Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
How does the first page of the first chapter tell you if a book is good or not?
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I assume you really want to know?
I can tell the style from that - too many books are close to illiterate and badly written, which I can't put up with however interesting the story may be.
Some people can put up with bad writing, bad grammar and the like I cannot.
Then I can also tell if they are likely to have anything interesting to say - if I'm not even vaguely interested after the first page, or it reads as derivative, I have so much other stuff queued up to read that I go no further. Occasionally I continue to page 2 - e.g. the second page of chapter 1 - to check but rarely further.
Sometimes I'm wrong of course and a good first impression leads to a poor book which I abandon later rather than sooner.
That's all I'm going to say. It works for me
