*Now with full-story summary & cover* Okay brutally honest internet, rip my story apart!

I'm soon going to try to get a literary agent/publisher to take on my dystopian adventure novel: The Price of Perfection (previously self-published as Inevitable Ascension, but after 30+ "content patches" and rewrites since 2014, I'm rebranding everything and starting fresh). They tend to make up their mind within the first 2-3 pages and synopsis, so I've pasted them below and need you to take a look at it and tear it to shreds before they do!

Cover:



First pages of the book:


2-page summary of entire story (with spoilers)

Not bad. Obviously a small snipet, so hard to judge on specifics on whether the dialogue fits the characters.

I feel like Violina is probably tougher than the vulnerability paragraph 5 indicates. The "fine, you got me there", and appeal to his honor seemed outta place imo. Unless there is better context to this, or leverage he has over her in general we dont know about that could indicate an appeal to his honor was inherently fruitless (or even funny).

Also "pet" name vs nickname infers a previous romantic association. Which may be accurate in this context, but we dont know yet. Either way it felt off.

Otherwise I enjoyed it, and was a smooth quick read! Good luck!

Congratulations, regardless of the outcome keep pushing. J.K. Rowling was denied so many times, we almost didn’t have a Harry Potter series. Her documentary is a huge moral booster if you can find it.

I enjoyed the reading. ^.^

Wow.... If the brutally honest internet is this positive, I'm gonna take that as a good sign. :)

"

KZA wrote:

Prologue

Reminiscences of a Man Left to Burn

“It’s been 14 years since the Second Sun lit the world on fire and abandoned us to die. It’s been 14 years since God killed us.

Unnecessarily redundant. Better would be "It's been fourteen years since the Second Sun lit the world on fire. It's been fourteen years since God abandoned us to die."

"

KZA wrote:

I still recall the voice of the Second Sun and the exact words spoken that day:

Missed opportunity to describe the voice. Better would be "I can still hear the Second Sun's words like a thunder sundering my soul:"

"

KZA wrote:

‘How oft would I have sacrificed myself to save you, but you would not.

Would not... what?

"

KZA wrote:

I know you all in perfect clarity, and there are none good among you. You sanctified greed and vilified reason. When met with innocence, you did not so much as ask her name before tearing her from existence. You have eyes yet see nothing. I’ve shut my eyes, and I see everything.

Vilefied. I would also prefer "You have eyes, yet you see nothing."

"

KZA wrote:

On this day the Second Sun will set, and as you push one another’s heads under the poison to keep your own afloat, so will you nevertheless drown. I’ve paid the price of perfection—my inevitable ascension.’”

It's very odd that the Second Sun would refer to itself in both first and third person within a single sentence. Either we need to understand a difference between the title of Second Sun and the individual inhabiting it prior to this (if such a difference exists), or it needs to be cleaned up.


I don't think you're ready, and I won't edit the entire thing for free.

^LOL.



Also, try saying 'thunder sundering' out loud really fast ten times.

thunder thundering. sunder thundering. sunder sundering. Thunther thuntheringFUUAARACADSFSDGFK



__

KZA: I stopped reading your older version when the blatant Malachai/Dialla characters turned up. Which means I made it that far. Take that as you will.

And if you think this is the 'brutally honest internet', this board...when it comes to writing? Yeah, Scrotes was right about one thing (and pretty much nothing else): you aren't ready.

But who is? Write for you. And I don't mean that in a 'don't take criticism' way. I mean, you'll know if you're meant to write because it will give you a feeling absolutely nothing else does. And sometimes that feeling might even be good.

"

^LOL.

I was being deliberately wrong under the assumption you wouldn't turn up. I honestly wouldn't have replied at all if I thought you would; I'd have been confident you'd persuasively express my main point, and you have (then I would basically just QFT you). The whole point of my criticisms was to support our conclusion.

I don't expect you to believe me that it was deliberate.

"

Also, try saying 'thunder sundering' out loud really fast ten times.

Hastily constructed on my part, and touché. However, the point isn't to copypasta my words, but to take an opportunity to describe the voice. I'm aware I'm not a professional writer of fantasy fiction.

"

you aren't ready.

But who is? Write for you. And I don't mean that in a 'don't take criticism' way. I mean, you'll know if you're meant to write because it will give you a feeling absolutely nothing else does. And sometimes that feeling might even be good.

That is excellent advice for children (and which I've given to my own), but I don't presume KZA to be a child, nor the middle-upper-class adult equivalent. You know, that one Cage the Elephant song about needing to work for a living. Not everyone has the time or resources to go back to school, my friend, and particularly not as an end in itself.

I wrote far more prolifically when I was a drudge worker. Naturally: you value your free time more, and you figure out very quickly if writing is what you want to do with it. If writing is the thing that does it for you, compared to anything else you could be doing.

If you look at the authors who do it first and foremost for money, from the start rather than finding success with their passion, you will see an interesting commonality: virtually none of them really care about the words. They get a formula and they stick to it. They know their readers don't care about anything so finicky as word choice or sentence structure. You can throw a billion cliches and adverbs in there but if the hook is right, it doesn't matter. That's writing for money, for a career, to pay the bills. But as almost any writer will tell you, if it's bills that need paying, for God's sake, do something else. No one writes for a living because they couldn't do anything else. Some people write for a living because, as noted, they don't have to. But the majority of authors know that writing is a luxury. It's just a luxury the results of which sometimes people pay to experience.

And that's also why most successful writers *are* something else, or at least have been. Robin Cook is a doctor. Grisham was a lawyer. Clancy...wasn't a Marine or a submarine operator or a President of the United States, but he was a master of research. Also a natural storyteller, which matters a lot too. Many of King's ideas, at least the ones that weren't just cries for help regarding various addictions, come from workplace experiences.

And yet they'd all tell you that if you don't want to write, if it doesn't do it for you on a very personal, visceral level, if you just want the success...don't. King, especially, drives this home repeatedly. They're not children and they're not speaking to children. Age is not a factor when it comes to turning a passion into something more.

The good news it's easier than ever to do that, as KZA is well aware. I'm not saying the literary agent/publisher route is bad, but again the golden rule with it is to constantly ask yourself, 'is this something they can sell en masse?' Is there a place for it in the market? That's genre thinking. Or does it do something nothing else does? That's literary. The bulk sales of the former often pays for the rarity and rarefied nature of the latter.

Getting back to KZA's stuff, I don't think it's really hitting either approach. It's definitely not literary in construction and it's not really doing anything catchy within its genre.

Hence the 'if you love doing it, do it anyway' response. And you'll know, because everything you read will somehow come back to it. Some books will make you want to quit, they're just that good. Some will make you want to write, they're just that bad. Most will add to your own repertoire one way or another.

But the career novelist route? It's less about the craft of writing than a lot of people think. It's as much the editing (handled by others), the cover design (handled by others), the marketing (handled by others) -- the creation of a product, in other words. What publishers will look for is the story. They can fix the grammar. They can edit the spelling and punctuation. But only the author can produce the story.

One of my professors, herself a successful literary novelist, once said the difference between 'critique' and 'editing' comes down to one word: POWER. What a lot of lay-folk consider 'editing' is actually just critique/workshopping. There's no real power to that, just suggestion and advice. Editing in its actuality is control over others' words. The author can veto and disagree but oh they'd better be ready to fight for their work.

In another situation, a younger author I once worked with had the most painful experience with the book cover. Her entire story was about non-white characters, but the publisher's proposed cover was, you guessed it, a white version of her main character. You'd think that'd be a no-brainer but she had to fight very hard to get that changed. Because that's the game publishers play.

So if you want to retain control of your work and aren't aiming for the stars, self-publishing is a very logical route. Self-promoting can be hard, depending on what sort of writer you are, and it WILL cost money. Which brings us back to the luxury of it all. Even a modest first run with some gentle advertising and some decent reviews will set you back several grand. That overhead would be covered by a publisher BUT of course they're much more about making money than the writer, so they're already thinking how many thousands of copies they'll be able to sell. Some very good authors I know have boxes of their work either dumped into bargain bins or just sitting around. Successful runs, just not as successful as hoped. Conversely, self-publishing is often digital only (bless the kindle age!) and/or publish-on-demand. Costly, but efficient.

I suppose I should have mentioned that bit sooner. Publishers think in bulk; it's how they can keep individual unit prices reasonable. They know market saturation, and pretty much all of them have dealt with duds. Their entire selection process is calibrated to minimise this. Will the author deliver on time? Are they precious about their work? Again: do they have something to say that hasn't been said before, and can we sell that?

And then there's the famous catch-22 of going the publisher route: you need an agent to submit manuscripts most of the time, but to get an agent you need to prove you're a serious writer and have something they can sell. Just not getting that from KZA's work so far.

I would love to be proven wrong, and I hope she does her damnedest to do so. Until then, I hope she keeps writing, keeps getting it out there any way she can, and most importantly, loves doing it. Even when it seems futile. Which it does, when you stop to think about it. My advice: don't stop to think about it. But I'm just another carpenter who can't fix his own house there, and yet can get awfully caught up in all sorts of side projects and minutiae. Sure, the walls are slanted and some of the nails stick out but oh my god look the detailing on that table. Isn't it just magnificent?


___

A note on the self-publication route: it is still stigmatic. For sure. There's absolutely no practical difference between self-publishing and vanity publishing, in and of itself. This is hard to ignore when you're doing it. Sure, your first sales to strangers mean a lot, but you're always niggled by the fact that what you've done has long been seen as the easy way out. The no-talent route. Your work can sit right next to a 30 page e-book about absolutely nothing that took absolutely no effort. In fact, it does.

And yet in almost every other form of creation, self-funding, self-sustaining, is perfectly legitimate. Hell, sometimes it even has serious cred. Obvious example: indie music. This is 100% self-produced, and it's cool. It's raw. It's untainted by the machine of mass production, of overproduction, of market calibration. It's...art, man. Indie movies that hunt around for distributors are like self-published works later picked up because they somehow hit that base (The Martian, for example). Self-funded games are lauded if they're also good, because again they're at that point untouched by the greed and corporatisation of 'selling out'. And self-funded visual artist is probably tautology these days; we don't exactly have wealthy patrons vying to sponsor the next penniless virtuoso.

But for all that argumentation, self-publishing will almost certainly never be cool. It will remain the domain of low-effort, 'well my friends liked it' output. Which is a shame because I've seen some self-pubbers (we just can't call them SPAs, can we?) put in more effort and care with their first drafts than many authors who are obliged to put out X works a year or two. Still, without some sort of universal standardisation, it's hard to justify a comparison between an indie song (3-6 minutes of your time, and you usually know within seconds how you feel about it) and an indie 'book' (which can take hours to reveal its worth, hence the tendency for self-pubbers to really focus on that hook). This is the real reason the publishing industry still exists for longer form works: if a manuscript somehow made it from submission to print, then it's been through a LOT of vetting. A lot of work. A lot of treatment. A lot of people have seen that work and judged it before you because it was their job to do so. Non-writers might not know the statistic that roughly 1 in 10,000 submissions gets that far, but they know it makes sense. Surely any manuscript that gets that far has to be extraordinary, right? Well, maybe. Or maybe it just has to be something the publisher thinks it can flog. When you encounter a published book you don't like, you can call it 'bad' but the truth is the opposite is more likely: you're just a bad fit for the book. If it's sitting on those shelves, someone has decided there's a market for it. You're just not it.

The problem arises when that perceived market is actively hungry for objectively bad writing. Derivative pulp. 'If you like THAT then you'll love this!'

I am currently reading a book, a sort-of gag from the sig other, where one of the biggest blurbs is 'Fantasy fans will love this!' and I'm like, what does that even say about anyone? It just makes the reviewer look like they had nothing more substantial to say; it makes fantasy fans look like they'll eat any old shit up; and it makes the author look generic and box-ticky. What an awful thing to put as a selling-point.

And yet the publisher knew it would be a selling-point, so on it went. And it probably sold a bunch of copies, that one line.

Self-publishing demolishes this regime of perceived market, of punchy but vapid quotes and recommendations...but in doing so it implicitly steps up and makes clear: if you're going to do it that way, you better damn well be sure you're up to the task. How can you and your very limited resources compete with that well-oiled contraption designed to produce trustworthy texts (and yet so often lets us down, individually)? You can't just go stand on a corner and read it aloud the way an aspiring muso can busk.

...Essentially, your self-made work has to pull off one more major trick than any professionally published work: it has to look as professionally-published as possible.

See? Not only will the self-pubber never be cool, they are forever doomed to be pretenders, poseurs. Buy those ISBNs. Stick them into the back cover's layout, so that it looks like a bored assistant can just scan it with their gun and voila, it's yours. Put some catchy quotes from favourable reviews you absolutely paid for (in lieu of the publisher doing the same) above it, or on the inside first page. Trite crap for the most part, as if your hard work can be summed up in a sentence or two. Pay for a cover that looks like it'd sit on a bookshelf in the shop and not seem amateur or self-made.

You might be Garage, Inc** but the world has to think you're Some Kind of Monster.

"I have been living in a state of enormous guilt and anxiety for the past year. Not because I felt like I was doing something wrong, but because I was always afraid of being found out." - Lee Israel