[ SECRET POST #5282 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5282 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 22 secrets from Secret Submission Post #755.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

da

This is me to a T. Idk, I don't have that much free time, I'm not wasting it on something that doesn't grab me right away. Books get like two chapters/50 pages, TV shows get two or three episodes, video games get two or three hours. If you can't make me care (and that isn't actually difficult for me!) in that time frame, I'm outta there.

[(Anonymous)]

Books almost never grab me in the first 50 pages regardless so I'm used to having to push through that, I guess.

But also - and this is just me personally - I feel like the first 50 pages aren't any more important than any other random 50 pages. Just because they happen to come first doesn't make them more important.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, the beginning is meant to be the foundation of what the entire book/series will potentially be about so OF COURSE it's important, arguably the most important.

[(Anonymous)]

If I was trying to sell the book I'd definitely consider it the most important. But I'm not.

[(Anonymous)]

(Cozy Werewolf Anon)

As an author I've had to address this quite a bit reading other indie books. Like, I give my fellow indies five chapters and I get maybe one in 20 I make to the end. Professionally, the first 50 pages is basically what you use to sell your book to an agent. In fact, at first you get 5. So, writing "Wisdom" is you get 4 pages to hook a reader. This means you gotta get your conflict/stakes and general feeling of the world presented ASAP.

For a debut/first book in a series, those 50 pages should be the MOST polished/perfect pages of writing. They're the marketing for the agent, the editor, and the publisher to know if you've got the stuff to have a complete book sell.

Maybe they had a good synopsis, not that most agents ask for one anymore. I dunno. Getting a pub deal is worse than winning the lottery it feels.

[(Anonymous)]

I totally understand why that matters for saleability and within the writing profession. That totally makes sense.

But I'm not in the writing profession. I'm a reader. And I just don't see why book industry conventional wisdom should have any bearing on my enjoyment of a book.

[(Anonymous)]

(Cozy Werewolf Anon)

Because books are written so readers will enjoy them? That's the purpose. So, if someone comes along and says "the first 50 pages are weak" when the first 50 pages are supposed to be selling the book and keeping the reader turning pages, there is a problem.

Like, the industry has spent a lot of time figuring out these weird little attention span rules to get the customer, you, the reader! And if you can get past the first 50 pages to enjoy the book all the way through, that's great. Usually, most readers don't. Many readers won't even get past the first 10 pages.

And yes, the middle and end are also important so they aren't soggy, and there's a fitting sense of completion to the plot as presented. But when it comes to drafting, most writers spend the most time on the beginning of the book to get the readers interest and keep them turning pages to get to the end.

[(Anonymous)]

I just don't see why any of that should have any bearing on my personal reading habits.

And I think this is a common thing in nerd fandoms - one way that nerds interact with their fandom is by understanding the production apparatus behind it, by becoming "smarks" (as they say in the wrestling business). And sometimes that leads them to adopt the outlook of the business, even when that doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter a damn to me what the book industry considers good writing, or considers saleable writing. If someone writes their best 50 pages in the exact middle of the book, that's totally fine for me. I know it's not what they're "supposed" to do to move copies, I just don't see why it's relevant to me what they're "supposed" to do. They haven't let me down by not writing their 50 best pages at the start, even if they let their agent down.

You see the same thing in other fandoms - to give you an example, the NBA playoffs are going on right now, and a bunch of teams in smaller cities eliminated more popular teams from larger cities. And there was a certain kind of NBA fan on social media whose reaction to this was: this is terrible for the NBA because the ratings are going to be really low. Well - who cares? The NBA isn't going to go out of business. If the league wants to worry about viewing figures, let them. But the point of being an NBA fan is to enjoy watching basketball games, not to worry about ratings figures and how the sausage is made.

I don't mean to come after you, since (for one thing) you're a professional yourself and (for another) this is just a pet peeve of mine I guess, nothing anyone's done wrong. But I just find it kind of baffling.

[(Anonymous)]

(Cozy Werewolf Anon)

Okay, you don't care about the "sausage" and how it applies to you. So, I apologize for answering the implied question in your original statement (because it read as baffled.) I don't want to bug anyone. And I wish you a good night.

[(Anonymous)]

I hope I didn't come off as rude, and I want to reiterate that you've done nothing wrong

[(Anonymous)]

Ahaha, you're just trying to mostly explain to yourself why you like books others don't/can't, since they aren't well written. It's OK to enjoy crap if you at least understand it's crap. You can enjoy what you want, but it doesn't make it good.

[tabaqui]

It doesn't, they're just explaining how the book industry works.

[(Anonymous)]

The thing is, most readers nowadays will not finish a whole book, if they like it or not. That's just not a thing anymore in those fast times. It's rare that someone will force themselves through a whole book if they don't like it and if you manage to do that, that's great! But a lot of people will not waste their time if the beginning doesn't grab them and just move on to the millions of other books they can read instead.

[meadowphoenix]

People consider the intro the most important because (most of the time) it's the most definitional. The conveyance of everything that comes after, the communication between author and audience, depends on how the author has set it up. You will have judged character, tone, conflict, setting, world, flow, etc and you will make your more deeper judgments as a whole as judged against that beginning. And that's regardless of your personal enjoyment. I'm not going to make any pronouncements on exactly how many pages an intro is, but I don't think you can pretend the intro is the same as any random part of the book.

I'm actually with you on most books not being compelling in the intro.