My novella (about half the size of a novel) is free this week in the Amazon Kindle Store. This is the science fiction horror story of a military space vessel that discovers a new enemy, a creature that targets a civilization’s technology.
Read it free: Here.
I honestly don’t know what to do. I can’t seem to get anyone interested in my writing. It’s not because it’s not good enough; it’s mainly because it’s not famous enough, and it’s never going to be “famous” enough because no one reads it.
I guess what gets on my nerves is that I tend to support all of my friends and colleagues on their social networking sites, but rarely is that ever reciprocated. I’ll give a thumbs up to someone’s ridiculous cat picture or to someone’s latest “look how cute my baby is” photo. But rarely does that get returned.
I have about one friend on my social networking sites who I am very thankful for because she’s always supporting me with my writing. Probably more than she should ever have to. But she’s a rarity. I sometimes wish there was more I could do to support her, but I try.
Recently, I published probably the most important book of my career. To give it the credit it’s due, I need to hype the hell out of it because the publishing world is not the same place it was a decade ago. Publishers don’t support you. Writers are pretty much on their own, and unless they were Stephen King-level of famous a decade ago, they’re pretty much stuck with trying to make an impact in a world that has the attention span of a five year old.
So, I have been trying everything possible to get people interested in this book. For the first time ever, I created a book trailer and put it on Amazon and Youtube. It’s really funny and entertaining. The people who have seen it, all ten of them, love it. If you start to get my drift, I now can’t get people to watch a Youtube of a promo for a book that they aren’t interested in reading either. Basically, a writer trying to get traction today is essentially screwed.
The tragic part of trying to make it has a lot to do with the mechanisms that drive the whole industry now. In order to advertise my book anywhere, you generally have to have at least 4 to 5 reviews that are 4 stars or above (averaged). So, if you don’t have people who already read your book and reviewed it, you can’t get advertising for it so that people can actually read it and review it. And if by some chance you got those first five reviews and then could pay for some advertising, you then have to get dozens of reviews before you can actually start hitting a breaking point of where people will ever even notice that you’ve written a book. If you’re unknown, kind of like I am, then you’d probably get better results standing on the corner and throwing copies of your books at passing cars, hoping to hit one, blinding the driver so that he has to stop after running into a flagpole.
Anyway, here’s a last look at the video I created for this campaign.
For the following week, Monday through Friday, Amazon is offering my books Darkened Passages (a new dark fantasy short story collection released over the weekend) and the book that was previously published before it, Deadly Deceptions (a mystery/suspense novel published last year) for free if you have Amazon Prime. So, hopefully people take advantage of it.
If you do, please do me the courtesy of leaving a review. It’s amazing how many of my novels are bought but then no one leaves a review. Hopefully, no one thinks they suck. 🙁
There’s a book story that’s been making the rounds lately. It’s a book called Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (a pseudonym). It started out as an ebook and then went through a huge bidding war before it was bought by a major publishing house. It’s been compared to the Harry Potter series and the Hunger Games series, which is why the big bidding war took place. But the history of this book is a little, well, um, interesting.
You see, the book isn’t a young adult book. It’s an adult book. A very adult book. It’s basically a book about bondage and discipline, where a young woman gets drawn into a world where some dominant guy becomes her master. Most of the time, a book like this ends up being marginalized and sold as ebook smut. Such a book is very, very difficult to sell mainstream.
Yet, it happened. It became that “book” that adults bought (most often the demographic of housewives, which is another story itself) but didn’t really reveal they were reading. Now, the big publishing companies AND movie companies, see this as the next big thing and are looking to market it because of its success as an ebook.
Well, that’s going to be interesting, to say the least. You see, the book did really well because it was an ebook. Think about that for a second. When you buy an ebook, you can read it in public, and almost no one has a clue what you’re reading. But bring a book onto the train (an actual book) and everyone knows what you’re reading. That’s going to make it really difficult to get people to want to read this book in public. That’s going to kill a lot of chances of selling it to the mainstream public because it’s going to be the equivalent of reading erotica in public. Good luck on that one.
Yet, the publishing industry it’s got the next Twilight on its hands.
What this is actually showing me is that the Legacy Publishers (the ones who still print books and then ebooks as an afterthought) are starting to realize that ebooks are a viable market that might slowly overcome the old style market. Yet, I don’t think they understand the nuances involved in ebooks versus mainstream books.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: I also have an adult book out there somewhere being sold as an ebook. It’s written under a completely different name, mainly because I chose a long time ago to distance my writing name from that other stuff. It’s not that I’m not proud of the other novel, or even ashamed of it. I just realized that for simple, rational (and sometimes irrational) reasons, people are often more comfortable separating the two names for the types of books that are published under those names. Throughout history, mainstream writers have done this as a precaution to keep the two camps of readers apart.
An example: Some years back, there was a series of books written by John Norman (the pseudonym of John Frederick Lange, Jr.) about a mythical land called Gor. It was one of those series that had a huge following, basically taking a complete life of its own. The premise of it centered around a civilization of highly structured slavery. This series has spawned into a lifestyle culture of people who partake in the culture of living a Gorean lifestyle, which generally revolves around a strong master/slave society. Sometimes the genders are mixed (as in sometimes its female controlled, but most often it tends to gravitate towards a male dominant household). Anyway, because the ideas of his novels were so against the mainstream thought, Norman remained the header on all of these stories and Lange made every effort to keep his secret identity. During the 1970s, as the series was at its zenith, a woman I knew named Laura figured out who the author was, including where he was teaching and confronted him directly about it. For years, he protested his involvement but then eventually he gave in, realizing that secret was quickly catching up with him. Today, pretty much everyone who has ever read these books knows exactly who was the author. Fortunately for him, he was already so famous as a writer that it didn’t actually affect his teaching career.
The same kind of thing happened when vampire-story writer Anne Rice was revealed to be writing under a number of names that published books on male and female lifestyle slavery. Because she was already so famous as a novelist, these revelations didn’t hurt her career, and then soon after her identity was discovered, she started writing religious fiction, and her career has really never returned to the power career it once was.
What is interesting to note about all of these cases is that the stories themselves never really became mainstream. Even Rice’s book, Exit to Eden, which became a major motion picture some years ago starring Dan Ackroyd and Rosie Odonnell, never really became the hot seller as a mainstream novel. And the reason is simple: It was perceived by mainstream America as smut. Which is sad because it’s a brilliantly written novel (and a horrible movie adaptation that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the book).
So, as this “new” series moves into mainstream writing, I’m wondering how it is going to do in that realm. All attempts to bring S&M into mainstream have never succeeded. Madonna tried to do it for years, and every time she did, she continued to remain famous, but those attempts (including a picture book, several songs and videos and even a major motion picture) continue to remain obscure in her collection of mainstream releases. Recently, even Rihanna tried to present such material to a mass audience, and she was criticized for responding badly to her scandal of how she had been beaten by her boyfriend (which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, as her adventures in that realm only served to be used as continued criticism…making some kind of weird connection to PTSD from being beaten by Chris Brown as her motivation behind why she’d do a move into S&M music video…yeah, the argument didn’t make a lot of sense to me either at the time).
The upshot of the whole thing is that no matter how hard people try, fringe sexual activity is rarely ever going to be seen as acceptable by sex-obsessed Americans who pretend to be shocked when they secretly covet all sorts of different sexual material. It’s like a politician who screams “sinner” at random strangers while having an affair with another woman to hide his predilection for having sex with children. America has never really made a lot of sense.
But expect to see a lot of shocked faces when people start to realize what they actually bought into now that everyone has jumped on the popularity of a bdsm book that publishers are convinced is ready for the mass public. I think they’re ready, but I’m pretty sure I’m wrong.
Over the weekend, I went to Best Buy to purchase a new keyboard that I didn’t actually need. It was to replace a gaming keyboard I have that works great, but I decided that because their new gaming keyboard (by the same company) was on sale, I wanted to buy it. It does absolutely nothing new that the old one doesn’t already do, nor is it more stylish or have any extra buttons the old one lacked. But it was on sale, and it was new. So I went and bought it. Yes, I am aware that I am Best Buy’s proverbial wet dream of a client, and I understand that.
To make matters worse, I found my keyboard I didn’t need, started walking to the register and then decided out of the blue that I was going to buy a brand new Kindle Amazon Fire. Already owning a Kindle and having the Kindle app on my Ipad 2, I obviously didn’t need one, but it was there at the store, staring at me, so I felt I had to buy it. So I did. And then I bought the extra pack with it, that cost me an extra $100 for a $50 Amazon gift card, a case and ear phones, all of which I didn’t need either. But happy with my purchase, I took it home.
I’ve had the weekend to play with Amazon Kindle Fire, or the Kindle Amazon Fire, or the Amazon Kindle on fire, or whatever it’s actually called, and I can say that it’s kind of cool. It lets you access the Internet, like my computer and Ipad 2 already do. It lets you download your music library, which Amazon first forced me to upload to its “cloud” first, taking about a day and a half to do so. But then I got to download my music, which I already had on my computer and Ipad 2 in the first place. I mean, convenience knows no boundaries, right?
Then I downloaded some of my books which I had already bought on the previous Kindle and put them on my new Kindle so I can ignore them and not read them there, much like I did with my original Kindle. Then I sat down and read a hard copy book (Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running) that didn’t need the Kindle or the Ipad 2 at all.
Joking aside, the Amazon Kindle Fire is kind of nice. Negatives: It doesn’t have 3G, so you have to use it over wireless only. Kind of a down side. It also makes it difficult to do certain things, like add my Amazon $50 gift card. I had to actually sign onto Amazon with my regular computer to have that $50 gift card registered. There really should have been a simplistic way to do it on the Fire, but there wasn’t. Granted, there may have been some convoluted and difficult way to do it on the Fire, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having the convenient device in the first place. I certainly couldn’t figure it out, other than using their web browser, which isn’t really the greatest browser of all time, even though they called it Silk.
Positives: It can finally read comic books on the Kindle. I downloaded several issues of Y: The Last Man and was pretty satisfied with it. Down side to that? Yeah, the text is really small because of the 7 inch screen, so I had to really struggle to read the text on the screen. Not a very comfortable way to read a comic book (or graphic novel), but sometimes you get what you get.
Overall, I think it’s pretty cool if you don’t already own an Ipad 2. If you do, then the only real advantage is that there are some magazines and newspapers that refuse to release on anything BUT the Kindle Fire, which is a travesty of an economic plan. In the end, it’s going to kill those magazines because people aren’t going to buy the Amazon Kindle Fire just because Macworld refuses to let Amazon release it to the Ipad 2 Kindle app (which CAN read it just fine). Again, the biggest draw back to the whole Amazon Kindle model is that book publishers aren’t playing along. I refuse to buy a book published by a major publisher that plays games with the Kindle at their outrageous prices of $14.99 and up. Instead, I often choose not to buy the book at all, which is why I haven’t bought the new biography of Steve Jobs, even though I wanted to read it. The publisher is being a complete asshole to readers, so they can go screw themselves, and I’ll buy it when it gets released as remainder issue stock.
Instead, I’ve been buying books that are showing up at the below $9.99 price, unless I can find it cheaper as a paperback, like is happening with The Girl Who Played With Fire, which is still being priced as if it’s a brand new hard back book for the Kindle. As long as publishers refuse to do proper business with Kindle customers, then I say they can go screw themselves and their legacy models. Instead, I bought four other books that were decently priced, and I’ll avoid reading them (due to laziness) instead of the books I would have bought and avoided reading as well.
When the Kindle first came out, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Actually, that’s not completely true. I was apprehensive because I was a believer in having a hard-copy of the book with me while reading it, but eventually I started to see that this could be a good thing. I went out and bought an Amazon Kindle, and shortly after that I gave up my newspaper subscription and subscribed to an online version of the newspaper (delivered over the Kindle). Then I ended up with an Ipad 2, and with the Amazon Kindle app, I have been able to read the Washington Post every morning by paying for it with that subscription.
But for books, it hasn’t been as wonderful an experience. As a matter of fact, the e-reader experience has gone from “hopeful” to “dismal” and the fault of this situation rest solely on the backs of the publishing industry itself. You see, in the very beginning, Amazon was offering books at the rate of $9.99, which was probably the perfect point for paying for a brand new book on an e-reader. The publisher wasn’t losing out because the manufacturing costs were practically nil, and their books were getting to their readers almost instantaeously. But publishers didn’t like not having complete control over their market, so they forced Amazon to allow the publishers to set the price for books. Now, an entry price is anywhere from $14.99 to $25.00 on an e-reader. As expected, owners of e-readers have practically discontinued buying books as e-books.
So, you’d get the impression that publishers won. Not really. What actually has happened is that two markets have opened up, and this was an occurrence that a smart publisher probably should have seen coming, but like the music industry before, this is an industry populated by egos who are convinced that they are infallible, and that their product is so great that it cannot be replaced or done without. Well, they were wrong.
It seems that Amazon now has two lists of bestsellers, and they are becoming completely exclusive of each other. In the old days, bookselling lists usually listed the highest selling books (physical copies) but because the legacy publishers refused to budge, Amazon has discovered that its bestsellers are actually e-books that have never been published as hard copy books. As a matter of fact, in 2011, only 3 of the top sellers actually were originally published as “normal” books. The rest were dedicated e-books only. What this means is that more and more books are being sold without ever crossing the desk of publishers at all.
Let’s unpack that. What that really means is that more and more publishers are losing out on their own marketplace because they decided they were too elite to participate in it. Instead of working with Amazon and other such e-book companies, they acted with hostility and marginalized their own market. Readers have gone out and started buying books that other readers recommend, and quite often those recommendations have no affiliations with legacy publishers whatsoever.
What this means, or could mean, is that the future for publishers is even worse than if they had participated with e-readers in the first place. Like the music industry, major publishing companies are being seen as in the way and as leeches rather than as particpants and designers of the industry. An example is the simple mathematics of a publishing contract that attempts to give a writer about 2% of the sales for a book, whereas a deal with Amazon gives the writer either 35% or 70% of the sales (depending upon which publishing deal the writer chooses for charging for books). The selling point of using an established publisher was that you got their name behind your book and their marketing team, but with most publishing contracts these days, a writer is usually left to fend for himself/herself after publication because a publisher will spend most of its resources on already established names rather than someone who is up and coming. So, essentially, you end up with a crappy contract, and you end up with a publisher that doesn’t actually do anything for you other than potentially get books into bookstores (which, in my experience, doesn’t always happen). A further example is the publishing company that handled one of my earlier books. It keeps “offering” to make my book into an e-book, and then offers me that same crappy publishing rate royalty as if it was a hard copy book. What they don’t want to reveal to me is that our contract with each other indicates that they don’t own the e-publishing rights, meaning they’re trying to get me to sign with them for e-publishing when in fact I can actually do that myself and get a 70% royalty without ever asking for their help in the first place. The dishonesty factor is the reason I’m mostly pissed at them, because they’re doing everything possible to make it seem like they’re on “my” side, even though they KNOW they can’t publish the book as an e-book without me signing over MORE of my rights that they don’t physically have right now. Again, another publisher doing everything possible to piss off a client in hopes of gaining short term gains in profit.
So, how can publishers regain the upper hand? Well, first they have to realize they lost it in the first place. If they don’t, we’re going to start to see more and more publishers go under in the next few years because they won’t have the money to keep operating. Right now, all they have is their reputations, but they’re being beaten badly by unknown writers who are making names for themselves without actual publishing companies. Once publishers become irrelevant, they’ll disappear.
But publishing companies are probably not going to go down without kicking and screaming. Realizing that they’re not going to do the smart thing, like announce that they’ll adopt the $9.99 model that Amazon first put forth (which would have probably ushered a new age in publishing), they’ll probably respond with legal action, using whatever clout they have left to hire attorneys who will submit confusing lawsuits that will bog down the system for years, further eroding their success in the industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a direct legal assault on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble by the publishing companies, as those are the two entities making the largest impact against them. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see it fall into some kind of patent war over technology, where some publishing company gets smart and buys up a patent that allows them to claim ownership over a certain “idea” of e-readers, even though patents were originally designed to NOT be used for that purpose. We’re seeing a lot of this kind of action on the behalf of software companies and the social networking sites, so it would not surprise me to see some enterprising legal maneuver like this.
Because they’re not going to win by going after the hearts and minds of writers and readers. They’ve already demonstrated they don’t have our interets at heart. It’s all about profit and maintaining a dinosaur of a publishing model. Therefore, expect trench warfare and years of interesting battles that lead to an industry that collapses on itself.
I’m reading a lot of blogging that is exactly this subject: Will the Amazon Kindle Fire defeat the powerful Apple Ipad 2? I’m going to go out on a limb and just say no. It won’t. But instead of treating this as an either/or situation, I’m going to talk about why the question shouldn’t be asked in the first place.
You see, the Apple Ipad is in a class of its own, a class to which no tablet has come close yet. The Motorola Xoom was released as the potential “Ipad killer” but it did no such thing. As a matter of fact, shortly after releasing the Motorola Xoom, the Motorola Xoom became the Motorola Xoom killer. It was decently constructed, had no apps made for it and relied on an app market that is woefully inadequate. To this day, I have a Xoom but I don’t use it for anything other than checking email at night (while my Ipad charges). Even when you found an app that might work for it, quite often it didn’t, and instead you ended up having to uninstall something you paid for (and couldn’t get paid back for if it didn’t work).
For months now, the talk has been all about the new tablet that was going to be released by Amazon. And it looks like it’s about to be released. Here are some of the particulars:
It has only wifi, it’s in color, and it has some apps it can run but they come mainly from Amazon’s online app store. It only has 8 gigs of RAM, and they’re not planning to up that on this particular model (although they might on subsequent versions of the model to be released later). Like I said, it has wifi only, so there’s no 3G, like you get for the main Kindle. And it will cost about $199.
Thoughts? The price is great. It serves as a great replacement for a Kindle if you already have one. It will do a few more things than a Kindle can do, like check email, and maybe play some music and videos (not sure on that last one yet, although details seem to point in that direction). What I really like about it is that now I can read books on a Kindle that has color (whereas I was reading my Kindle books on a Kindle app on my Ipad, because it was the only way to see color on a Kindle-bought book).
It’s not a replacement for the Ipad because it’s not as powerful as an Ipad, doesn’t do as much as an Ipad, and well, it’s just not an Ipad. It’s another Kindle, which will do what normal Kindles do, but be more like a Barnes & Noble Nook Color but not as dysfunctional as that product.
I’ll probably buy one. Do I need one? No. Not really. But I have a Kindle, and I like my Kindle. This will be a Kindle capable of doing more things than my current day Kindle, and I sort of like that. But it won’t replace my Ipad, which is still the one device I carry with me everywhere.
There’s a term that e-published authors have been using to describe the old way of doing business in the writing world: Legacy Publishing, meaning that it’s the old way of doing publishing. As one of those who got his start in the legacy publishing industry, where my first two novels were published as physical entities, I’ve slowly been trying to build a writing career by embracing the non-legacy model, i.e., publishing my work as e-books myself. In the process of doing that, something strange has started to happen that I never really anticipated. Let me explain.
When I started publishing some of my completed novels as e-books, I wasn’t really expecting to make a huge profit, or even to sell a whole lot of books. I hoped to sell a few and at least get a few readers interested in my work. Honestly, that’s what every writer tends to want to do. I’m really not that different. Not knowing the first thing about connecting to an audience that I don’t have, I’ve tried all sorts of different marketing, including Facebook ads, google ads, viral marketing, standing on the corner and yelling out loud, and all sorts of other antics that are capable of bringing on all sorts of restraining orders. As a result, a few people have started to read my books, and let’s just say that while I haven’t been extremely successful, it’s proving to be an interesting experiment.
However, a new development has occurred, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I mentioned that some of my earlier work was published by Legacy Publishers. So far, they have done absolutely nothing to sell my work other than orginally publish it. I’m an unknown to them, so why would they be interested in pursuing any marketing on my behalf? So far, there’s been no reason. However, because I’ve been doing a LOT of marketing myself recently, some of my work has actually started to sell. Most of it as e-books, but some of that marketing has actually caused potential readers to go to bookstores and buy physical copies of my novels. Great. This is leading to something, however, and what it’s leading to is the realization by the original Legacy Publishers that I’m capable of actually selling books. It never dawned on me that they’d ever be paying attention to the fact that my marketing would start to pay off. And it has. Which has led them to start paying a bit more attention to me, and that attention has proved to be quite eye-opening.
You see, when I was originally published by them, the whole e-book universe was not even on the radar. So they never bothered to negotiate those rights. Those rights are mine still. Well, they’re now realizing that, and they’re also realizing that because I am self-publishing the rest of my work, it’s pretty obvious that my work they originally published will net them absolutely no profit whatsoever when it comes to the e-book market. So, rather than just contact me and be honest about it, their contact has been the kind you expect from a Shakespearean villain. The kind that goes: “Did you know that people are selling their books as e-books, and they’re making millions? We’re willing to publish your book as an e-book if you’re willing to sign that right over to us.” They also forget to mention (and sometimes they do) that they would like to set up the generous terms that are similar to the ones that happened under the old contract, where they get about 90 percent and I get 10. In other words, rather than have me publish it myself where I get 70 percent and Amazon gets 30, they’d rather they take 90 percent of the 70 percent, leaving me with (doing the math….for every $1.00 a book makes, I get $0.07). So, for a book that normally sells for (if they put it up at the maximum they’re trying to get) $12.99, I’d get 90 cents. Now, if I sold that book for $4.99 by publishing it myself (or even at $2.99), I’d make $3.49 (or $2.09 at the $2.99 rate). In other words, even if my book sold at a massive discount (my pricing), I’d still make 2 to 3 times more than what a publishing company would give me for it. And keeping in mind that the publishing company has NEVER marketed one of my books EVER, I get absolutely no benefit from them being the ones publishing it. None.
So, you might see why many writers are turning away from the normal legacy publishers. It’s not profitable, and unless you’re already a marketable name that they’re willing to throw money behind, you get absolutely nothing out of the deal. Instead, you sign over all of the profit to an entity that doesn’t do anything to deserve it.
It would be different if they actually went out of their way to do something to benefit my name. But they don’t. Or they never have. Now, if I was to find a publisher that was willing to do something to help me sell books, then we’d be talking a completely different story. But the way this model works, they don’t want me until I can already do the job that they won’t do themselves. Once I have the name recognition and the ability to sell my own work, my need for them goes away completely. So, somebody please tell me how quid pro quo thing works here if one side is continuously leeching off the other.
A few months back, I read a book called Homer’s Odyssey, about a little, blind kitten whose owner wrote about his adventure of life. It was a cute, nice book, and I was happy to have read it. Well, since then, Amazon (where I bought it) won’t stop sending me cat book recommendations. Let me put this simply so it’s understandable. I don’t really like cats. I don’t hate them, but at the same time I’m also allergic to certain breeds of them. So, it might be understood why I don’t really go out of my way to buy books about cats.
The first book was a fluke, mainly because the whole idea of the blind kitty’s struggle really appealed to me. That doesn’t mean that I have a thing for wanting to read about cats. Yet, Amazon doesn’t seem to know this and continues to send me nonstop recommendations that are about cute cat stories. I have yet to figure out how to stop these from happening, even having gone into their recommendation procedure (to change them), and that hasn’t stopped the fact that I stupidly bought a cat book from them once.
Which is why I’m thinking of buying porn from Amazon. I mean, if they’re going to send me recommendations based on my previous purchases, this sounds like a win-win situation to me.
This is one of those books that is extremely hard to read, especially if you’ve ever lived through any type of abuse yourself. When I first started reading it, I went into it completely oblivious to what the story was about, and then I had to back out and re-read the write up to realize what I was reading was, in fact, a true story. That, immediately, changed my perspective on reading this book. You see, if this had been fiction, I probably would have stopped reading after about the first tenth. It’s just that hard to read through the impacting scenes that take place in this young girl’s young life. But once I realized this was supposed to be a true story, I forced myself to keep going because if this really happened to someone, she at least deserved having someone try to understand it.
And I’m glad I did because the rest of the book actually makes the journey worth it. To be honest, the first 1/3 of the book is really hard to read through. But once you hit the 35 percent mark (the Kindle is really cool for telling you exactly that), the story changes, and you start to experience a different kind of a tale, one that’s no longer about abuse, but one that tells the struggle of a young girl becoming a woman who is attempting to find herself as a result of the previous abuse. What you discover is that she spends the rest of her life trying to find some sense of acceptance, whether it be acceptance from others, or just a solitary acceptance of other people and some semblance of belonging in a world that appears mean and cruel, and sometimes oblivious to the struggles of others.
I will admit there were a couple of points where I almost didn’t finish it, but then perservered, a lot like Abbie pushes forward through the travails that life continues to throw at her, and in the end it really was all worth it. Someone who reads up to that first part of the book and then stops would probably be impacted as well, almost needing to read the rest of this book to get the closure that seems desired and needed through this book.
Story: 4 stars
The narrative throughout was well worth reading, and the story crafted was one that leaves an impression. It’s very hard to do that with a non-fiction narrative, and there were times where I found myself comparing events with Dave Pelzer’s “A Child Called It” to the point of outrageousness. The beginning of this book is really hard to read, as it goes from child abuse to child rape to continuous child exploitation, almost to where it felt like the events were trying to outshock previous events. But then you’re left realizing this is a true story, so you can only feel compassion, and when the story is complete, feel anger that there are those out there who will go unpunished for the unspeakable acts they have carried out against innocent victims who have no way of ever striking back. The epilogue alone is poignant and casts its own shadows of despair on the depravity of humanity.
Voice: 3 1/2 stars
Although non-fiction, the author struggles to maintain a singular voice throughout the tale, as she sometimes juxtaposes the tale from fluidity to a sense that some prose the tale contains is still difficult to convey, making it disjointed at times. But overall, it carries forward very well and you get the sense of a very young girl’s memories being relived through the prism of someone decades after the events.
Mechanics: 3 stars
The book could have used an additional edit. There are numerous spelling errors, “theres” instead of “their’s”, and other mechanical errors throughout. But overall, it holds up well. There were also a number of port problems from the original manuscript to the Kindle version where the justifcation of the text was off, but as someone who has worked with porting to a Kindle myself, I completely understand that problem as there are times where it happens, and no matter what you do, it just can’t be fixed.
Cover: 4 stars
There are any number of different kinds of covers that could have been used to convey this story; the one chosen seems to do a pretty solid job. Having seen some really outrageous covers for some books on Kindle, it’s nice to see a simple, telling piece of artwork that doesn’t go out of its way to overdue an appeal to attention.
Summary: I would recommend others to read this book, keeping in mind that the first 1/3 is VERY difficult to get through.
Overall: 4 stars