Changes in Reading and Writing

I don’t know about everyone else, but self-publishing and self-published authors promoting their books have drastically changed reading for me.

It used to be that I had a set of authors whose writing I consistently enjoyed, thus I always bought or borrowed their books and was perfectly happy reading in my comfort zone.

Now, every time I turn around, some author is touting a *free* book. And because many of my faves write only one book per year and because I’m cheap, like every other human on the planet, I download a lot of those free books onto my Kindle. So now I have such a mish-mash, I can’t decide what to try to read next. I’ve never had so many books I've started, but will never finish.

This experience has been a journey of discovery for me.….. Of the plethora of books I’ve downloaded, I’ve discovered a couple of authors whose free book I enjoyed, so I bought the second in a series or another book by the same author. Nine times out of ten, that has been a mistake because a lot of the time, the story falls apart in Book #2 and I'm disappointed.

I can see that it's a challenge to carry on an interesting story involving only two 2 characters (hero & heroine) throughout a three or even five-book series. I’m in the process of writing a trilogy myself and I am glad I didn’t choose to make it only about 2 characters. I’m glad I have a story arc that begins in Book #1 and ends in Book #3 because I don’t think I could pull it off if I just had the hero and heroine to work with.

Another vehicle I’ve discovered self-pubs using is to publish books that amount to short stories and end them with cliff hangers so that I’ll have to go on and buy the next book if I want to read the whole story. All I can say is that makes me feel cheated. And after disrespecting my intelligence as a reader in that way, an author would have to be telling a heck of story to make me buy Book #2.

And speaking of shorts, I’m close to finishing up a novella. But I’m clearly labeling it as a "novella" so that nobody will be expecting a 100,000-word book if they buy it. In the beginning, it was going to be an erotic novella, but after reading at least two, maybe three dozen erotic books, I’m not sure it’s erotic. It’s hot, with explicit steamy sex, but it’s not kinky. So I’m still undecided if I’m going to try to market it as “erotica.” 

Let me know what you think of the cover:

It does have a cliff-hanger ending, but it’s also a stand-alone story. A reader shouldn’t be disappointed if he or she doesn't read the next book. ….. Oh, and I might change the title. ..... Can anyone say “make up your mind?”