Quote:
Originally Posted by DaringNovelist
I think you've got it reversed here.
First, "just" is misplaced. A short free sample is JUST for showing that you can spell. It doesn't allow for any other purpose. The reader can't tell anything about your plotting and pacing and follow through.
Second a short sample really is crippleware, because it doesn't actually let the user do anything with it - it only gives a spoon fed sample. The reader can't use the product as he or she would in life. While I see nothing wrong with crippleware, it has limited usefulness.
Third - and most important - it limits what the consumer can do with the sample. Someone like you, who only wants to make a quick check for "writing quality" can do so. Someone who judges writing quality as an ability to handle character development and plot arcs also has the ability to do so, which they can't with a short sample.
Across all kinds of sales practices, short samples are notorious for being false come ons. It's easy to create those. It takes guts to let your reader really judge the full value of the product.
But, to get back to the point, it's irrelevant to a book review and should not be taken into consideration, and it's also irrelevant to the price.
Camille
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That's an interesting point of view. Is it really possible to make a decision about how an author handles character development without actually reading the entire book, or at least spoiling the ending?
Usually when I'm in a book store, I'll spend at most 3 or 4 minutes leafing through a book to decide if it looks like it's worth buying. I figure that the most I'm ever going to get out of it is a feel for the style (including vocabulary, spelling and stuff like that) and a very rough idea about what the book is about. Basically, if I like that stuff enough to buy the book, I'm hoping that the plot will be compelling and the characters interesting and fluid enough to make it all worthwhile. I figure if the prose is a disaster, then the more subtle elements of good writing are probably going to fail as well, although the reverse does not always hold true.
A couple of people have raised the point that the sample may deliberately not be representative of the entire book. Does that really happen? Does anyone have any examples where they think the sample has been significantly better edited and vetted than the book as a whole?