For my new subscribers: I write these letters about once a month and try to pair them with an ebook giveaway. I tend to write about language, psychology, sociology, the craft of writing, and about the act of reading itself. I try not to be boring, but I focus on things that are interesting to me. I read widely and on many topics and use the insights in my newsletters. And I also talk about my projects. So here it goes — my little notes about reading and some free ebooks. Enjoy!
There are many different types of readers and thus the marketplace for books is very fragmented. Stories require mental space and need to hang out in working memory long enough to get incorporated into thoughts and intergraded into understanding, to squirrel into our dreams. Reading takes time. Not surprisingly, women, who are looking for men on online matchmaking services, look for men who list one of their hobbies as ”reading”! That said, I know just how difficult it is to “make time and space” for any personal activity when you have a job and kids and life. All the good intentions in the world don’t change the fact that there are just so many hours in the day we can be awake and able to function. Still as a writer, I hope that my stories find people who have the luxury and desire to read.
Of those readers, we also have divide them by reading material preference. I’ll focus on fiction lovers here. There are those who consume romance and those who focus exclusively on historical fiction. Others recognize their genre by the high fantasy cover art. And there are those who are devoted to detective thrillers or horror or science fiction. Some niche genre preferences get so specific that any deviation from the central theme becomes a betrayal from the author advertising to those readers: Cli-Fi (fiction that involves climate and weather disasters), Slipstream (a hybrid scifi/fantasy/ literary fiction that creates cognitive dissonance in readers), Hopepunk (stories where kindness overcomes all evil), etc. One of our books, Twin Time, included in this giveaway is listed on Amazon under History of Russia eBooks, Historical Fantasy Fiction, and Time Travel Science Fiction. Internet and AI allows readers to fine-tune their reading experience almost too much, it feels. On the other hand, it’s that people can find exactly the story they are looking for. I do think that indie authors carry more surprises in their stories — since we get to control our stories, we get to choose and pick what to include without publisher interference (for good or bad).
Regardless of genre, a story has to grip the reader by their very souls. It needs to make people feel and empathize with the characters. Writers have to make their readers need to know what happens next. And that’s really is the whole trick. If the story takes too long to develop, if the people can’t remember names of characters and places because they are too unfamiliar, or the prose is too cumbersome, then people get pulled out of the fictional world and don’t enjoy the story. I finally arrived at an age when I feel like I can put down the book I don’t enjoy after the first chapter or so. I used to be one of those readers that had to finish every book she started. Not anymore. I don’t have that luxury. Time is too short.
So however you pick your next story — by the cover art, by the cool name, by the author, by the genre — I hope you’ll find something good to read in this indie collection!
https://books.bookfunnel.com/free-sci-fi-fantasy-paranormal-oct-2026/95tz71ekgp