Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 378

Reading nonfiction

So, I saw this post over at Rinn Reads, a blog I’m glad someone pointed out to me because I immediately said Yeah!. Then I said, Oh, memoirs? Because to me the experience of reading a memoir is identical to the experience of reading fiction, only (usually) not as interesting, because, well, fewer dragons, right?

There are exceptions, though. Have any of you read EIGHTH MOON?

Here’s what Amazon says about it: “Sansan was four when the Communists took Tientsin. She was seventeen when she left China in 1962. This is her story of the years between: how she lived, what she hated, whom she loved; a sturdy, stubborn girl’s true record of an existence none of her readers has ever known.”

Here’s what I say about it: It’s an amazing story. Sansan is so ordinary, and her circumstances are so extraordinary, and the juxtaposition gives you whiplash. I knew about the Cultural Revolution, but this will bring that to life — on a very small scale, because this is a story about Sansan’s life, not a political treatise. What she knows about is what’s happening to her and to her family and neighbors. This is a story I keep giving away, but luckily paper copies are easy to come by and not expensive, and the Kindle edition I linked is also inexpensive.

But memoir is definitely not at ALL what I think of when I think of nonfiction.

I read a lot of nonfiction when I’m supposed to be working on a project of my own. Since that’s the case at the moment, I currently have on my coffee table:

WHAT JANE AUSTEN ATE AND CHARLES DICKENS KNEW, by Daniel Pool. It is quite entertaining, plus since I’ve been reading Regencies lately, it’s nice to finally know the difference between a guinea and a pound (I thought they were the same thing, but it turns out not quite) and how to play whist. Did you know that when a gentleman escorted a lady down to supper at a ball, he stood by while she ate, but he didn’t eat anything himself? I had no idea.

WHAT IF THE MOON DIDN’T EXIST by Neil Comins, an entertaining look at what happens to Earth-like planets if they form under different conditions.

A MAN FOR ALL SPECIES, by Marc Marrone, which is supposed to be anecdotes by a guy who is owns a pet store — one presumes he doesn’t sell puppy mill puppies, but I haven’t read the book yet — anyway, the store is called Parrots of the World, so I expect it’s one of those specialty places that raise their own parrots and things.

EVERYDAY LIFE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, edited by Kathleen Adams and Kathleen Gillogly, which I want to read to develop a SE Asian “flavor” for a book I want to write sometime. Don’t hold your breath; I only have a few pages of that one written, plus I suspect there is a dragon in it somewhere.

ART THROUGH THE AGES, edited by Crosby, because it was free to a good home and I picked it up. I’m hoping it is nice to flip through, but this is not likely to be something I read from cover to cover.

DOLPHIN SOCIETY by Karen Pryor, which I’ve read before but want to read again.

HOW TO READ A FRENCH FRY, by Russ Parsons, a book on food science — Parsons explains why French fries don’t brown as well in perfectly clean new oil as in oil that was used once already, and lots of other things. I’ve read this one before, too.

Okay, all those books really are just sitting here on my coffee table. I didn’t cheat by going and getting a couple more to pile up here.

It’s true that fiction is more compelling on a must-turn-the-page level. That’s why I don’t read much fiction when I’m working on something of my own. But . . . honestly, if you don’t ever voluntarily read anything but fiction, I think you’re missing out. And as a writer, I know I would be. I may not be doing the research a true historical novel would require, that’s way too much work for me, but I believe that any writer will do better worldbuilding if they actually know something about the world. Something deeper than the snappy soundbites we’re handed by pop culture and mass media.

Prologues?

A good post at Janet Reid’s blog.

My own take: I used to hate all prologues. Then I wrote a book with a prologue. Then I wrote another books with a prologue. Now I have to limit myself to declaring that I hate all unnecessary, infodumpy, pointless prologues.

And if I were writing a query, I would call the prologue “chapter 1″.

Good comments on this post, btw. My favorite: “I would never skip a prologue. But then, I also read the acknowledgments, dedication, author’s notes and the back of my cereal box in the morning.”

Me, I never read cereal boxes. Now that I no longer eat cereal.

A brief roundup of reviews –

Of other people’s books, positive and negative.

I know I am probably a bad person for enjoying negative reviews of other people’s books. But sometimes I can’t help it. In case you have the same taste, I’ll start with those. Here are a couple I have particularly enjoyed lately.

First, this is a YA story, WATERMUSIC, published in the eighties. Charlotte takes it apart, fairly gently but quite thoroughly.

“In case you ever want to write a high school essay on this book, I will help: Laura’s mother and the anthropologist are both, in different ways, making bad choices by distancing themselves from the world of insects and over-ripe cantaloupe (which is what the swamp mermaid smells like). One can assume that the writer thinks the eighties are/were bad and we are/were killing too many insects with our household toxins, but also thinks that pure thought, devoid of emotion, is bad and we must embrace as well the Mermaid of Fecundity or something.”

I must add: of course there were brilliant YA stories published in the eighties! (Of course I know Charlotte knows that, too.) Having declared that, am only able to think of a couple. It turns out Red Moon and Black Mountain was actually published in 1978, so I guess it doesn’t technically count, though what’s a couple years between friends? But! The Blue Sword! The first Alanna stories were published in the eighties (I didn’t discover Tamora Pierce till decades later). And, hah, DWJ was publishing in the eighties, so there you go.

It really would be interesting to look at YA themes through the decades, though — the reviews published of Watermusic at the time are so interesting. I’m glad Charlotte tracked those down.

Okay, now for something much newer and quite different. No one does devastating reviews with such a fine scalpel as Liz Bourke. Check out her recent review of Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson.

“Unwrapped Sky takes all the creative power of language and sets it in service of hollow symbols of dissolution and decay. It turns revolution into a directionless treatise on corrupted wills and compromised moralities: its characters are more symbols than affective individuals.”

Wow, rush right out. I don’t mind sharing this review with you because I’m pretty sure people who like my books are going to join me in stepping slowly away from this one, so I don’t feel bad in saying it sounds awful. I must say, if Davidson had succeeded brilliantly at what he was apparently trying to do . . . I would still totally detest this book:

“Sad, morally compromised people, they drift about rather aimlessly, being sad and ineffectual and morally compromised and reflecting on the state of the world and the state of their selves. . . . It all seems very impressed with its own profundity. That rarely turns out well.”

I don’t know about you, but “dismal” is the single word that comes to mind with all that drifting aimlessly. This is not the tone I enjoy in a book, even if the author brings it off. The review, on the other hand, is great fun. You should particularly click through and read the whole thing so that you can appreciate the last line.

On the other hand! Don’t you enjoy reading recent positive reviews of books you read ages ago and loved? Here is The Book Smugglers’ recent joint review of Jaran by Kate Elliot. This review also raises an important question about what constitutes Science Fiction Romance and what expectations readers have of a book called “Science fiction” versus “science fiction romance.”

I have not previously been aware of anybody identifying a subgenre of “science fiction romance,” and frankly I think the name should have a stake driven through its heart pronto. The term is going to drive people who aren’t big on romance (like me) away from excellent books and as night follows day, books that are called “anything romance” are going to be dismissed as nonserious or lesser quality. Ana nails this by saying “I admit I was surprised at how much of the novel focus on the developing romance between the protagonist Tess and the leader of the Jaran, Ilya. Because I was not expecting it: this seems to show how I have certain expectations of Science Fiction I was not even aware of. If it is not called SFR, I am not going to be expecting a strong storyline involving romance and sure as hell won’t be expecting it to be that good.”

Anyway, they both loved the book. So did I, though I was not keen on how some aspects of the story played out in the sequels, and felt strongly that the series did not come to a satisfying conclusion. So personally, I would suggest reading Jaran as a standalone.

And finally, I really enjoyed this review of Troubled Waters over at Ivy Book Bindings. I don’t always agree with Keertana about specific books — do you know, she actually did not like The Blue Sword? Can you believe that? But we are on the same page when it comes to Troubled Waters.

Keertana also adds, “The world of Elemental Blessings is one of those few fantasy realms I wouldn’t hesitate to live in.” That is so true!

So there you go: a handful of reviews that caught my eye last week. Enjoy!

Pairing up YA titles: The judges would kill you for making them choose between –

As a follow up to the previous post and comments, if you really did try to match excellent YA titles for age and venue and tone, what would you come up with? Here are some that occurred to me.

Jellico Road and Tomorrow When the War Began I’m trusting Maureen’s opinion about Jellico Road for this, plus the Amazon description of the book, because as you recall, I haven’t read it.

The Floating Islands and Airborn by Kenneth Oppel — they’re both adventure stories with elements of flight.

The Attolia series and The Riddlemaster series — the whole series for each because that’s only fair, right?

The Changeling Sea and The Truth-Teller’s Tale. To me, these two seem to be aimed at the same age group and to have something of the same lyrical fairy-tale tone. Agree / disagree?

What are some other good ones? The Sunbird and what? Something historical-ish? It would have to be something intense. What would work?

The Year of the Griffin and what? Another school story? I hesitate to suggest Harry Potter. What other school stories are there? I mean, I know there must be heaps, but it’s not a subgenre I’m all that familiar with.

Jinx and what? Oh, how about the Enchanted Forest books by Patricia Wrede? I think those would match up pretty well. Wait till the third Jinx story is out and match up each series as a whole.

Oh, hey, what would you match up against The Scorpio Races? Something intense and tightly self-contained. I’ve got something on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite think of it.

Anybody want to finish any of these off or offer a pairing of your own?

Check this out –

It’s a YA / MG faceoff for great and underappreciated titles! I do think some of these are pretty well known, probably only underappreciated in the sense that they’re not at the level of The Hunger Games . I also think there is a very wide range here, from the young end of MG to the high end of YA, which has got to add an extra layer of difficulty to the judging.

But! I must say, I thought this was a great idea even before I saw The Floating Islands is on the list. Then I spotted Islands and was instantly much more excited. I’ve read about half the books in Round 1 and, wow, I love every single one of them. Very nice indeed to see one of mine in this company.

Unfortunately, I haven’t actually read both titles in even a single given pair. This isn’t strictly a coincidence; a lot of these are not fantasy titles and those are mostly the ones I haven’t read. In fact, only two pairs of faceoffs involve books where both stories are fantasy. I wonder if that will make the judging easier or more difficult? I would be a terrible judge for most of these faceoff challenges because I think I haven’t read enough contemporary to be a fair judge.

Okay, looking carefully at the faceoff pairs:

I have Chime down on my TBR pile, but I haven’t read either it or the one it’s paired with. It’s the only pair where I haven’t read either title.

I personally loved Court Duel, but was not quite as enthusiastic about Crown Duel, so I wonder how that will work out. I have The Demon King on my actual physical TBR pile downstairs, but alas, haven’t read it.

I haven’t read A Face Like Glass, can you believe that? After everything everyone’s said about it? But I haven’t, yet. It’s just as well, as I somehow don’t feel I’m likely to be objective in judging that particular pair of titles. : )

I know Maureen loved Jellico Road, but I haven’t read it (yet). Though the Stephanie Burgis’ Kat series is charming, it reads a bit young for me and I don’t think I would be a good judge for it. I know Charlotte liked this title but preferred the second and third books. Like the one by Sherwood Smith, I suspect a contest here might come out differently if the challenge involved the second book rather than the first. I also wonder whether it’s quite fair to put a young MG title against a YA title such as Jellico Road. But my impression is that several other pairs do this, too.

You know what *I* would have put against Jellico Road? Tomorrow, When the War Began. Both set in Australia, both contemporary (-ish), both with themes involving war. Hah, THEN let the judges try to pick! I must say, Jellico Road is moving up my must-read list. Or at least my must-acquire list. Heaven knows when I’ll have time to read. Next month, maybe.

Okay, moving on, I think it’s going to be very difficult for ANYTHING to beat The King of Attolia; I’m glad I’m not facing off against MWT. That’s the first pair that I’ll just call, even though I haven’t read the one by Susan Cooper and even though I loved The Dark is Rising.

Nobody is likely to beat Patricia McKillip for me, plus I haven’t read The Road Home, but I know it is a historical. So that is going to be a tough pair to judge — I wouldn’t want to do it, even if I wasn’t going in biased, which I would be. I do know that Angie at Angieville really really REALLY loves The Road Home.

If I’d been arranging these pairs, I’d have put The King of Attolia against The Riddle Master of Hed. Talk about an impossible judging assignment! There would be NO WAY.

Of course Sorcery and Cecilia is wonderful, and here’s one where I think the first book is very clearly better than its sequels.

And! Of course, here is DWJ to wind out the contest. Would you have picked The Year of the Griffin? I might have, because I really loved that one, but if you were going to pick just one DWJ title, which would it be? I would probably have picked Dogsbody. Or The Power of Three.

Besides Tomorrow, When the War Began, I could easily pick a handful more. The Truthteller’s Tale. The Adoration of Jenna Fox. An Alien Music. The Sky is Everywhere. There’s no end! Any of you have a definite pick you’d love to have seen here?

Welcome to March! We have an exciting month ahead –

Mark your calendars, people, because right here on this blog, starting on March 17th, we will have a special event: Andrea K Höst Week!

It was just about exactly a year ago that I read AND ALL THE STARS and then THE TOUCHSTONE TRILOGY and fell completely in love with Andrea Höst’s writing. This year, I’m marking the occasion by inviting various Höst fans to join me here with guest posts. I’m very pleased that a wide selection of bloggers proved enthusiastic about the idea, not to mention … drumroll please … Sherwood Smith!

I hope you all are as excited about this as I am!

Plus, almost forgot, I will be giving away a copy of any one Andrea K Höst book to one commenter chosen at random. I’ll pool all commenters for the week, one entry per comment. The winner gets to choose which book and either physical or ebook format. Plus! If you, like me, already HAVE all of Andrea Höst’s titles, then hey! I will switch the giveaway to any other author you choose. How’s that for a deal, right?

So many books, so little time

You know what just came out? And by “just came out,” I mean a few weeks ago to a few weeks from now, so some are more accurately just about to come out. But whatever. Close enough to be within the meaning of the act.

LOST LAKE by Sarah Addison Allen, out right this minute.

Also, TROPIC OF SERPENTS by Marie Brennen, very nearly out.

Also, THE KINDRED OF DARKNESS by Barbara Hambly — it’s the latest in the James Asher series. It’s hitting the shelves tomorrow, which counts as out as far as I’m concerned.

On March 11th, the latest Mercy Thompson novel will be out — NIGHT BROKEN.

Also, EVERYONE DIES IN THE END by Brian Katcher. Fine, fine, it’s not out for a full two weeks, but whatever. Goodreads says, “Everyone Dies is a light-hearted coming of age story about love, growing up, and what it’s like to be buried alive.”

A bit further away — fine, I admit it, not till April, which is perhaps a bit far to count as “out” just yet — CJ Cherryh’s fifteenth FOREIGNER novel will hit the shelves. The fifteenth! Truly amazing.

One problem with this list: Except for the one by Katcher, I really want every single book on this list in physical form. I have all the others by each author in real-book form, and I don’t want to switch format in the middle of a series because I just don’t. But I don’t know that I can stand to pay that much more for a physical copy for all these. Look at those price differences! No wonder everyone expects ebooks to crush physical books. Except I must have the Cherryh in physical form. And the Marie Brennen. I MUST have that in hardcover because I so admired the sheer physical beauty of the first book.

This is going to kill even my generous book budget. Not that I have time to read all these right now anyway. So no rush to pick every single one of them up, I guess. Mood: happy because look at this list! / grumpy because no way I can read all these as they come out.

And the TBR pile reaches for the stratosphere.

Okay, here we go: ACROSS A JADE SEA by L. Shelby

As you know, this is a trilogy, containing Serendipity’s Tide, Treachery’s Harbor, and Fealty’s Shore. It’s available in Kindle but not, I hear, for Nook — but visit the author’s website and you can see all the buying options, plus it looks like you might be able to just read it online.

Okay, people, truly, this story has lots to love: girl engineers, mysterious shipwrecked guys, pirates, daring escapes, patronizing young gentlemen who get nowhere trying to patronize girl engineers, annoying bureaucrats, extreme culture clash, sudden marriages at sea, thugs and assassins, more daring escapes, complicated family relationships, treachery, messages gone astray, diplomatic crises barely averted, and tons of clever worldbuilding and delightful dialogue.

Want to meet the two protagonists? Try this:

“Dying of thirst so that I have a better chance of surviving doesn’t work – I’m afraid of dead bodies. If you die, I’m going to jump into the ocean and get eaten by sharks.”

He closed his eyes. “I am not dying of thirst.”

“Prove it! Stand up and dance a jig or something.”

His eyes opened again, and he pushed himself up to a sitting position. “I do not know what a jig is.”

I thrust the cup at him. “From now until doomsday, I’m not drinking a single drop of water until I see you drink your share first.”

He looked at the water, and then he crossed his arms across his chest. “We do not have enough for two people.”

“I’m telling you, it’s both of us or neither of us. You keep forgetting, I’m really just a helpless little girl. I can’t survive out here on my own. You have to stay alive so that you can look after me.”

He actually laughed at that.

And well he might. They’ve only just met, but it’s been an eventful day, and it’s already crystal clear that Batiya is anything but a helpless little girl. Although she actually does need Chunru to look after her – shortly after this, he saves her from pirates. But she’s already saved him from pirates, so that makes them even. Actually, I lost track early on who saved whom more often, because the story does not get less eventful.

But I don’t love Batiya because she saved Chunru from pirates. I love her because she really does think like an engineer, because she’s totally down-to-earth, because she’s happy with who she is – her character arc involves no angst to speak of, which is great – and because I just love the way she is always figuring stuff out from half a clue.

Plus, it’s especially refreshing that Batiya is not consumed by angst, since actually she does have a lot to deal with, as in her society girls are not normally engineers. (Think industrializing Eastern Europe for her and Imperial China for Chunru and you’ll get a good idea of the culture clash embedded in this story.) Batiya is comfortable with being a girl and being an engineer; almost implausibly so given she is only nineteen and incredibly inexperienced in some ways. But then, growing up in her family provides a fairly believable background for this combination. And a good reason to have developed such a smooth, practiced manner of dealing with patronizing young men and snide young women, as here:

“But you let a Shan call you Batiya?”

I pretended to think about that and finally said, “I don’t want to be accused of putting my thumb on the scales. If anyone here saves me from a fate worse than death by single-handedly killing three pirates, I’ll let them call me Batiya too.”

Isn’t that perfect? I tell you, her countrymen are just so annoying at times.



“Is it true you’re an apprentice engineer, Miss Latikov?” one of the girls asked.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And on the liner you worked on, you slept with all those burly coal-heavers?”

I decided it was pointless to tell them that I had actually shared a cabin with my Uncle Stan. “There aren’t any coal-heavers on the Empress Katronika,” I said instead. “She’s powered by ten diesel engines burning a mixture of paraffin and bio-fuel produced from crops grown in Dostrovia – primarily the Bogaposk district.”

Strikovad nudged his friend. “Your folks have a place in Bogaposk, don’t they?”

“The fuel is injected into the engines using a special pressurized system,” I continued, “that makes it burn more efficiently. We also have a much smaller engine-room crew than this –”

“But it smells weird,” Strikovad interrupted.

I blinked at him. “You’ve been on the Empress Katronika?”

“No, but I’ve seen a diesel engine at work in one of my father’s factories in Vamdiksi.”

“Really?” I asked, suddenly interested. “What does it make?”

Batiya really does think like an engineer, see. Want to give her the perfect gift? How about a tremendously intricate broken clockwork toy? Because she will love taking it apart and fixing it. I found every scene of this kind highly entertaining, even though I personally don’t know the first thing about engines or clockworks or anything of the kind.

The worldbuilding is just as wonderful as the characters – the details are great, both in the Eastern-Europe analog and the Imperial China analog. Colors and styles of clothing, where and how cloth is made (Wakani shawls aren’t made in Wakani, you know – they’re made in Kostolnin Flats, one neighborhood over from West Borstev, on these big fancy automated looms that – and then Batiya’s enthusiastic explanation of how and where Wakani shawls are made gets cut off.) We get these details scattered liberally all through the books. Styles of music, calendars and clocks, hanging prayer tablets on a tree (on a pink ribbon for good luck in childbirth), a giant statue of a crab in the middle of the road (for no reason that’s explained).

I particularly enjoyed the slang. There’s a ton of slang in this book, mostly appropriate for the working-class culture that Batiya comes from, but also some, entirely different in tone, from Changali. It’s hard to come up with fictional slang that sounds right, or I always thought it was, but Shelby makes it look easy. Maybe some of this is real slang from a real culture, I don’t know, but either way, it sounds perfect:

I’m overjoyed. Gleeful. Brighter than a bean in a bucket.

They’d pick out some boy they knew nothing about and decide he was the man of their dreams and start acting like melted cheese whenever they saw him.

You’d better warn him to get his boots laced.

What’s a white-sider Brussels-sprout doing in a game like this?

Someone told you the Dostrovian ambassador liked picking sunflowers.

It’s all perfectly clear in context and serves wonderfully to deepen the world – you feel it has to be a real society, because a bean in a bucket?

Now, Changali is much more formal, right down to the slang, such as, “This is an idea so clever that it fills me with a fog of admiration”, meaning “Wut?”

The languages of Changali also contain characteristic turns of phrase and so on, like “This you should never regret,” and “All this is fascinatingly different.” I particularly loved this bit:

“Tell me about Shanali.”

“About Changali?”

“I say the name wrong, don’t I?”

“Up north in Rarfahn, they would say Shangali. And in Gea Trach Poi, which is at the western edge of our country, they would say, Chanali. So you sound like you have a western and a northeastern accent at the same time. This is very charming.”

I’m pretty sure that by this point, Chunru finds just about everything about Batiya very charming. Chunru is a great protagonist himself – well, he has to be, or he would hardly be a match for Batiya. He’s autocratic, determined, honorable, ruthless, possessive, and of course far from stupid. Also, it’s a good thing Chunru is an excellent male lead, because he gets to be the pov protagonist in the second book. I loved Batiya’s pov, so it took me about ten pages to get over the switch. After which I really enjoyed Chunru’s pov, too.

The third book is nearly all from Batiya’s pov, by the way, but switches to Chunru’s right at the end, at least partly so the reader can be aware of one or two things happening behind the scenes that Batiya misses. On the whole I was glad to get mostly Batiya’s pov, though as I said, I like both. Also, as I said earlier, the entire third book does strike me as a very extended epilogue, which is not to say nothing happens, but the big problem of the first two books has been resolved and the big problem in the third book is, well, the sort of thing that seems to fit in an epilogue. It’s the making-a-life-for-yourself-in-Changali part, after Batiya and Chunru finish up in Dostrovia and go to Changali to explain the whole thing to Chunru’s father. I could have done with a bit less Batiya-MUST-be-sleeping-around suspicion – I mean, seriously, we are still suspicious? Haven’t we learned better yet? – though I admit that your enemies feeding you fake information can lead to that kind of thing.

Oh, I should stress that there is no point at which Chunru himself doubts Batiya. That would have been outrageous, but it doesn’t happen. I’m talking about Chunru’s father, here. Not that Chunru himself can’t be unreasonably jealous of, say, ambassadors who like to pick sunflowers, but he knows very well Batiya is definitely not interested in helping anyone with their, um, flower arrangements. Chunru just enjoys being jealous, I think. Batiya kind of enjoys it too, and doesn’t take it too seriously. That aspect of their relationship actually reminded me of Kate and Curren in the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews.

The other work that this reminds me of is the duology The Assassin’s Curse and The Pirate’s Wish by Cassandra Rose Clarke. Both have catchy writing, a similar culture clash between a working-class girl from one society and an upper-class guy from another, an emphasis on sailing and the sea, and so on. Clarke’s series is youngish YA, though, and Shelby’s is either right at the top edge of YA or else it’s adult – to me, it reads as adult fantasy because Batiya is decidedly mature for nineteen, and the plot has wider scope, and also because the world just feels, I don’t know, like it has deeper foundations. But if you liked Clarke’s books, you should try the Jade Sea series; and if you didn’t, well, you should still try the Jade Sea series.

This story is not perfectly flawless, btw. I don’t want to be over-the-top and give you all inflated expectations that nothing could live up to. I did find Imperial Spoiled Brat Lulahn disappointingly one-dimensional, for example; I kept thinking she would show a glint of something worthwhile under all that self-absorbed stupidity, but no. Who knows, though, maybe in a sequel she could be better developed? I would love to read more stories set in this world; my pick for protagonist would be Batiya’s brother Vanitri.

A note about grammatical errors: There are a few more than you would find in a typical traditionally published book, but by no means so many as to interfere in any significant way with the reading experience, particularly if you were not trained by a science background into reflexive perfection as far as the effect / affect thing goes. Frankly, as far as eye-catching errors go, it bothers me a whole lot more that Strange Chemistry replaced “all right” with “alright” in BLACK DOG, since no offense to Strange Chem’s house style, but I hate that with a white-hot burning passion.

More on self-publishing and discoverability

So, are you familiar with the Underground Book Reviews website? I wasn’t, until I looked around for a site that might review specifically self-published works. Lots of reviews and author interviews here. The site looks professional, but since I have no idea how critical the reviewers are, or what their preferences might be, it’s hard to guess how helpful this website would be in identifying gems in the self-published “slushpile.” On the other hand, here this website is, and it is certainly better than nothing.

A lot better.

Infinitely better, really.

There is a “suggested readings” page where you can get a better idea about the reviewers, and obviously following reviews for a while would give you an excellent idea about the taste and focus of each reviewer. I can’t say that I desperately need more books on my TBR pile, but it would be nice to read one or two self-published titles now and then, rather than sticking strictly to the shiny hyped new releases from the Big Five. This might be the place to pick a couple out.

Also, every now and then, someone runs a useful feature on self-published titles. For example, World blog, which picked out a handful of standouts from last year. Mostly these are not fantasy titles, but on the other hand, how about this:

Beneath the Chipvole Mountains A.K. Brennan (Scherzo, 2011)

In a way reminiscent of the classic Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Brennan tells of a mouse whose husband had gotten entangled with an up-to-no-good weasel king, so she and her children decide to move back to the Chipvole Mountains.

Do you remember Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh? Because I loved that book when I was a kid.

Okay, one more link: Here at Fantasy Review Barn, we have a post about a handful of self-published gems from 2013, and of course this time they are all SFF. Plus, this time the reviwer establishes her credibility by naming two of Andrea Höst’s books. That right there makes me inclined to check out the reviewer’s other picks.

The Demon of Cliffside by Nathan Fierro sounds really intriguing. So does The Five Elements by Scott Marlowe. In fact, all of the titles mentioned in this post sound like the deserve a second look.

So there you go: hopefully a boost to discoverability right there.

Discovering self-published gems

Have you all ever read anything by Chuck Wendig? I mean posts at his Terrible Minds site, not fiction; I don’t think his fiction sounds like my kind of thing (it sounds like horror or perhaps very very very dark fantasy and I’m not inclined to get within a hundred feet of it) (If I’ve got it pegged wrong, let me know). But his blog posts are a) almost always funny and b) rather crude, just so you know if you click through, and c) frequently spot-on about whatever topic.

He has a long post about self-published books which is worth reading because it’s funny and probably at least partly spot on, and he starts it thus:

“I do not hate self-publishing and I am in fact my own author-publisher on a number of releases, and will continue to be so. I am in fact one of those “hybrid authors” you keep hearing about, which means I have fins like a dolphin and claws like a badger and I can both play the violin and kill with my mind. This is not a post bashing self-publishing, but rather a post that aims for critical awareness and constructive thinking.”

Which sounds promising. Am I going to suddenly be able to play the violin and kill with my mind after I self-publish something, which I want to do, probably later this year?

Anyway, it’s a long post, in which he makes these points, among many others:

a) in the United States alone you have about 300,000 new books added per year to the traditional pile, and Bowker claims the number for self-publishing is somewhat higher (~400,000 in 2012) if you count them by ISBNs, and many self-published authors do not use ISBNs, so when you add in other countries and territories, you could be looking at twice or more of that number.

This is obviously both YAY! and OMG! because it’s so completely plain that you will never, never, never find even a fraction of the books you would most love. And the reason you won’t find them this year or next year or the year after that is because discoverability is so impossible. Here’s a tiny bit of what Chuck says about that:

b) Given that word-of-mouth still requires some genesis in discovery, let’s talk about one’s experience when going to browse an online bookseller to discover new work.

*inchoate screaming*

Oh, jeez, sorry! I tried to browse Amazon for new books and found myself plunging into a nightmare of noise and garbage.

Chuck actually thinks Amazon used to be easier to browse. If so, I missed that. I think it is impossible to browse online. The very closest you get is “if you liked this, you might like that”, and that is not at all close. And it doesn’t even matter how easy Amazon is to browse, because are you kidding me? 800,000 books (or more) per year and all the books published in all the earlier years that keep piling up, and there is NO WAY anybody can possibly browse. Hence, discoverability is THE issue. Especially for self-published authors because so few blogs / pro reviewers / libraries / bookstores / etc are willing to even glance at self-published work, and who can blame them, because 800,000 books! Per year! Is too many and everyone MUST have a gatekeeper to sort this pile before they look at it. Chuck says:

c) I was once open to self-published authors sharing this space [on his blog], but when I open myself to that, it’s like trying to get a sip of water from a water fountain and getting a fire hose instead. A fire hose that shoots sewage. . . . these books. These books. And these authors, man. … So, what I get is: a bunch of ugly books with quality issues pushed forward by unprofessional authors. Now, that’s by no means all of what I get from the self-published, but it’s at least half of what I get from them. And here someone is going to say, “Well, I’m sure you get the same from the authors with big publishers,” and here is where I say: not once. Not ever.

And thus Chuck Wendig concludes that the pile o’ slush is not harmless, because many avenues of discovery are closed to self-published authors because nearly everybody gets very tired very fast of the fire hose that shoots sewage. Then he winds it up by offering potential reactions to the problem, many of which are awful but I could certainly imagine them happening, such as Amazon segregating self-published work into a different search engine, and just imagine what that would do, burying gems that are self-published in a pit that no one would ever in a million years want to look at. Which is where they are now, mostly, but not as deeply and uniformly buried as a policy like that would bury them.

Solutions!

I don’t have any. Except: Once a specific person discovers a specific book, an awareness of that book can ripple outward via personal recommendations, until not only personal friends but also bloggers and reviewers and so forth start to pick it up. For example, Bibliotrophic has a perfectly clear no-self-published-books policy, but here is a recent review of Andrea Host’s AND ALL THE STARS at Bibliotrophic.

Social media probably helps with this, because I expect other reviewers’ enthusiasm for AND ALL THE STARS encouraged Bibliotrophic to make an exception.

But social media isn’t a perfect solution, because (as Chuck Wendig also points out) book recommendations that you see on social media do blur from signal into noise. It’s not that I don’t trust the taste of (lots of) the people I follow on Twitter. It’s that all of them are recommending books all the time, and unless someone says just the right thing about a book (Foodies will love this wonderful alternate-China fantasy! Wonderful sibling relationship plus dragons!) or specifically directs a recommendation right to @rachelneumeier, I am not likely to pay that much attention.

This makes me sad because I assume that most of the people who see recommendations on Twitter for MY books also don’t pay that much attention, but it also seems inevitable.

I will say, when someone *does* direct a recommendation directly to me, I pay attention. So that makes me happy, since I trust everyone has the same reaction on those rare occasions a friend specifically recommends about one of my books.

The amazing ease of giving books as gifts via Kindle may help, too. I’ve started to simply now and then send a book I love to someone I think will also love it, because that makes almost no difference to my overall book budget (huge compared to a normal person) and the prices for ebooks are often fairly low, and I just enjoy doing that. My bet is absolutely all of a person’s friends and acquaintances will pay attention to a gift dropped onto their Kindles (ie, pure signal, zero noise for this particular method of calling attention to a book you just fell in love with).

Which is a very long way of saying that I just discovered a new author whom I think is self-published, because of a direct personal recommendation from a frequent commenter (Thanks, Elaine!).

I loved this book, and also the second in the series:

Which should be read as a duology. You can expect a review to appear in the next few days, but I will say that to me the third book — while fun and worth reading — felt rather like an extended epilogue. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because I love epilogues. I mean: plan to buy the first two and then if you love them, which I think you will, then buy the third.

The other warning I’ll offer right now is: these books were far, far too distracting for me and I have gotten nothing useful done for the past couple of days. Don’t start the first unless you have time to finish both it and the second.