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 the act of reading itself. I can be eclectic as I focus on things that are interesting to me. And I also talk about my projects. So here goes — my notes about reading and some free ebooks. Enjoy!
Readers are making a commitment to the book they choose. Stories require mental space and time to linger in working memory long enough to get incorporated into thoughts and to integrate into understanding, to squirrel into our dreams, to become part of us. People who hardly read for entertainment don’t really get absorbed into what they are reading. People who value reading make time in their lives for it. Not surprisingly, women looking for partners on online matchmaking services, often prioritize profiles that list reading among their hobbies. That said, I know that there are just so many hours in the day we can steal away from all our other responsibilities. Still, as a writer, I hope that my stories reward people who have chosen to spend their leisure time reading them.
Of those readers who have the desire and time to invest into a story, we also have to 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. 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 better or for worse.
Internet and AI allow readers to fine-tune their reading experience almost too much, it feels. On the other hand, people can find exactly the story they are looking for. In order to invest the time into reading a book, many like to know that the book is going to meet their expectations. I don’t read like that, but I sometimes find myself not enjoying a book that I started. It’s only recently that I’ve allowed myself to not finish a book that I don’t like. And I still feel guilty about it.
I watched an interview with Taylor Swift on Stephen Colbert’s show. She described the types of books she liked in specific detail:
“So, if you’ve got an old, rambling, shambles of a British mansion covered in moss or ivy, and there’s a mysterious relationship, and he may not be what he seems, and there’s a murder that happened in the past, but you only hear whispers of it. There’s the idea of a ghost, or an actual ghost. If you present me with a plotline where there’s a family compound on an island off the coast of Maine, there’s secrets in this family, right? This brother — what’s going on with him? Why don’t we know where he’s been for 10 years? Why did he just show up? Do you know what I mean? If there’s a marriage, and the marriage isn’t what it seems, and it seems like this dude is clearly — why are you with him? He’s horrible to you. Oh, plot twist! Unreliable narrator. She’s the psycho.”
One of our books, Twin Time is most likely to meet Taylor Swift’s preferences. There’s a rambling mansion, a family who is not what they seem, plenty of secrets, an uncle who has been missing for years, and even a bit of the supernatural. It is listed on Amazon under History of Russia eBooks, Historical Fantasy Fiction, and Time Travel Science Fiction. None of those categories even begin to encompass it, but I don’t get to choose those. Amazon assigns the genres.
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 that matches your particular desires in this indie collection!
