Quote:
Originally Posted by GraceKrispy
Your stories have interesting premises. I do wonder if the writing in the stories mirrors the writing of the blurbs.
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That's what makes me paranoid about the bad blurbs (and worse, bad thread titles!) I see here. They're the first examples we see of the authors' writing. If I were them, I'd certainly want those examples to be letter-perfect, since they're the examples that would make someone download my samples or buy my stories. When people can't get even a hundred-word post right, what are they doing in a hundred-thousand-word novel?
To pick on poor cbaehr's stories, since they started this thread, there's the difference between "it's" and "its". To someone who isn't accustomed to writing, I can see how there's a question of how to spell the sound "itz". But to a writer, to whom written words should be familiar tools, the difference is between the meaning of "it is" and the meaning of the relative of "his", and what it sounds like isn't any part of it. So, when a writer shows me that he's not intimately familiar with words, I get as edgy as I would with a mechanic who isn't intimately familiar with tools. I certainly wouldn't want to take my car to a mechanic who wasn't quite sure what sort of combination wrench he should use (actually, I do most of my own work, but that's another issue), and I'm likewise reluctant to take my reading time to an author who isn't quite sure what sort of word to use.
In other threads, we've seen post icons, excessive caps, reviews in the title (!), and other random ways of making a thread "special". I don't know how it works with other people, but the kind of "special" those are to me is the usage in "special olympics". If an announcement of a book can't stand on its own, it's not going to do any better if its poster comes up with a way to push it forward and make it different from the other posts. That means, to me anyway, that he's thinking more about presentation and less about content. Plus, of course, he doesn't play well with others. He doesn't want me to read the announcements in order; he wants me to look at
his first. It's all about him, HIM, HIM!!! That's rude. I tend not to read rude authors. I wonder how MobileRead feels about this? Do we give rude authors more attention, as they expect, or less, as I do?