Trying to break into a B&N store

Most of our readers and contributors are Indie writers like myself. We have a few lucky mainstream published authors in our midst that I envied from the start of my writing endeavors. I decided to self-publish with Createspace after a 18 months of inertia on my agent's side and impatient waiting for things to happen on mine. Promoting my work and creating a platform that every author needs was the next step to getting noticed and making sales. This website is part of it.
Like me, you probably eagerly take every promotional opportunity with interviews and guest blogs or radio/ podcast interviews and tweet the heck out of your PC and mobile device. I follow every blog giving advice on writing, editing and selling my product. I also carry business cards and books in my car and steer a conversation my book's way when appropriate. That plus getting book reviews and writing press releases. Not to forget the networking. Still- it's a long, arduous road to success --whichever way you define it.
After a year of trickling book sales, I learned that there are on demand publishers that can make it into the Ingram's distribution list and via that to the holy grail of an established book store that actually has my printed copy on its shelves. Some authors only concentrate on eBooks, but a physical book in my hands, for me, was my humble  yardstick of success. Half a year, some added chapters and various editing hurdles and publishing obstacles later, a very a handsome man looks at the potential buyer from his shiny, sexy cover of the new bright blue version of Next Time Lucky. B&N here we come!
So we are on Ingram's list, Mr. Right and I. When and how does a store decide on which book to order, however? You must wait for a sales rep to pitch your book to the stores and a purchasing manager to choose it from thousands of listings. Good luck with that as a newcomer. Cold sales were never my forte, yet I plucked up my courage and walked into a B&N store to talk to the acquisition manager introducing myself as a local author...You know the spiel! (That's not what they're called here, btw: They are  "Community Relations Managers". (n.b.!)
A simple email would have sufficed, I was told.
Following up on my email that remained unanswered for weeks also gets my knickers in a twist, yet I managed to do it.
The reply I got triggered off this piece:

"I have researched your book; while the ISBN you provided does list the publication date as 1/13, I noticed that this is a reprint of a 2010 publication, with slight adjustments...Between this book being a reprint and lack of sales since it's (sic!) publication, I am going to pass on the opportunity to host an event with you and your book Next Time Lucky." ( no sales on B&N that is!-- Duh!)

Would you have let it sit at that? I called her directly and was told that "B&N 's Small Press Division has the policy NOT to take books on board that are published by small presses. And since it hasn't sold yet, they will not consider the signing." She admitted it was a Catch 22. 

How does a book get on a shelf if nobody has bought it before? How do buyers grab it in a store if it's not on a shelf? 

Fellow authors on writers sites assured me that mainstream shops like B&N are shooting themselves in the foot by underestimating or even ignoring Indie authors. From a best-selling Pen Woman I learned that readers come to her book signings and still buy online...Online sales look like the way of the future.

An article I recently saw: "Traditional or self-publishing?" is nothing but one big rhetorical discussion for me. Blog posts claiming that best-selling authors go the self-publishing route now in order to retain their rights and earn more money is one thing. To get the ball rolling as an unknown newbie is quite another. Give me a traditional publisher anytime.

            Your experience, please! 

                                                              

  Siggy Buckley

Pls. check out my hub: www.SiggyBuckley.blogspot.com

https://www.facebook.com/SiggyBuckley 

   Discussing Poetry
                               over
                                          Dinner

. . . and so . . .

I put my fork aside, adjusted my napkin, and began

Yesterday, I sat down to a feast of poetry
Cooked up by steamy, rising young poets and served on new plates
I flipped through its tantalizing menu

Appetite ready to choose a possible pleaser

Unfortunately, the first poem’s flavor was dulled in a spaghetti of obscurity
Clung to by a thick spiced sauce of overcooked metaphors and illusions
It was a heavy concoction burdened with salty emotion

Having no beginning nor ending and giving no satisfaction

Very well, I thought, I'll try another poem
I paged to a beef steak raw protest of gang life betrayed and street loves gone wrong
It was garnished with drugs, bullet peppered and blackened
Then drowned in a gravy of resentment
A chef's bad day creation

There were more dishes to sample
Some were cooked and stirred to choking blandness
And others too sweet to taste for long
Being drowned in syrupy self preoccupations and worn out slights

Creations of young poets craving self indulgence

Unsure of the finer dishes and traditions that life would soon offer

But after a long search I found a few that were perfection
Poems leaving pleasant tastes and promises of new delights
They were quite good, really

Inviting me back again
Exquisite creations to anticipate and savor . . .

With that said, I picked up my fork and tried the chocolate torte

C 10/07
Sandy Hartman

 

Here come the summer holidays, dear reader.  Again, a time to celebrate our fortunes and misfortunes, our friends and family, and those other things that sustain us. . .

Most especially the gift to create and express our feelings about them.

www.eonwriter.com          

Sandy Hartman

The Suitcase

The Suitcase.
I beg that before you pack to leave,
You follow these instructions; please.
Place my passion in first,
Then place it under the pillow of your bed.
Wrap yourself in it when you are alone at night,
And let it lead you, to where it wants to be led.
Place my heart in the centre,
But keep it close to your own.
Don’t leave it on the journey
To die cruelly all alone.
Let my love be the last
That you fold carefully within.
When you arrive unleash it.
Wear it like perfume,
Clothing your skin.

Danny Kemp
http://theauthordannykemp.com/
Danny Kemp is a best-selling London based author whose thriller The Desolate Garden is being made into a 30 million $ film. He is also well-known to many of us from FB!

Re Ralph Waldo Emerson

FFRF News Releases | Freethought Radio | Media Coverage/FFRF in the News Freethought of the Day | From the Headlines

Freethought of the Day Ralph Waldo Emerson May 25 On this date in 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston.   Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became  a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The  congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion,  something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension,"  Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he  believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by  Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife,  Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to  Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as  British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge.  He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life as poet, writer and  lecturer. Emerson inspired Transcendentalism, although never  adopting the label himself. He rejected traditional ideas of deity in  favor of an "Over-Soul" or "Form of Good," ideas which were  considered highly heretical. His books include Nature (1836), The  American Scholar (1837), Divinity School Address (1838), Essays, 2 vol.  (1841, 1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and three volumes  of poetry. Margaret Fuller became one of his "disciples," as did   Henry David Thoreau. The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such  as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,   adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one-  (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will,  so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being"  (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches,  gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing  clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15,  1838). He demolished the rightwing hypocrites of his era in his essay  "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted  our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to  learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or  mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson  of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not  seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856).  "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and  of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). D. 1882. “The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850)

Editing Essentials

As a self-published author, I often find myself involved in discussions debating the benefits of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, both with readers and fellow authors.

I am the first to admit that both have their pros and cons--which I won't get into here--but the two attractive features of traditional publishing which are almost universally agreed upon are distribution and perceived quality. It is the latter which provides the impetus for this post.

The perception of quality in traditionally published books comes from the editorial support provided by publishing houses. Before anything goes to print, multiple editors have a go at a manuscript, leading to multiple revisions, all supposedly to bring the best manuscript to market (or perhaps the most likely to sell?).

What many indie authors miss is that they can also bring this level to their work, but it has to start with the writers themselves.

Even if you are investing thousands of dollars with one of the best editors in the world, you still have to take a look (a number of looks, really) at the work yourself before you email it away. But how do you do that? You just wrote the thing, you know what happens, your eyes are already tired of looking at it. How do you get some distance?

You're right, it's difficult. The answer is not to simply sit down and start reading through, looking for errors--this is exactly how you will miss things. The key is to have a process. That looks different from one writer to the next, but here's mine:

1. Bad word edit.

In this stage, I have a list of words I look for to get rid of my habitual 'go to' words, passive constructions, and wishy-washiness. Most word processors and writing software (I use Power Writer) have a 'find' or 'find & replace' function under the edit tab to make this easier. Here is my list:

that, as (shows me both 'as' sentence constructions and passive 'was'), were, just, try, tried, moment, turn, fro (shows me 'from' when I meant 'out of'' and the like, as well as having people standing in front of things too often and when my fingers screwed up 'for'), form (I used to misstype 'from' frequently), could, had, almost, even, somehow, something, barely, nearly, only (wishy-washy words), still, there, manage, glance, feel/felt (not precise), would, like.

I look for all of these words in a chapter before moving on to the next, reconstructing sentences and reconfiguring wordings as I find them. I've been using this list for some time, so I've come close to completely weeding some of them out of my writing (I almost never use barely, barely ever use nearly, and nearly always remember to leave out almost). It feels great when I run through a chapter and find a few of the words either used sparingly or avoided all together.

Some writers might think it backward doing such a close edit on the first pass, because we are often taught our first edit should look at the big picture, taking into consideration storylines, tone, character arcs and such. This type of edit actually gives you that kind of view of your manuscript, because you end up looking at your book one sentence at a time, skipping some and reading others, and not in order. You will be surprised what you notice.

2. Editing software.

This is a new step in the process for me...well, not really new, but different. I recently found on-line editing software called ProWriting Aid, and I love it. The way it works is easy--you paste your manuscript into it (I usually do one chapter at a time), click 'analyze', and it spits out a number of reports for you. They include:

overused words, variation of sentence length, grammar (spelling, ending sentences with prepositions, etc.), writing style (passive verbs, repeated sentence starts), sticky sentences (locating unnecessary words in sentences), clichés (things that sound like clichés) and redundancies (e.g.-enter into), repeated words and phrases (that occur within a few sentences of each other), phrases summary (2 to 5 word phrases and how often you use them), diction, vague and abstract words (feel is a vague word, for example), complex words, alliteration analysis, consistency, time (to check the timeline in your story), dialogue (tag frequency), and homonyms (make sure you meant there, not their, or they're, or thar if you're writing about pirates).

It also provides a word cloud to give a visual of how often you use certain words in your story.

These are all things I try to be aware of, but sometimes get missed (a recent word cloud showed me the most used word in one chapter was bottle, so I ditched a bunch). Finding this software is the best thing to happen to my writing in a while and will save me a considerable amount of time, as well as allowing my editor to concentrate more on story.

The key to using this software is to remember it is not assessing your story, simply the pattern of words.

I take notes during both of these steps, noting either directly in the manuscript or in a notebook any new ideas, inconsistencies, or story and character thoughts, so I have them at hand when I get to step three.

3. The chapter read through.

My first read through is done chapter by chapter when I am done step two (i.e.- do step two, completing all changes, then do step three, then do step two in the following chapter, then step three...lather, rinse, repeat). In this step, I look mainly at pacing, tone, word choices and sentence structure. I also continue to take notes as in steps one and two.

4. The full read through.

Start at the beginning, work through to the end. My main concerns are story, character and consistency...the big things.

5. Send it to the editor.

You have to have an editor. Let me repeat that, in case you missed it...YOU HAVE TO HAVE AN EDITOR. Yes, this will cost you money, so start putting aside your pennies now. DO NOT be one of those indie authors who cuts corners and gives self-publishing a bad name, you hurt all of us when you do.

6. Returned from editor.

Make necessary changes.

7. Proofreaders/Beta readers

Have some people who like to read, know how to spell, and know what commas are, because something always gets missed. Have as many readers as you can, then don't be surprised when a missed word slips through everybody to be mentioned by the first person who reviews your book. Every published book--self or traditional--has at least one mistake. Electronic, self-published books have the advantage of being able to upload a new, corrected version.

Here's the thing you really need to know about editing...it has to be done no matter whether you choose self-publishing or traditional publishing. If you are an indie, good quality editing leads to better sales and reviews. If you go with traditional publishing, agents and publishers expect your best possible effort for their consideration--don't miss out on a publishing contract because you don't like editing.

Learn to love editing and sell more books.

(PS - I am in no way associated with ProWriting Aid. I discovered it on a forum and have been thankful for its mention ever since. There are other, similar tools available and I encourage you to do your own research)
Bruce Blake 

Author of: 

On Unfaithful Wings

All Who Wander Are Lost

Blood of the King (Khirro's Journey Book 1)

Spirit of the King (Khirro's Journey Book 2)

Heart of the King (Khirro's Journey Book 3

Q&A with writer Suellen Zima

Suellen Zima

Suellen Zima is a writer and blogger in Southern California. She is the author of Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, and the forthcoming Out of Step: A Diary to My Dead Son.

Q: Why did you decide to write a diary to your late son, and how would you describe the relationship between you?

A: My son died in 2003.  As Mother's Day approached in 2011, I had a strong feeling that he was just too dead.  I needed to try to do something to make him come more alive to me.  I had half-heartedly, unsuccessfully tried a few times to write something about him, but that had gone nowhere. 

So, I thought, "Why not write a diary to him and see what happens?"  I had no plot, didn't know if anything would come of it, or where it might lead, if anywhere.  There were a lot of pieces to our mother-son relationship that were unsaid and unfinished.  We both had felt abandoned by the other after [my] divorce.  Although I always knew something about him from his dad, there had been long gaps where he had refused any contact with me. 

When being HIV-positive turned into AIDS, he knew his time was limited.  It was then he started calling me again, and visited me once.  He died two years later, a month before his 35th birthday. Interracial adoption in the 1970s, divorce when he was 12, guilt and abandonment, homosexuality, HIV-AIDS, dying and grieving were all parts of our complicated mother-son relationship.

Q: How did writing the diary affect you?

A: I wrote in the diary frequently until Mother's Day of 2012. Sometimes I talked to him as I would if he were alive, telling him about up-to-date news I thought would interest him. I discussed interesting aspects of books I was reading. I told him about my life after the divorce that he hadn't wanted to hear about. I attempted to understand him better, both as the child he had been, and as the adult I barely knew. And I wanted him to know me as the person I was now. 

Slowly, subtly, I felt a shift in my emotions. I purposely became more optimistic. My anger and guilt became muted as I endeavored to talk to my son. I enjoyed our communication and felt more connected to him than I had in years. He popped into my mind often, reminding me of things I wanted to tell him in the diary.

Q: Your previous book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, followed your travels around the world, particularly to China. What about China kept drawing you back?

A: I first went to China in 1988 out of sheer curiosity. I knew nothing about China.  I didn't know any Chinese people. And no one was talking much about China at that time. My first fascination with China was, I suppose, the third-world time machine effect. I knew I wanted to get to know the people, and I chose teaching as my tool to learn the culture from the inside. 

At that time, the students were an intriguing mixture of both innocence and depth, with incredible motivation for learning English. They not only respected their teachers, but treated them as people they wanted to know better. They took me places and invited me to visit their families. Because I nurtured the relationships and visited often over the years, my students became my friends. 

We are still in contact. Now I am a senior, and they are middle-aged.  Six of them asked me to be the foreign grandmother to their children, and this has been a continuing joy in my life.

Q: Do you see links between your two books, and if so, how are the themes you explore in both books connected?

A: Out of Step:  A Diary To My Dead Son is really a prequel and a sequel to Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird. Because my son chose not to travel with me after the divorce, our communication in a time before the ease of computers, e-mail, and long distance phone calls was limited. Since he felt I had abandoned him by choosing my life abroad, he didn't want much contact. 

So, the years covered in Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird did not include him. His rejection, plus my guilt for choosing to divorce, made it too painful for me to write about him. However, in the diary, I filled in the gaps of those years without much contact, continued the relationship after he re-connected to me two years before he died, and covered the years since his death in 2003. 

The two books offer very different perspectives on the roads I have traveled in my life. 

Q: Are you planning to write another book?

A: While the seed of writing a book about the times and cultures I explored through my travels was in my mind for a while, the idea to try writing a diary arose unexpectedly from the nagging thought that my son was too dead. 

When I had tried writing about him, I realized I didn't really know enough about him after the age of 12 to write about him. Besides, I craved a form of writing that would re-start some form of communication. The diary emerged spontaneously and I continued to write in it frequently over the next year.

After I ended the diary as a book, I missed the communication with my son.  So, I have continued to write him e-mails. I don't know at this point whether those e-mails will one day become a book. I surprised myself by publishing one book.  There is also a Chinese translation of my first book on an online website in China. And now Out of Step:  A Diary To My Dead Son will be available to all.  Because I am sure I won't stop writing, I know that I will continue my blog (www.zimatravels.com/wordpress). It's quite possible another book will emerge eventually.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Visit http://www.zimatravels.com and Follow the Senior Hummingbird as she wanders, wonders, and writes.

How I Fought the Amazon Wars and Won

When I wrote my first historical detective mystery, Forevermore, I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to write the best story for my reader to enjoy. This is the goal of every independent author out there, and the reason I want to communicate this fact of indie publishing is that many of the "big publishing houses" are not publishing the best stories for their readers. Please allow me to elucidate.

I have been published by a big publisher. It was called "Harcourt-Brace," and it was the small professional arm of the corporation, "AP Professional Press" that published my book, The Digital Scribe: A Writer's Guide to Electronic Media. Notice the quaint reference to "electronic media." Back in the late nineties, we were still bedazzled by the newness of digital technology and its "multimedia" aspect. Today, digital multimedia is part and parcel of most of the "packaged novels" that get submitted by the big agents out there. They've already looked ahead to all the money to be made on movies, computer games, translations, Chinese edited versions, ads on the walls of urinals, and on and on with the corporate merchandising aspect of business. This was 1996, so publishing had yet to go through the gigantic and tumultuous war with the Amazons (coming soon to a screen near you!), and I was too much of a rookie to see the writing on the Amazon wall, so to speak.  Amazon, after all, was also a "big corporation."

Flash forward to 2013, and I am completely entrenched in the "indie publishing movement." Yes, I am politicizing this because there is a grassroots "political" movement going on that dares to stand-up to the big publishing giants and call them on their intrigues and misrepresentations. I wrote a "little mystery" that I was proud to say was a "big publisher's worst nightmare." Why? First of all, it was short (114 pages in paperback, 12 pt. font); it was not padded with description and useless back story; it was, in short, the best short mystery I had ever written, and it was meant to grab the readers' interest and keep them entertained for the entire 114 real pages and 2415 Kindle pages. I used the simple and straightforward distribution method of Amazon's (there's that creepy name again) Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This method allowed me (ME, ME, ME, a thousand times ME) to control all of the content, all of the revisions, all of the covers, all of the entire blasted book! Oh my God! It was if I had been re-born! I now had a direct line to my reader! No longer would I have to haggle with an editor about using a drawing of a male monk in the Middle Ages on my book's cover because, she said, "Eighty percent of readers are female, and they would not want to see a male monk."   But, I argued, monks were male in the Middle Ages!  Anyway, I had to "compromise" and use the "hands of the monk" holding a feather pen! With KDP and those lovely Amazon ladies, I was able to make all of these big, "executive decisions" about my own book! What power! All of that concentrated energy infused my body!  (Or perhaps too much caffeine?)

Of course, I must give a spoiler alert to all you would-be indie pubbers out there. Unless you know what goes into a really good story, and you've consulted with other indie authors about how to set-up your book, you had better stay away from the wild forest where the Amazons roam. They will capture you, possibly castrate or dismember you, and put you in a pot for Mah Jong hors d'oeuvres later that day. Suffice it to say, get somebody to "have your back" when you go down the indie road into the dark Amazon forest of KDP or even the seemingly "friendlier" places where they Smash Words or read together with Sluggo and Little Lulu. I suggest you check-out places like Indies Unlimited. They have some crusty old buggers who have been down many of the self-publishing roads, and they are really friendly to newbies! Don't, under any circumstances, fall for the scams out there! You thought Amazons were tough? You haven't experienced anything until you've been raped by Author Solutions and its vast minions of corporate goons!

Okay, where was I?  Oh yeah, me (my favorite topic).  So I wrote this tiny little mystery that began to receive some favorable reviews on Amazon (up to 11 so far) from my readers.  These weren't reviews from some paid author who publishes his books at the same big publisher as I do, or some "computer harvested mass of reviewers" who are paid by big publishers to receive some other "reward."  No, these were actual readers of the book (the best kind for reviews, by the way).  I know they are the best kind because I have been hoodwinked by so-called "professional" reviewers who never read my book.  In fact, my favorite short story is "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff.  In this story, the protagonist, Enders, is a professional book reviewer of this ilk, and he receives his just desserts!

The final bullet in my brain came from my hero detective author, Lawrence Block.  He was saying how he recommended all would-be mystery writers to become independent if they want to bypass the "screwing over" that was becoming the norm in big publishing.  This is a gentleman who could practically "name his advance" in the detective mystery genre, so when he barked I sat up.

Are there independent author success stories?  I'll let you be the judge.  This ain't a war for nothin', ya know!

Jim Musgrave is an author, English Professor and business owner who lives in San Diego, CA.  His most recent historical mystery series features Detective Pat O’Malley in Forevermore. 

Home

Home. A simple word; a loaded one. You can say it in a whisper; you can say it in a cry. Expressed in the voices of father and daughter, you can hear a visceral longing for an ideal place, a place never to be found again.
Imagine the shock, imagine the sadness when a daughter discovers her father’s work, the poetry he had never shared with anyone during the last two decades of his life. Six years after that moment of discovery, which happened in her childhood home while mourning for his passing, Uvi Poznansky presents a tender tribute: a collection of poems and prose, half of which is written by her, and half—by her father, the author, poet and artist Zeev Kachel. She has been translating his poems for nearly a year, with careful attention to rhyme and rhythm, in an effort to remain faithful to the spirit of his words.
Zeev’s writing is always autobiographical in nature; you can view it as an ongoing diary of his life. Uvi’s writing is rarely so, especially when it comes to her prose. She is a storyteller who delights in conjuring up various figments of her imagination, and fleshing them out on paper. She sees herself chasing her characters with a pen, in an attempt to see the world from their point of view, and to capture their voices. But in some of her poems, she offers you a rare glimpse into her most guarded, intensely private moments, yearning for Home.
Uvi Poznansky
                                                                               

http://uviart.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/uviart
https://twitter.com/UviPoznansky
http://www.amazon.com/Uvi-Poznansky/e/B006WW4ZFG/
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5758946.Uvi_Poznansky

Tomb Of The Unknown Writer

For the last several weeks, I have struggled to finish reading a book. This is a book written by someone I call a friend. A face book friend - true enough, but we have supported and encouraged each other and though I have never met this person, I consider him a friend.  I was really looking forward to reading his book. The book, so far is receiving high accolades from reviewers on at least two continents.  Imagine my disappointment, when after more than a month I was only on page 87. I could not finish reading this book...No - I refuse to continue to read this book. This book is dead!

What is it about books that cause a reader to lose interest, or stop reading? I don't know. I suppose that is an individual's taste and is different for everyone. For me, I can muscle through most stories. The truth is I enjoy reading, so if the story is good, and the characters are believable, I'm good. With my friend's book, the story line was excellent. The way he was developing his characters - superb. So why did I stop?  There were too many of these:  anywho-be-doo,  hunky-doubly dory, loopy-doo, doggy doo- doo, lazy-daisy and more. On top of which there were numerous cliché, and the syntax of the cliché left me with mixed messages. It was British...it was American...it was cowboy...it was rural, poor Ohio. For me, it was confusing.

The combination of all of the above made this book, for me impossible to read. I was so distracted, I could not move forward. But that was me, and as I said before, it is highly individual. It is different for everyone.

You will probably never read a review I write that smashes another writer's work. I believe that writers, novice to master deserve credit for making the journey, and writing a story for others to enjoy. The fact that they spend months, or years writing their story for my entertainment or education is good enough for me. Still, there are books out there that for one reason or another are difficult for some of us to read.

I wish I could have ignored the distractions in this book, and enjoyed the ride his character was clearly prepared to provide. It was a great story line. For much of the first 87 pages, the writing was flawless.

So the question I throw out to the universe this morning is this: How many cliché is too many? How many - I do not even know what to call them..."any who" types of words and phrases can a manuscript have before those words and phrases become intrusive to the story?

Oh! I don’t have the answers. Just the questions. I think I will leave the answering of the questions to you.

Have a regular week every one.  I figured if I said "great week", I would be raising the bar too high, and setting us all up for failure!

Brian M. Hayden

first published March 21, 2013 on my blog

http://brianhayden.net/

http://www.amazon.com/Brian-M.-Hayden/e/B00520BT8U/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1