David Dubrow

Author

A Few Thoughts About Editing Your Indie Book Plus Book News

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(This post is not intended to point fingers at individuals, nor is it a reaction to a particular book.)

After having read dozens of indie- and self-published books over the last year or so in several different genres, I’ve found some common threads that link them together as indie fiction and separate them from traditionally-published books.

Most prominent is the lack of editing.  The vast, vast, vast majority of writers need an editor, or, if nothing else, a competent, experienced proofreader to make their work ready for prime time.  There really is no acceptable number of typos or grammatical mistakes allowable in a published work.  The expression “the perfect is the enemy of the good” doesn’t apply to publishing.

There are, of course, more subjective elements to your book that may or may not benefit from a story editor: character arcs, plot arcs, dialogue, a clearly-defined antagonist, etc.  They’re important, but their very subjectivity puts them up for debate.  (The subject of a later post will cover the relative value of having a book editor review your book.)  I’m talking about having everything spelled properly.  No wrong word choices like “vocal chords” or “it’s” when you mean “its.”  Microsoft Word doesn’t fix run-ons, comma placement, and subject-verb agreement, and if you can’t do it (most writers, remember, cannot), you must find someone to fix these errors for you.

Yes, I know it’s expensive.  And time-consuming.  And a pain in the ass and a gut check and you still have to do it because if you don’t do it you’re putting out marginal work.  These things count.  We’ve all read traditionally-published books with grammatical errors, yes.  But just because some people put out substandard work, it’s no excuse for you to do the same.  Do you want to be good for an indie, or just plain good?

Get it professionally edited, and if you can’t, get it proofread.  It shows you care about the reader.

My other concern is book formatting.  I’ve read some books that were horribly formatted.  There’s no excuse for that.  If you can’t or won’t have your book professionally formatted, download this invaluable guide, follow the instructions, and you’ll have formatted your book properly.  Mark Coker is my personal hero for writing this guide and making it available for free.

The bottom line is that publishing is all about being detail-oriented.  Including self-publishing.

In other news, The Nephilim and the False Prophet has been sent to educated, literate readers I trust to sanity-check it.  The end is nigh!

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Five Book Reviews for the Price of One

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These are going to be short reviews, but they’re all you’ll need to determine if the books described are worth your time and money.

  • Brilliance by Marcus Sakey: Unfortunately, this book does not at all live up to the title.

     Bestselling author Lee Child described it as, “The kind of story you’ve never read before.”  That’s not true.  This kind of story has been done before, and a lot better (Wild Cards, for example).  The premise is that in 1980, a percentage of the population was born with uncanny abilities that go right up to the edge of supernatural, but don’t quite reach it (they’re called “abnorms”).  No psychokinesis or telepathy, but one guy manipulated the stock market to make himself a multi-multi-billionaire and ended up crashing it.  Some are just super-intelligent.  The main character, Nick Cooper, has the ability to read body language in such a way as to make him an unbeatable hand-to-hand fighter.  Some abnorms have become terrorists, so Nick, under the employ of the government, goes to stop them.  It’s an impossible mission.  There are many nonsensical plot twists; a standard Hollywood divorced-but-we’re-still-great-friends relationship; a new love interest who happens to be incredibly beautiful; a my-child-is-in-danger plot element; and a 9/11-style attack that was actually carried out by the U.S. government, Truther-style.  Sakey breaks up the action sequences by telling us how Cooper makes his unnaturally-quick combat decisions, which slows the pace down and destroys the scene’s excitement.  I really wanted to like this book, but couldn’t.  Two stars out of five.

  • Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells: This is a first-contact science fiction novel about a group of present-day astronauts plus one incredibly-talented linguist who go to a derelict spacecraft to explore it.  The protagonist, Jane Holloway, is the linguist.  She also alternates between weepy-weak and stronger than combat-hardened military veterans.  Plagued by a past tragedy that doesn’t seem so bad, she needed a great deal of persuading from a borderline mentally defective engineer to join the space mission (as if the opportunity to meet extraterrestrial life wasn’t much of a draw).  The engineer happened to be the love interest.  Her fellow astronauts act like angry high schoolers with firearms (in one laughable scene, the captain tells the crew to put armor-piercing rounds into their handguns), the love interest is extremely incompetent at just about everything, and her supernatural ability to pick up languages faster than others can program a VCR enables her to communicate telepathically with the one surviving intelligent alien aboard the ship.  None of these characters were likable or acted in ways that made sense, the plot was a mishmash of alien politics and crew infighting, and the story seemed too much like a setup for future volumes rather than its own discrete narrative.  Two stars out of five.
  • The Wayward Pines trilogy by Blake Crouch: A sci-fi thriller that consists of Pines, Wayward, and The Last Town.  There were times when I was reading these books that I literally couldn’t put them down for love or money.  They were awesome.  Extremely well-written, accurate with weapons, complex in characterization, and exciting from start to finish.  The big secret to the town of Wayward Pines, revealed in Pines, was a bit disappointing and unbelievable, but overcame that anyway.  Wayward didn’t suffer from the middle-book slump that so many trilogies experience, and brought real tension to the overall story.  The Last Town had a disappointing ending, but it wasn’t a failure of writing.  I simply strongly disagreed with the choices the characters made at the end, though the epilogue gave it a final punch.  If you read nothing else in the thriller genre this year, at least pick up Wayward Pines.  Four out of five stars.
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Book Review: Graham Masterton’s Ghost Music

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I’ve been a huge fan of Graham Masterton since the early 1990’s.  Two of his novels, Night Warriors and Flesh and Blood, occupy prized spots on my dresser, so I can see them every day.  Like most writers who’ve had long, successful careers, some of his books have been great, some good, and some not so good.

Unfortunately, Ghost Music wasn’t so good.  This is why I didn’t enjoy it:

  • Graham’s American Problem: There’s a persistent problem with the novels Masterton sets in the U.S.: they’re self-evidently written by someone unfamiliar with American idiom, customs, and culture.  He’s typically got very snappy, witty dialogue, which is great, but occasionally English expressions like “Who’s X when he’s at home?” pop in when Americans speak to each other, and it takes you out of the story and reminds you who’s writing it.  His attempts to immerse the reader in American culture simply fail most of the time, because when he’s not trying too hard, he’s not trying enough.  I just wish he’d stop it.  American horror fans will buy books set in Poland and the U.K. if he writes them.  This problem was very much evident in Ghost Music.
  • Stupid Protagonist: Another major criticism of the novel is that the protagonist was an absolute idiot from start to finish.  While I understand that authors who work through traditional publishers often don’t get to choose the titles of their novels, it makes for a frustrating reading experience to read about a man who’s obviously seeing ghosts everywhere but has no idea that he’s seeing ghosts.  He’s even screwing one who has the uncanny ability to shatter glass with her screams of delight at climax.  It’s only near the end that he figures out that the people who appear and disappear, are dead one day and alive the next, are actually…wait for it…ghosts.  The protagonist also makes a number of very strange decisions, all of which make no sense but are vital to move the plot forward.  This is sloppy writing.  It shows a lack of respect for the reader.
  • Bad Bad Guys: There was needless brutality in the way certain people met their end: a boy has his eyes glued shut as part of the torture he endures before dying, and a young girl is literally sewed to a mattress that is later sunk into the sea (we’ll ignore how the latter can possibly be done for the purposes of storytelling).  The impetus for this brutality involves a hastily thrown-together denouement with illegal organ harvesting in the Third World and a mafia-like antagonist.

Across the board not one of his best, but I did finish it.  Two stars.

Final note: When he’s on his game, Graham Masterton is extraordinary.  I’ll take him over Stephen King any day. Don’t take this one review as indicative of his entire oeuvre.

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Book Review: Dune: The Butlerian Jihad

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It gives me no pleasure at all to write a review like this.  I’m intimately familiar with what it takes to write a novel with multiple characters, attempting to describe events that are epic in scope.  And I understand that not every book is going to appeal to every reader.  You can decide that you don’t like a book, but acknowledge that it’s a difference of personal taste, not the book’s quality.  Nevertheless, Dune: The Butlerian Jihad is an objectively bad book that should never have been foisted upon the reading public.

I tried extremely hard to like it.  It promised to describe a very interesting period in the Dune universe: what caused humanity to throw away advanced computer technology in such a way as to refer to it as a jihad?

Well, you can keep asking, because this answer is terrible.  There’s nothing about it that’s worth your time.  Here are some of the low points:

1) The chapter introductions are trite and without insight.  Take this chapter introduction from DTBJ (Dune: The Butlerian Jihad): “When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and learn from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind.”  Not particularly penetrating, that.  Why bother reading the rest of the book after that?  Contrast it with this chapter intro from Dune: “There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man – with human flesh.”  That tells you something.  You can agree with it or not, but it’s a great insight into what Paul-Muad’Dib thought.  There’s none of that in DTBJ.  The characters and plotting likewise lack depth.

Sandworm: “Ow.”

2) The writing tells you everything without bothering to go through the whole rigmarole of showing you anything.  An example: “He was a serious young man, prone to honesty and with a tendency to see things in black and white….Much admired by his superiors, Xavier had been promoted quickly; equally respected by his soldiers, he was the sort of trusted man they would follow into battle.”  Oh.  Well, great.  I don’t suppose there’s any way the writers could have demonstrated these traits for us in the dialogue or action of the book.  Instead, the reader is beaten over the head with this kind of information.  Clumsy.  Terribly clumsy.  The writers don’t give us the opportunity to judge the characters on their own merits, and instead tell us what to think.

3) The best parts are glossed over, and the story is mundane.  Evil brains-in-a-jar cyborgs called cymeks begin the novel by attacking a planet.  These cymeks have names like Ajax, Agamemnon, and Tlaloc, but don’t act like their namesakes, and there’s little backstory described or told about their origins.  We get ugly little infodumps about them like cat crottes in a litterbox instead.  None of that intricate weaving of history and current action that we’d come to love from Frank Herbert’s work.  The reasons for voluntarily relinquishing one’s own humanity go entirely unexplored here.

DTBJ was a New York Times bestseller, published by Macmillan.  And it’s awful.  Tell me again how self-published books are the scourge of literary quality, and that the more self-published crap gets out there, the less likely it is great, properly-vetted books will be read.  The gatekeepers missed this one.  Big time.

I got 11% in and had to stop reading.  Don’t do what I did and buy it.  Learn from my mistake.  Save yourself.

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