BOOKS!

Well, a book.  My book!  The first proof copy of Sky Treader came in today.  I need to make a minor change to one of the pages that didn't centre properly, but it's good.  I was particularly worried about my font choice, and thought it might be too big, but it works.  And now that I know it does, I'm going to go ahead with the others as well. 

After reading a lot of discussions on CreateSpace's printing, I was a little worried that I wouldn't like the end product, but it actually feels really sturdy.  The cover is good and thick, and the pages don't feel like they're going to tear if you look at them too hard.  When I get it through and have it properly available, I'll probably order about a dozen copies and do a GoodReads giveaway to celebrate.

Release day book binge

Since Dwarf's Ransom came out yesterday, I spent last night going through the top sellers for its category and effectively scoping out the competition.  It's a small category, but of what I started to read last night, I wasn't able to even get past the first chapter on any of them.  The last one seemed promising, but by the time I got to it, I was too tired to keep my eyes open, so the last one's waiting to be read tonight.
Most of the books I came to had similar problems in formatting that made it too difficult to read (either because something happened and there were no paragraph breaks, or the author didn't understand formatting conventions or how paragraphs work), or had just been placed in the wrong category and weren't anything I actually wanted to read.  Two of them had misspellings in the title, which just made it impossible for me to get past (and I thought twenty uses of "reigns" when the author meant "reins" was grating).  These are issues I find I can look past in fanfic, but if I'm paying for a story, I expect it to at least be spelled correctly. 

Another really common one that came up, which just reminded me of why I hated reading as a kid, is all the pointless infodumping.  And not even about anything interesting, like the setting, or a particularly turbulent political history.  Those, I can usually get through.  But more like the kind of infodumping every children's novel does, where they describe in detail what a person looked like, and what they're wearing, and what they thought about what they're wearing, and their opinions on what they had for breakfast two days before...

I read a lot of that last night.  And it's just something I could not possibly care less about.  I've always been a believer in only telling the reader the important bits, but so much of infodumping is just random garbage.  It goes back to the boring bits.  Often, the boring bits are boring because they're unnecessary. 

I admit, this is a matter that entirely comes down to taste, but it's becoming so prevalent that I find myself reading less and less these days.  And when I do read, half the time I'm just skimming over stuff and hoping to find the plot again.