Ebooks vs. Snail Books

Now that I've got to reading tons of ebooks from Kindle and Smashwords, I have quite a different perspective on pricing!

An actual paper book, costs about $6, and I take about 3-4 days to read it.

An e-book, on the other hand, I sometimes finish two a day.  I think the authors are not focused on filling e-books with a lot of substance; they're more into hooking a reader into reading the first of a long series of books.  Some of the books I have read lately seem to be just an installment in a serial novel.  ('A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens was first published this way.)  So if one of my e-books were to be priced at $ 6, readers would (1) expect quite a substantial book, and (2) have to be committed to all of the odd variety of topics that the book contains: college life, young children, music, television, a young drama queen, a daughter of a British Earl (even if a minor one), and so on, in the case of Westfield.

None of my books---except Yraid, and Flower shop Girl, are quick reads, as it happens, but I'm glad I priced them at 99c, now having a feel for the issues.

A Wonderful Book: "Without Words"

I have been reading a number of books on Kindle, as I said, and I have come across a dozen great authors, about whose existence I had not been aware.  Unfortunately, in the literary environment in which we find ourselves, you can't depend on an author who has written a fantastic book to keep repeating the same feat with subsequent books.  (I mean, you never could, really; the best indication of how good a book is, is to read the first quarter or so of it.)

The book, a fantasy, was Without Words, the author is Cameron Darrow, and I'm close to being without words to sing the praises of this particular book!  The title refers to a really unique character in the book, who has difficulty with language.  All through the book, this character struggles to communicate with her tribe.  She is not unintelligent; the conceit of the book is that, due to an extreme effort needed to save her life when she was an infant, the required magic damaged her language ability.  There are a handful of wonderful other characters, but this central, linguistically challenged character, Zifa, carries the entire story, and the entire book.  With careful skill, the author succeeds in describing Zifa's---often complex---thought processes, which she struggles to convey purely at the vocabulary level, being unable to use sentences at all, except ones that she has memorized.

Many of the stories that I have read have the theme of prejudice running through them, sometimes even racism.  On the other hand, a lot of the stories are close to being potboilers: stories that are close to being formulaic, focusing on comfortable themes, of coming out, or 'friends to lovers,' or 'age-gap romances,' or any number of such frames.  This is not to say that the authors do not take time to invent an interesting plot, and interesting circumstances, and insert interesting details, and set these stories in interesting locations, or create glamor by making one or both protagonists fabulously wealthy, or powerful, or a movie star.  It is interesting, but natural, though, that authors of lesbian romance novels are sensitive to the existence of prejudice.

Another fascinating fact is how these stories deal with sex.  (I had to resist trivializing the word 'sex' by placing an exclamation point after it.)  Sex is dealt with in various ways; some authors are at pains to describe exactly how each partner pleasures the other; some authors do not focus on sex at all; some authors describe the opening moments of an intimate encounter---especially if the level of intimacy escalates throughout the story, and then 'fade to black' a very clever phrase that describes, rather graphically, a literary device where the description of the sex is gradually faded out.  The number of acronyms used with lesbian romance is vast; it is clear that lesbians have no patience with long phrases that could be abbreviated into a few initials.  A few are HEA ('Happily Ever After'), a description of an ending, which allows the option for a reader to not choose a book that ends in too trite a fashion, HFN ('Happily For Now'), and I suppose there is some acronym for a story that ends tragically.  Without Words is a HEA book.

Insight into Being an Author

I was recently reading some (lesbian) literature from (Amazon) Kindle, and I was amazed at how good some of the books were.  (Of course, some of the books were really below par, but it evidently suits Amazon to keep them on their site.)  The book I read most recently---actually, I've read a couple of books since I read that one---was so well plotted out, and the characters were so beautifully created, and some of the incidental, and not so incidental events so perfectly described, that I felt embarrassed at how far my own writing fell short, I guess, from what that author was delivering.  And that author wasn't alone; at least 10 of the authors, or close to that number, anyway, were amazingly good writers.  Writing lesbian fiction, it seems to me, requires a couple of different skills, and not all authors have these abilities developed to the same degree:

(1) Getting inside the head of their characters.  [Almost all authors had this skill.]

(2) Being able to explain what their characters were thinking.

(3) Creating a scene in the minds of the readers.

(4) Inventing a story that captures the interest of the audience.

(5) Introducing just the right number of subsidiary characters, who have enough charm to lend depth to the story.  [I think this is an important skill.  Some of the characters introduced were pets, who were super cute.  I could have done this, but I think I've missed some opportunities!]

(6) Guiding a reader through a dialogue, where the reasoning of each participant isn't self-evident.

That last item is the one I'm trying to focus on.  But before we go into it, I want to mention one of the vices of an author that one of my early mentors pointed out to me: editorializing.

What does editorializing mean?  As I understood it when it was first used with me, it means making judgements on the words or actions of a character.  Most writers of fiction hold the view that moral judgements of the actions of a character are not needed, or even appropriate, in a work of fiction.  Whether some action is good, or bad, or horrifying, or despicable, or admirable: it should be left to the reader to make that call.  But some stories hinge on a particular call being made, and so the author steers the thinking of the audience, by using a loaded word or phrase.

Item (6), above, is different.  We're all, in some ways, amateur psychologists.  When someone is telling us something important, what we make of the statement depends on (a) both our backgrounds and our circumstances, (b) any previous events that would color the meaning or our response to the statements; possibly very specific incidents the reader simply does not know; or perhaps a thinking pattern that was habitually a part of one of the characters.  (For instance, perhaps it was the habit of a character to assume that another character was always trying to put him down, in which case even an innocent remark would be regarded as a criticism.  Or perhaps a certain person wouldn't ever consider a woman to be anything but innocent, and a man to be anything but guilty!)  So the author has to run interference for us, and make it clear how the psychological reasoning of one of the participants in the dialogue is going, based on all these background thoughts and habits.  It's unavoidable for this to happen, otherwise the reader would jump to the wrong conclusion.  Sometimes this guidance has to be put in right in the middle of the dialogue, to stop us going even an inch down the wrong road, because that would be ... I don't know, objectionable somehow.

I'm going to try and find an example of this, to show you.  I'm too embarrassed to use something from my own writing, so it would have to be from a story by someone else!  I'll add to this post when I find a good enough example.

Kay