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PSA: Choose Your Words Carefully

I agree with Mindfire. I routinely look at the first couple of pages of a book and make a buy decision (assuming I've made it past the cover and the blurb). Moreover, I as an author do not expect the public to give me any better break.

That's why I found this thread worthwhile. I *do* want to make sure the blurb (and cover!) does two things. One, that it hooks. Two, that it does not repel. Both are important. I would not have thought samurai either, though if there was a picture of a samurai I'd probably put it together. It would be a negative, though I perhaps would not have reacted quite so viscerally. It does not take many such negatives, though, to drive me off.

There are times I let the rope pay out further. One is when it's an author I've previously enjoyed. That one gets more rope. Another is when it's a book that's in the genre niche where I'm working. I've grim-slogged my way through two or three books like that. But when I'm just reading for pleasure, my standards go way up. So those first impressions are terribly important, and it's quite enlightening to hear from fantasy readers how they react to these seemingly trivial points.

This is essentially what you have to do to try and sell a script to a studio. Basically have 60 seconds to convince them the story is worthwhile. Then you have the movie poster which has to do the same for the consumer.
 

Mythopoet

Auror
Side topic: Have you ever looked at a book, and thought, this one made it? Of the ten thousand manuscripts that flow across a publishers mail room, this book made it?

I used to think that sometimes.

How on earth did The Wheel of Time get published? It's some of the worst storytelling I've ever come across. But it has hordes of fans. How did that happen? If you're able to take a step back and look at it from a more impartial frame of mind, you have to acknowledge that it's because there are thousands readers that really, really enjoy those books. And you have to acknowledge, if you are intellectually honest, that there is nothing wrong with that. That different people enjoy different things and just because there's someone who enjoys something that I did not enjoy at all, does not mean they are somehow wrong about it. Fiction is all about the experience and the experience varies highly from person to person. Someone else's experience of a thing is not wrong just because it is different from mine.

The Wheel of Time got published because someone at a particular publisher read it and said "I bet there are a lot of readers who will want to buy this." That person was correct. The publication of The Wheel of Time made a ton of happy readers into fans. So, without a doubt, The Wheel of Time deserved to be published, whether I think it's crap or not.

Every single book that has been published has been published because someone thought there was a good chance people would buy it and enjoy it. Sometimes books get published and readers don't respond positively to them, they sink into obscurity, Sometimes books get published that some readers respond to really positively, but most readers don't, and then the few fans go around wondering why no one else likes this obviously wonderful work. Sometimes the books that are the most popular, the most beloved are also the books that are the most hated and maligned. Twilight, 50 Shades, Eragon, Shannara, etc. No one has the right to judge that any of those books don't deserve to be published. If a story gives even a handful of readers an experience that they enjoy and value, then it has done what a story is supposed to do.
 

Mindfire

Istar
Twilight, 50 Shades, Eragon, Shannara, etc.

Are Eragon and Shannara really that popular though? Eragon's Fandom seems to have evaporated, and I only ever see Shannara referenced on articles about how *not* to write fantasy.
 

Incanus

Auror
Are Eragon and Shannara really that popular though? Eragon's Fandom seems to have evaporated, and I only ever see Shannara referenced on articles about how *not* to write fantasy.

According to the Wikipedia intro on Terry Brooks, he is one of the best-selling, living fantasy authors. I've always considered the Shannara stuff pretty weak, even as a kid when I first encountered it (probably around 1979-80), I felt it was lacking. But as we've seen, success and quality are all too often exclusive to one another.
 
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