Dwayne’s Comments (group member since Apr 01, 2017)

Dwayne’s comments from the Support for Indie Authors group.

I'll be blunt, Jeremy. It's a mess and hard to follow.

Parts of it seem to be referencing the first book. I'd try to lose that.

Due to the word "their" and later "her", it's a little unclear if Isra Jicarrio is a person or a group of people. The phrase "a job she can be forgotten..." doesn't make any sense.

I don't really get the notion of a utopia fleeing one planet and going to another. If it's a utopia, why would they need to go somewhere else? "Ruled by Rainha ..., Cytherea a city..." isn't really a sentence and I'm not sure what it's trying to say.

Not following what a "secret hidden" is. The team's medic is Althea... but I don't know what the team is. And I don't know which team she's going up against. Her own? Rainha's? Are they on the same team?

I'm not picking up on what the plot is. Someone hears voices in a place there shouldn't be voices. Someone rules a utopia. Someone senses a secret hidden. And everyone fights for some reason. I guess.

In response to your title, yes. Stakes are important in any fiction. Without them, there's no plot, no conflict, nothing.

As for the body of your question:

Literary fiction is my specialty, whether reading or writing. It is a very different animal than genre fiction. It almost doesn't even belong in the same zoo. Stakes are important, but not as much so as in genre fiction. It's one of the reasons I like it best.

I don't know your writing. The advice to keep raising stakes, however, seems more directed to genre fiction. If you have many telling you the stakes aren't high enough or you need to keep raising them, perhaps they're right. If it's only one or two people, take a hard look at who they are. Do they understand literary fiction? (This is not a presumption that you have be especially bright to read literary fiction. I mean those who don't read much of it, probably don't realize it's different from genre fiction).

There are some literary writers who played the raising stakes game and did it well, such as John Steinbeck. Myself, I pattern my stories after those of Twain and John Irving, where I have one to three major plots going with many little subplots popping in and out and the stakes keep going up and down. It's been a long time since I read Philip Roth, but as I recall his writing was much like that, too.

If you're satisfied with your writing, chances are there will be others who will be satisfied with it, too. If you're not satisfied with your writing, no one will be.

Comment deleted. This goes against... almost all our rules.

It's definitely an improvement.

I'm a little confused by why it starts in third person, then goes to first. I'd stick with either one or the other. You don't see many blurbs in first person, but the part you have is good. I get a little better sense of what the story is about than in your previous blurbs and definitely get more a sense of who Meg is.

It's still very passive. As Margaret pointed out, it reads more like a book report than a blurb.

Some pointers: You don't have to tell us Meg is the narrator. The reader will find that out when they open the book. You mention it three times. This is the kind of thing that makes it feel passive. It needs to be dynamic. When you tell us over and over that Meg is narrating the story or reflecting on things in the past, you're not pulling us into the story.

You repeat Meg is angry twice, but give no real indication as to why. Maybe an example of the illogical dictates of her mother would help. As it is, all I'm getting is the mother is mentally ill and somehow that angers Meg.

Maybe it needs to start with something like this: "Meg is a physical therapist in a nursing home. Caring for her elderly patients often causes Meg's mind to drift to a time when she, as a young girl, had to care for her own mother..." It's not great, but it does a little better at actually taking a reader into the story, rather than viewing it from across the street.

It might help if we knew what the mother suffers from and why this causes so much trauma for Meg. I'm not able to connect those dots with what you have.

There are a few lines here and there that are meaningless to those of us who do not have the context of the story to fall on. "She gradually seeks out the resources of role models." Maybe a specific example of what kind of resources she's seeking and from whom might help.

You mention "parents" but we get nothing else about the father. Same with the sister. If you're going to include them in the blurb, help us see how they fit into the story. Or, if this is a story about Meg and her mother and the rest of the family has little to do with it, there's no reason to mention them.

Aaron wrote: "How many words make a novel?"

No, seriously, that was pretty entertaining. Thanks.

My personal scale looks something like this:
1 word to 20,000 words - whatever it is, price it at 99 cents
20,001 to 307,000 (the longest thing I've published) - price it higher, but lower the price to 99 cents now and then if you want to get sales

Aaron wrote: "After all that hard work, I sincerely hope you put this to good use."

tl dr

It's very passive and doesn't tell me a lot about what the story is actually about. All I really get is that Meg observes people and thinks about them. It feels like I'm trying to see this book through a dirty, out of focus lens. I get the sense that something is going on, but I'm not sure what.

I would probably wait a while, if I contacted her at all. She may have removed it as she wanted to rewrite it. Maybe she felt she left out something significant. Contact Amazon first. If you don't know this person at all, I'd use caution in contacting her. You said she came to you through a site. Maybe get in touch with that site after Amazon.

It's always possible, too, that the reviewer removed the review. I'm not saying this is what happened, but sometimes we're too quick to blame Amazon for vanishing reviews. Contact them about it and see what you can find out.

I was hoping another moderator might answer this, one who is connected to the contest. I know the stories have to be at least a thousand words long.

Without seeing your story it's hard to come up with specific ideas, but M.L.'s suggestion is good. Maybe adding a dinky subplot would add a few words. Beef up the descriptions of the setting and characters.

Dorothy,

Google NaNoWriMo and it comes right up.

Sam (Rescue Dog Mom, Writer, Hugger) wrote: "Now they have TV's in the waiting room..."

Yes. And they're always tuned to the most pointless, mind-numbing programming out there. And always turned loud enough to be distracting to those of us who are trying to read.

Straight up, honest reactions here...

This is a tough, tough industry to make it big in and it very, very rarely happens. When it does, it rarely happens quickly.

I know some people have moderate success at shows, but I really don't know how they do it. I have never attempted it as I'm sure it would be a waste of time and money, unless I start making a modest success without it.

Reviews are nice, but I've never seen any proof that they sell books. They might help, but I would say it's marginal help at best.

People don't read as much as they once did. More and more people are deciding to be writers these days because they think it's an easy way to make a buck, yet fewer and fewer are reading. And most people that still read are only interested in top selling authors and whatever Oprah says we should be reading now.

If no one is buying or reading your book, no one will come to a book signing.

Some questions and suggestions:

Your first book seems only available in paperback. Why not ebook form?

I don't like the disclaimer at the beginning. It ends with "Happy Reading!" but the rest is off-putting. So, your book might offend. Good! Don't apologize and don't be a wimp about it. Put your book out there and be proud of it! If someone gets offended, let it be their problem and don't feel bad over it. And definitely don't feel bad before it even happens. Get rid of that disclaimer.

Your blurb has a few typos and needs some work, too. Feel free to submit it to the blurb workshop sometime.

Sometimes people assume that this game is all about marketing. That's part of it. But, we need to pay more attention to the products we're marketing.

Bottom line, this is not something to get into unless you love writing. No, I mean, LOVE IT! Bleed for it. Die for it day after day and be happy you did. Whatever sales and reviews you get should be a small reward compared to how satisfied you are after a good days' writing.

Threads in this folder should only be started by moderators. I don't know why, but it looks as if you posted this in two folders, so I'm deleting this one and archiving it.

Thanks.

Don't forget, too, you can always use synonyms or phrases to indicate smiles, frowns, nods, etc. to cut down on some of the monotony.

It's difficult to give a concrete answer on this, as I don't know the characters, how often the ones in question appear in the story, etc.

As you read the book over in the proofreading / editing phases, if you feel they're smiling and nodding too much, then it's too much. When you think you've cut it down enough, cut it a little further.

A good beta reader will let you know if it becomes cumbersome to their reading.

UPDATE:

I got a notice from Goodreads that they removed the message Natasha sent to me as I had marked it as spam. I found that Natasha's whole profile has been removed, too.

So, yes, if you want to do business with The Prairies Book Review, exercise extreme caution. Again, I am not saying they are a scam, but they do seem to have sketchy business practices and do not conduct themselves in a professional manner when faced with criticism.

Discouragement, unfortunately, is a huge part of this game for most of us. I just remind myself daily why I'm really doing this. It's not for the money, the reviews, etc. It's because I love to write and there are people who enjoy what I do. That keeps me going.

Natasha,

We've been watching this thread closely. It's clear that those representing Prairie Book Review are trolls. Avira just happened to give one of my books a nasty review, along with another person on the very same day - a book that hasn't had a sale in some time? Then, by some coincidence she shows up here to defend your organization? And now, by some miracle, you've shown up?

The proof is in the pudding folks. Legit organizations don't act like this. To be clear, I never said this organization is a scam, I said their tactics are similar to what scam artists do. All I have stated is you're paying a lot of money for a sub-par review. I still believe that.

Trolls.

Closing this thread.