Smashwords Summer Sale

[elf]

Sale at Smashwords until July 31; hundreds of free ebooks, lots of discounted ebooks. (Use the tags at the top to filter for 100% off, 75% off, 50% off or 25% off.)

Hmm, I should download a cluster of the free short stories and post mini-reviews to sps on the theory that I'm willing to read up to 5000 words of just about anything, and it'd be nice to find good unknown authors.

Anyone up for the idea of a read-and-review fest at some point, where a bunch of us download a given collection of free ebooks and post thoughts about them?

Comments

[stasia]

I can read more than 5K words and I'd be happy to join you in a read-and-review fest.

Um. Would these reviews be for public or private (this DW comm only) consumption? (Do I have to pull punches or can I be honest?)

Stasia

[elf]

Reviews would theoretically be public, but no punches need be pulled. Reviews are for other readers, not to save the authors' egos. (Besides, I would be thrilled to kick off a Howett-style meltdown over reviews of free short stories.)

I trust that fanficcy people would be able to say, "I can see that someone really into [topic] would enjoy this story, but outside of that niche, meh." From what I've seen of literary reviews, I trust fannish ones better--they're more centered on "here's what works & what doesn't and what you might not care about" than attempting to claim some objective standard of literary quality.

The biggest problem I'd expect with short stories would be a tendency to slip into beta mode and start suggesting actual corrections for the stories that are *almost* good reads on their own. The number of self-publishing author who can't properly wield a comma is terrifying.

[stasia]

Kewl Beenz. I'll be there for the read'n'review. Will there be snacks?

I can certainly say Your Kink/Squick/comma usage is not mine, but yeah, it might be hard to not offer corrections. *sigh*

And why are commas so hard for so many people?

Stasia

[tameiki]

And why are commas so hard for so many people?

It's because commas are ebil. ^^

[stasia]

*blink* They're ... sort of like parentheses. Only dangly, like drop earrings.

Pretty little dangly pauses, all in a row.

,,,

*hee*

Stasia

[tameiki]

;/;/;/;/;/;/;/;/;/;/;/

I think I prefer semi-colons and slashes. They look like little people sitting in a bus :)

[stasia]

They DO look like little people on a bus! Cool. Maybe they need to pause for dangly earrings!

Stasia

[stasia]

I should be writing, so of course I'm poking around on SW and um, golly. How does one find the good stuff? Cripes. Some of the adverts I'm seeing on the front page are stunningly dire.

*boggles*

Stasia

[elf]

How does one find the good stuff?

Slow, painful trial and error. The search engine is basically useless and the browsing is worse. And I browse with the book covers turned off because (1) erotic bookcovers are bad for at-work viewing and (2) mygods, anyone with GIMP and access to flickr thinks they can make a bookcover.

Mark Coker, who runs SW, knows the search needs improvement.

It feels like poking through a rummage sale collection... "here's 50,000 books you've NEVER HEARD OF, some of which are excellent and some of which are random jerk's propaganda, which is still miles ahead of some jerk's masturbation fantasies that he wants you to pay $4 to share with him."

A lot of the authors at Backlist Ebooks sell at Smashwords; they're all good. (Well. So far as I've noticed. They've all been through the traditional publishing process, so their books are devoid of 90-word run-on sentences with no punctuation and random capitalization.)

[stasia]

See, sometimes I wonder if I'm too picky - or not picky enough. For example, there's a sample I'm trying. In it, a girl says that she's had to chop her hair off in order to hide:

... chopped off her long auburn locks that had taken most of her twenty-two years to grow to the small of her back.

This is in the second paragraph of the story. I'm immediately thrown OUT of the story, because this chick's hair must grow unhealthily slowly. I'll continue with the sample, but is it unreasonable of me to be un-impressed?

Stasia

(ETA: Also, I'm just never impressed with stories that call a woman's hair her "pride and joy". It's just hair, ffs. This is a Male Gaze thing, isn't it?)

[elf]

There are women obsessed with their own hair, who think it's one of their great achievements in life. I don't like those women IRL and I don't particularly want to read about them.

And I could kinda see hair taking 22 years to get to the small of one's back, because it grew to low-shoulder-blades length and the split ends kept it at that length, and it took years to find the right conditioner and so on that would let it get those last 5 inches. What I can't see is anyone *caring* about that. Especially not in the opening pages.

One of the amazing parts of the Self-Published Ebook Revolution is getting to discover exactly how many people are prone to atrocious mary-suism. And how many think their 1200-word plotbunnies are actual complete stories.

(And yes, the site is *awful* for finding anything. And keeping track of anything once it's found; your "library" is a single-page list of everything you've added or bought, in chronological order.)

I wind up reading a lot of the HTML samples; if the first few pages don't catch my attention, I don't bother downloading/buying.

[stasia]

And thanks for the link and the reassurance that my impression of the site isn't wrong. It's as chaotic as I thought. Phew.

Stasia

[yourlibrarian]

The R&R fest sounds like it could be fun. Given that the sale runs until the end of the month, I think I could take part.

[isis]

I'd be happy to review some of the free books from feedbooks.com. I have read some. I have opinions.

[ephemera]

not a review, but Marshall Thornton has a short free in the sale, which I enjoyed:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9603