Today's Thought

Just 'finished' a book that went to great lengths to mask that it was self published.

It had:

• A fake positive review excerpt on the outside back cover. …early reviewers are comparing to the works of Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews and Ella Summers! And yet no early reviewers are named.
• The cover art of this book is similar to the cover art of the above noted writers. Only hilarious difference, while the illustrator, in this particular book, is listed as Rebecca Frank, so is Shutterstock—an online shop for illustrations and photos. I only mention it but you don’t need to credit Shutterstock when you’ve already paid for one of their images.

• 

  A real copyright page
  

  And speaking of that copyright page, it lists Supernal Publishing as the, well, publisher. When I tippy-tapped that into Google, I came up with the UK based bookseller Book Depository (Outskirts Press does their self pub printing). You need to dig to find that out and I did.
  
• * There’s an elaborate, too elaborate, logo—two interlocking letters appearing on the outside back cover. At first I figured they were mocking up a publisher’s logo but it seems to have no relation to the self publisher’s brand name, the book or series’ title OR the two author’s first OR last names. It’s seems totally random. ‘the fuck? What’s that all about?
• * While this self pub was well edited (unlike certain others) paragraphs weren’t formatted traditionally. That is, there were no word breaks to give a hard right paragraph edge). Instead, like online copy or info on a flyer, each block of text, while left justified, was all over the place at the right. For me, this made following the word flow incredibly confusing. Did they go through all the effort to fake a traditionally published book and totally miss the details of paragraph formatting?
  

Yeah fine, but how was the story though, you ask? Meh. The theoretical main hero, was the stereotypical cranky, strong but not at all introspective type woman. The male lead was the exact opposite (and is, of course, madly in love with the chick lead). So really, it was like the writing duo took the the ‘60s-‘70s gender bullshit and flipped it. Laaaa-zy! I wanted to like the story but the writing was lifeless, trite and dull. I got halfway through and cut to the last chapter. Frankly, the hunt to find out the extent to which they went in their efforts to mask the self pub was more fun than the book.

No, I’m not telling you the title or author’s names. That’d be reader abuse and I’m not into that shit. Ya know?

Also too, why the big fake? If you're gonna do that, do it right or write. Heh, see what I did there

Instead of a crap book name, here have a nice pic from Ten’s morning walk. Yur welcome.