Indie Book Review: Whom God Would Destroy

Welcome to another book I'm having a hard time reviewing.  Whom God Would Destroy does not fit easily into the traditional good/bad categories.

Let me start here, I really enjoyed reading Whom God Would Destroy.  But, here's a little secret, I read for characters, not action.  And Commander Pants is really good with characters.  This book is filled with interesting, entertaining characters.  People who feel real.  Given how strange some of these characters are, it would be very easy to go off the rails and end up with farcically drawn comic book characters.  But, even at their most insane, Pants' characters still feel real. 

Of course, a book is not just a collection of characters.  There also needs to be a plot.  And this is where the problem is.   Whom God Would Destroy doesn't so much have a plot as a collection of themes.  The Vagaries Of Mental Health: it's in there.  The Nature of God To Man: yep, got that, too.  The Dissatisfaction That Comes From Looking For a Perfect Experience: in spades, my friends.  Reality Is a Collection Of Layers, One More Complex Than the Next, and In The Whole Scheme Of Things Humans Understand Just As Much About The Universe As Bacteria Understand Quantum Physics: of course.  One Man's Crazy Is Another Man's Truth: do I even need to mention it? 

Instead of a plot, let us say there are two main themes.  The Nature of God to Man, and One Man's Crazy is Another Man's Truth.   Interestingly enough both involve aliens.  Theme A is illustrated by the story of Jeremy, an alien playing God for kicks and giggles.  (He gave the Jews the Shema, He did the Christ routine, and this time around He's apparently been reading some Heinlein, 'cause He sounds an awful lot like Valentine Michael Smith, you grok?)  He's messing with humanity again because He enjoys it.  He finds Oliver, an outreach counselor for a local mental health facility, and decides Oliver would be a perfect disciple.  A modern day Paul if you will.  So, in line A we watch as Jeremy manipulates Oliver into Discipleship.  For Theme B we follow Doc, one of Oliver's clients, and learn about how Doc is being used by an alien race in search of the PERFECT experience.  (The Ultimate Orgasm, they term it so mere humans can understand the idea.)  They find said experience in Big Macs (why not?) and Doc is part of the team of humans being used to make sure they get their Big Mac fix.

As themes these two lines have similar focuses and illustrate different aspects of the same concepts (the levels of reality, for example).  But as a story, they just don't have a whole lot to do with each other.  What the book is missing is an overarching plot to tie these themes together.   

Let me be clear here, Whom God Would Destroy is worth reading.  It's five or so hours well spent.  But if you want to examine it critically, there's a huge hole in the middle of it, and that's the plot.  Whom God Would Destroy meanders from one character to the next, spending time in their interesting worlds, getting to know them, but it's lacking in direction.  

Take Greg for example.  He's my favorite character in the book.  His purpose in the book is to illustrate how psychology isn't all that precise and with great ego comes the ability for a great fall.  I really like his story line and think it's quite clever.  But if you cut every scene with him as the main character out, it would have absolutely no bearing on the story.  He's not vital or even tangentially related to either of the main themes.  On his own and developed more fully he'd be a wicked cool novel or novella.  As a part of this story, he's just there.  Greg is a microcosm for what's right and wrong with Whom God Would Destroy.  He's well written, he's fascinating, as a reader you want to get to know him better, and he's totally divorced from any plot the book may have. 

So, how does a reviewer rank a book that was enjoyable, with well drawn characters and no real plot?  Pants knows how to use words.  His writing is clear and, if not poetic, well crafted for the purpose of the book.  His themes and the way he treats them is not precisely new (see Heinlein comment above) but well done.  His characters really are excellent.  But plot is a major issue, and it's a writing 101 level skill.  The whole purpose of a novel is to have something happen that ties all the elements of the story (characters, setting, writing style) together.  And that's just not in this story. 

I'll call Whom God Would Destroy a well recommended 3 stars.

Self Pulbishing with Lulu.com: Options As Far As the Eye Can See

Do you want maximum options for how your book will look?  Do you want marketing tools out the wazoo?  Is endless possible customization your idea of a very good thing?  Then Lulu.com may be the perfect self publisher for you.

If you are looking to do something beyond a standard novel, Lulu is probably the best option as well.  They have templates set up and ready to go for picture books (like a photo album, but the photos are printed directly on the pages), cook books, yearbooks, and calenders.

But, if you are like most of the people reading this blog, you are publishing a novel.  And there's only one thing I'd recommend Lulu.com for in that case, your hardback copy.

Why?  Because there's almost nothing Lulu offers except a hard bound book that you can't get for less with CreateSpace.com.

Here's the oranges to oranges comparison: with CreateSpace you decide on the Pro or Regular plan, the Pro plan costs $39.00 regular is free.  If you go pro your per page cost is .012 and regular is .02.  With Lulu.com you pick the kind of paper you want Publisher Grade (.015) or Standard (starting at .02 and going up from there).  Publisher grade gives you two size options, and you can't get an ISBN number.  Standard comes in pretty much any size you can imagine, and you can get an ISBN.  If you're actually planning on selling your book, you're already spending way more per book than you will with CreateSpace.

Why am I comparing Lulu to the Pro Plan prices instead of the Regular plan prices?  Because when you buy the Pro Plan with CreateSpace you also get the distribution tools you want if you actually intend to sell a physical book.  (I'm assuming this is where the term Pro Plan comes in.)  With Lulu, if you really want to sell a book you have to pick the paper option that costs more and then pay more for a distribution channel on top of it. 

So, for Sylvianna my CreateSpace author's copy costs $5.96.  My Lulu author's copy costs $14.00.  That was the moment I decided, unless I want a hardback copy of Sylvianna, Lulu was not going to get my publishing business.

Okay, so how do they do on ebooks? 

I'll admit I didn't get very far in this process.  I uploaded my file, and then they asked me what size I wanted my ebook to be.  I found myself thinking, "Pick a size for ebook?  Ummm what?"  See, here's the thing with ebooks, they come in whatever size the reader's screen happens to be.  So, my Kindle for PC screen is a lot bigger than my iPhone and my husband's Kindle is sort of in between.  So it doesn't make a lot of sense to pick a size for your ebook.  But, what do I know?  I'm new to this whole thing, so I open the list of sizes.  They're all standard book sizes.  I pick 5x8, and it resizes my document for 5x8 pages, and it looks bad.

Now maybe if I hadn't already used Smashwords.com, and come out with a product that looks good on any sized screen, I wouldn't have been so picky about this.  But I did go through the Smashwords conversion process and got an electronic book that looks good everywhere.  So, seeing the 5x8 pages, and knowing I already had a distribution channel set up for basically any ebook format I could want, I gave up on Lulu's ebookery. 

Lulu offers marketing tools, they offer promotional stuff, they'll build your cover for you, they'll edit for you, they provide pretty much every service you could possibly want, the only thing is: it costs a lot of money.  CreateSpace offers almost all the same marketing, promotional, editing, and cover work, and they charge less.  Smashwords actually understands how to build an ebook so that anyone can read it.

So, unless you are looking for your hardbound masterpiece, it's time to go looking for a different publishing house.

Next up in the Self Publishing series: Outskirt Press.  I see their ads below my posts, so it's about time I go and see what they can offer!  Also in the not too distant future, a review of Whom God Would Destroy.

Indie Book Review: The Crown Conspiracy

I'd like to introduce you to The Crown Conspiracy (The Riyria Revelations) by Michael Sullivan.  This is a six book series revolving around a fantasy world and the goings on therein.  The Crown Conspiracy is book one in this series, and, having read it, I'm looking forward to books two through six.  

I may sound a little hard in the coming paragraphs of this review, and I want to explain something up front, the Crown Conspiracy is a wonderful bit of old-school sword and sorcery (though this particular book was a bit light on magic) fantasy.  If, like me, you grew up in the days DragonLance and Forgotten Realms, this story feels like an overdue homecoming.

Let me begin with the good: the writing is lovely, detailed enough to let you know what is going on, who is doing it, and why, without falling into the Anne Rice trap of describing everything in such painstaking detail you want to skip pages or fall asleep. 

The Crown Conspiracy is a very carefully written book.  One of the lessons I learned as a writer was 'if it's not vital to the plot, leave it out.'  Writers don't always do that.  Indie writers really don't always do that.  I had a few spots through the story where I was thinking, 'and we're reading this why?' but all but one of those threads eventually got wound back into the story.  No matter how obscure a bit of the story may feel when you are reading it, there's a reason for it, and I like that very much.  That also means you need to pay attention to everything that happens, what looks like a throwaway line will come back and be important later. 

I loved the main characters.  Loved how they played off of each other.  There is a sort of well done buddy film feel to this book.  Royce and Hadrian genuinely like each other, making it easier for the readers to like them. We got enough back story so we didn't feel lost, but enough tantalizing details were left just out of reach to whet your appetite for more tales of Royce and Hadirian.  That can be a hard balance to pull off, and Sullivan did a lovely job with it.  He also pulled off another trick of the master writer, secondary characters that feel real, but don't clog up the story with unimportant back story.

Now for the less good: I can't call it bad, because it's not, but because the rest of the story is so strong little bits like this stick out.

This book has one mystery, 'Who murdered the king?'  As the book begins, the only thing we know for sure is that Hadrian and Royce didn't do it.  Beyond that we're left in the dark.  And being in the dark works, it's good to go through the possible options and rule them in or out.  Then we go beyond 'in the dark' into intentionally misled by the author.  He dangles little bits of story in front of us to make us think one thing, and then whips them out from under us when he finally lets us know what's up.  There's an almost sucker punch sensation when we find out what is actually going on because of the way the story is set up.  Like the misdirection was written purely for the purpose of misdirection. 

Sullivan wrote a very complex climax to the Crown Conspiracy.  There are at least six lines of point of view he switches between as he keeps building the tension.  Some of this is very gratifying, very clever.  One of the points of view is a bit annoying.  When you're that close to finishing up you don't want to suddenly break away to a point of view of a character who was last mentioned three hundred pages earlier for a few paragraphs and then dies two pages later.  It would be like watching Return of the King, getting to the battle for Mordor, and then slipping away for two minutes to see what Arwen is up to.  She might be doing something really interesting, but unless you're a diehard fan, you're going to fast forward to get back to the action.  However, once the book gets back to the action... Oh yeah, it's so worth it.

Sullivan has given us a fantastic first course, balancing the elements of his composition almost flawlessly, putting just enough on the plate to leave you feeling satisfied but still wanting more.  Lucky for all of us hungering for the next course, Avempartha, book two, is already out.  

On Writing Reviews

Spending some time online, and in the search for my next book to review has brought an issue to mind.

How do you know you're getting an honest review?  More importantly how do reviewers deal with stinkers?

Well, I like to consider myself an honest reviewer.  But those of you who are reading closely have probably noticed I never give a bad review.  Why?  I don't publish my bad reviews on my blog. 

There are several reasons for that, first off, I don't want to finish reading a book I loathe.  When I go book hunting I find a collection of possible books, download their free samples, and usually something like seven out of ten of the free samples are bad enough I don't read past page three.  By page three I already know the grammar is bad, the formatting impossible to read, the writing inelegant and amateurish.  I don't need or want to read further.  And really, a review based on three pages isn't fair.  A book has to be exceptionally bad for me to write about it on just the sample.  Occasionally it happens, but I keep those reviews on the page of the book, so that the only people who see it are those considering buying the book.

Secondly, I hope to make some money doing this.  I want you to click on those Amazon links and buy the books I recommend.  Now, if I take the time to read a book I loathe and then write a bad review of it, I've cut into the return on investment in my reading time.  I, like everyone else, have finite time, and I want to maximize the potential dollars I can make off the time I spend reading for review.  Is that mercenary?  Sure.  Is it true?  Oh, yeah. 

Why not write a good review of a bad book?  Because if you ever do click on that link and buy the book, you'll rapidly see the book is bad.   I can't be the only person who found a well reviewed book, clicked on it, and rapidly decided all the reviewers had to be related to or friends of the writer, because no one else would give the thing a five star review.  Once again, I hope to make money on this, if you buy a book on my recommendation, notice it looks like it was written by a ten-year-old, and I didn't mention that in the review, you're very unlikely to take my word on it again.

Sometimes people send me books to read for review.   This usually makes my day because books people send me have so far been pretty good.  I've had one I couldn't write at least a three star review for.  I emailed the author and asked if he really want me to continue reading and write that review.  He didn't take me up on the offer. 

So, that's how I go about doing this. Other reviewers probably have other techniques. 

Author Interview: MeiLin Miranda

MeiLin Miranda was kind enough to answer some of my questions about her adventures in self publishing.

KR:  Could you tell us more about crowdfunding?  How did you learn about it?  How did you do it?

MM:  "Crowdfunding" is when the fans or supporters of a project put money behind it to make it happen, rather than hope a gatekeeper--a publisher, film studio or record producer, for instance--picks up the project. Sites like Kickstarter.com or Indigogo.com allow musicians, artists, filmmakers and writers to organize crowdfundings; some people offer premiums there, rather like NPR offers tote bags for certain levels of donation.

I first ran into a form of crowdfunding while reading the online serial Tales of MU. Its author, Alexandra Erin, was then using a donate-for-chapter model; if readers met a fundraising target, she'd write an extra chapter that week. She's since stopped doing that, but for a long time it was the most common model of crowdfunding support for online writers. I used it when I first started, and did pretty well with it.

But I needed to raise a whole other level of money to make the first IHGK book happen. It needed editing, and the closer I got to finishing what I thought was book three, the more I realized how badly the whole thing needed to be rewritten from the top--and how unsustainable it was as a serial. I needed to convert it into books, which meant money for an editor and for professional design services. I think my readers helped me puzzle out what would be attractive to crowdfunders, and this is what we came up with:

For $50, you got
--an autographed paperback
--your choice of ebook format
--an acknowledgment in the book
--and most importantly: the final unformatted hot-off-the-laptop raw manuscript before anyone else got to read it, the moment my editor (Annetta Ribken) and I decided it was done. I finished the book on August 31st, 2010 at 9:30 pm; the manuscript was in the hands of its funders the morning of September 1.

I raised about $2,500 this way from 48 people, some of whom bought two packages and some of whom bought an ebook-only version for $25; they got everything in the $50 package except the autographed copy.

I'll be doing the same thing again for book two as soon as I come close to sending a draft to Nettah the Edittah. Netta is fabulous, by the way: http://www.wordwebbing.com/

 

KR:  Did you have any interest in going the traditional publishing route?  Did you do the agent/publisher hunt?

 

MM:  I very half-heartedly looked for an agent. I think I sent out three queries. I really didn't want one, but thought, well, now I can say I tried, I guess. The material I sent was atrocious enough that it's no surprise I got turned down, and I did it having already decided to be independent.

That said, I do have two short stories coming out in different Circlet Press anthologies (http://www.circlet.com/); in fact, one of them goes on sale December 28th, 2010: "Like a Moonrise: Shapeshifter Erotica." Not sure when the second anthology I'm in is going on sale yet. And I just submitted a short story to a major online outlet, mostly for fun. If it gets rejected, I'm not concerned; I can put it out there myself. I'm just curious at this point.

KR:  You have a book trailer video, has that been an effective marketing tool?

MM:  I have no idea! :) The "Lovers and Beloveds" trailer has been viewed close to a thousand times, and the Scryer's Gulch trailer about 250 times. The funny thing is, the Scryer's trailer is about a billion times better than the LaB one!

KR:  Who did your cover art/trailer?

MM:  I did both my trailers, and it probably shows. :) I do the covers for the Scryer's Gulch books, since they're just compilations of the serial. Alice Fox (http://www.alicefox.net/) did the cover of "Lovers and Beloveds." Alice has been the official artist for that series for some time now. She is amazing. Fellow writer and all around cool guy MCM did the typography design for LaB.

KR:  How many copies have you sold?  What has been your best marketing tool?

MM:  Speaking strictly of "Lovers and Beloveds," since the book's release in September 2010 I've sold about 75 paperbacks between direct sales, CreateSpace and Amazon. Ebooks, I've sold about 150 so far among Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and direct sales on my site.

My numbers are not that high compared to people like JA Konrath, but as Netta is fond of saying, it's a marathon not a sprint. And compared to the vast majority of self-publishers, I'm doing pretty darn well. I expect things will only get better as my catalog grows.

KR:  When is the next book due out?  Does it have a title yet?

MM:  The next book is tentatively due out in October 2011. The working title is "Mothers and Fathers," though that may not be the final one. I'm about 10,000 words into the alpha draft. (I tend to "name" my drafts by software convention: alpha, beta, release candidate, final.)

KR:  Lastly is there anything else you'd like to say about self-publishing?

MM:  Sure! If you self-publish, take it seriously. Invest in your work: hire a professional editor (not your friend who was an English major in college). Hire a professional cover artist. If you're going to print, get a typographer to design the book block if you can; if you're staying ebook only, you can do the formatting yourself for the most part. There are a lot of good guides out there on how to format for Kindle and Smashwords.

Most important is to commit to writing. Finish the book. Put the time in, get it written. If it's finished and languishing in a drawer, pull it out, dust it off, give it a good shake. Then let someone who isn't invested in being nice to you read it. Revise. Design. Put it out there.

If you'd like to know more about MeiLin Miranda you can check her out at MeiLinMiranda.com.

Indie Book Review: Lovers and Beloveds

Lovers and Beloveds: An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom Book One

A while back an email popped up in my inbox requesting I read Lovers and Beloveds for review.  I did my usual routine of checking the book out, looking at it's reviews, reading the back page copy, and bits and pieces of text.  It looked good.  My initial impression was steampunk erotic fantasy.  It sounded right up my alley.  

Then another interesting factoid hit my radar; it was groupfunded, a major plus.  If that term means nothing to you, prepare to learn.  Groupfunding (more on this in a later article on Kickstarter.com) is a technique where you get a bunch of people to give you money to pay for you to do your project.  Call it modern day patronage.  On a practical level that means this book was good enough, in the bits and pieces released by the author, to get total strangers to give her money to hire an editor, artist, etc.  While total money generated is not a definitive ruler for a book's quality, I've waded through a lot of self-published fiction that no one in their right mind would buy, let alone decide to patronize.  I was thrilled to get into this book.  

It turns out my initial impressions of Lovers and Beloveds was off, but not in a bad way.  It is a coming of age tale wrapped around a story of sexual domination (a story within the story writing technique is used to good effect in this book) exploring how the one story furthers the other.  It's a tale of a young man preparing for his eventual kinghood and the paths he may take to get there. 

It is set in a fantasy land with an 1890's-1910ish technology level.  But the technology is just in the background.  To call it steampunk would be similar to calling Sherlock Holmes steampunk, sure it's the right era, but to do so misses the point of steampunk.

It is erotica: coming of age, realpolitik, intelligently crafted with layers and story lines beyond the sex, and wrapped up in the sexual politics of what it means to be a man or a woman erotica.  As such, if you don't happen to enjoy reading explicit sex or sexual violence, just put the book down and head for the next one on your list.  Assuming such reading does not bother you, go get a copy, you'll be well rewarded.

Lovers and Beloveds uses erotic sex as a vehicle to explore the paths of power and the relationships of dominance and privilege.  All things a boy needs to learn to become a man who will be a king.  The sex is well written, very hot, and it's easy to see why the main character, Temmin, finds himself aroused and dismayed by that arousal when seeing the main character of the inner story raped.

I think calling this book fantasy might be a bit misleading.  There is magic in this world, but it's use is minimal.  My guess is that in later books in the series it will become important, (perhaps there will be a magical coming of age in the next book?) but for the opening book it's just sort of there.  Really, this reads more like historical fiction than fantasy.  Take out the few brief magic bits, and this could very easily be set in a fictionalized 1890's Colonial India or Hong Kong.

Temmin reads as a genuine young man.  He's spoiled but trying to be a good person.  He can be self-absorbed and whiny, but he's an eighteen-year-old who just had his world turned upside down.  He's earned his whininess, and there's something wrong with a person who isn't self absorbed when his entire reality shifts.  Basically, the fact that he is annoying on occasion is entirely in character and should the annoying bits be removed, he wouldn't read true.  

The writing is tight.  Scenes flow from one to the next with no major issues.  If there were grammar errors, I didn't notice them.  Dialog and voice may not be exceptional, but they were more than competent and worked with the characters.  I never found myself thinking, "There's no way Temmin (or any other character) would say that!"  There are bits where as a reader I found myself wondering why we were meeting certain characters and plot lines, but the quality  of the rest of the story and knowing this is book one of a series makes me think they are the seeds of future plot points.  The story within the story may have been a bit longer than strictly necessary, but that's my own personal taste (I tend to skim epic battle scenes), and for all I know in the next book the bits I thought were long may be vitally important.

  

I look forward to seeing how Temmin will mature into his future.

Lovers and Beloveds is available on Amazon as a physical book for $14.95, a good price for a book that length, and it's a steal on Kindle download for $2.99.  You can get it at Smashwords for most other eReader formats. MeiLin Miranda has offered me a free copy to give away, so if you want a shot at it for free, leave a comment, and I'll hold a drawing to see who wins it. 

Merry Christmas To Me: Sylvianna is Live!

There was only one thing I wanted to get for Christmas this year, and with a day to go, I made it.  Sylvianna, my book, is online and available for purchase.

So, this is a, shall we say, less than objective book review, but I'll try.

This is the single most brilliant piece of writing you will ever read.  As soon as you devour the first sentence of the first page you'll be hooked, and by the time you finish the last line of the last page, you'll be ready to build shrines to my brilliance and will have started to fill out the paperwork to change your children's names to the names of my characters.

Hmmm... that might be a tad hyperbolic.

It's good.  I feel like I can say that honestly, not just as the person who wrote it, but as a person who reads a lot. 

Sylvianna is the first book in a three book series.  This one is a modern day set tale of magic, the search for redemption, tying up loose ends, and true love.  It's a story of some basically good people who made some very bad decisions and how they deal with the fall out of those decisions.  It took me eight months to write the basic story, and another eight months to edit, re-write, re-edit, re-re-write, and then edit one more time that first story into a book I'm proud I wrote.

I loved Harry Potter.  I even loved (well, really liked) Deathly Hallows on the first read through.  Then I started to think about it critically and disappointment crept in.  It needed a real editor.  It needed someone to explain to JKR that it's not okay to suddenly introduce all the pieces of the puzzle in the final installment, especially since a good two thirds of them really should have been introduced in earlier books.  (Like, I don't know, when Harry is learning about wands for the first time, maybe that would be a good time to talk about how they work and wand mythos.  Or just possibly in one of the early Christmas scenes Beedle the Bard's stories could have been mentioned as say, I don't know, a present for a little sibling not yet at school or something.)  And most of all, someone needed to read that book, give it back to her, and say, "There is no purpose to the Deathly Hallows even being in this book."

I loved the first two books of His Dark Materials, and loathed the third book.  Not only did the story suddenly go off the rails when Pullman decided he wasn't going to write the story he set up, but he also wrote the least romantic romance in the history of best selling novels.  If romance was the temptation that was supposed to give Will and Lyra second thoughts about closing all the cuts, it would have been nice if that romance had actually developed more than ten minutes before they had to close the cuts.  He spent two novels getting us ready for a massive battle of good and evil, God v. Man, and then pulled the rug out from under us by devoting less then ten pages to that battle.  After the set up of the first two books, readers did not want to spend hours wading through an anthropology lesson about Mulefa.  Once again, the idea of the Dust is pretty cool (just like the idea for how wands work in Harry Potter was cool) but diverting away from the climax of the story to tell that tale is not a good writing technique.

I didn't love Twilight.  I tried.  I can't get past page 115.  There's not a single character in that book I had any desire to spend another minute with.  I can deal with unsympathetic characters, as long as they have some redeeming qualities (House for example.)  If the Twilight characters had redeeming qualities, I couldn't stick with the book long enough to learn about them.

So, why is that important?  After all this is about Sylvianna, not those books.  I had a story I wanted to tell, and quite a few ways to go about telling it.  But as I went through I kept the things I learned from reading those series in mind.   And I kept things in mind from reading books I adored.  You probably have to be me to see what I learned from Lonesome Dove in Sylvianna, but it's there.  You don't have to be me to see that Sylvianna has a romance that matters to not only the characters, but to the people reading it.  You don't have to be me to notice that forays into the forest of useless plot are non-existent.  (If you ever find yourself thinking, "Why on earth am I reading this?" just keep reading, it will be relevant sooner or later.)  And you don't have to be me to like the characters.

As I said, I think the book is genuinely good.  You can get it from Amazon at the above link.  That's the 4.99 Kindle version.  You can get it on Smashwords for 4.99 as well, and they offer basically any electronic format you could dream of.  Or you can get it at CreateSpace in a physical book edition for 14.99.