Aug 15 2007
For your viewing enjoyment
I’ve been a busy girl, savoring the awesomeness that is Meljean Brook’s Demon Angel (plug coming soon to a blog near you) and doing what I hope is the final merciless self-edit on The Manuscript, at this point entitled Wish List. (Don’t judge—I suck at titles. This one is better than the last one, trust me.) In honor of the occasion, I’ve fulfilled my promise to put an actual excerpt in the “click fake book cover for excerpt” spots on the web site, and to get it there in fantabulous .pdf format. (KNOWN ISSUES: Font issue resolved. Bloody miserable sneaky bastard typo resolved. Adobe crash issue fixed with installation of Adobe Reader 8. If you still can’t view it, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail.)
(This is why we put this stuff up now. Can you imagine it’s countdown-to-publication time and everything is buggy? It may not bother other authors, judging by some of the sites I’ve seen, but I can’t do that to you. I’m not a perfectionist, but when it’s something I can fix, dammit, I’m going to fix it.)
When there’s an actual book to pimp, the excerpt will be considerably larger. No point giving you a lot now, only to have it be unrecognizable when the editor gets through with it, is there?
Which raises the question—How big should an excerpt be? Talk to me about pages, since chapters vary too widely in length to make a good yardstick (mine, for example, are huge). How big a slice do you need to convince you to buy the whole pie? Is it something you can tell on the first page because of the style or a great opening line? Or is it getting far enough involved in the action that you must find out what happens next that makes you run out and buy the rest? Do you want to start at the beginning to mimic the reading experience, or do you want an excerpt from another part of the story?
I want to be reader-friendly. So tell me, reader, how friendly you want me to be. Sorry, I’m not the kind of girl who goes all the way (as in entire book for free), although I did think it would be pretty cool to throw the whole thing out there for, say, a month before the subsequent book’s pub date as bait to attract readers to the new release. (Subsequent book? My, aren’t I ambitious…) I don’t even know if that would be allowed, but I don’t see how it could hurt. After a year or so, sales are going to have slowed on Book A. Might as well get a little more mileage out of it to promote Book B, right?
But that’s a back-burner issue. For now, let’s focus on bringing you the excerpt of your dreams. Tell me what you want, baby.
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