Thursday, January 14, 2016

The Advantages Of A Really Bad Book.

(another blog post composed using speech recognition)
No, I am not going to tell you the name of this book.
Don't recall the exact set of circumstances which led me to download this book.  Obviously, I was in-between reading books I wanted to review, but I don't remember which books those were.  And another thing I don't know, is how this particular book came to my attention.  I feel relatively certain that it must have been a recommendation by Amazon.  However, some responsibility is mine; I don't know if I was attracted by the cover or by the title, but something grabbed my attention.
After I downloaded it, a particular line in the blurb caught my eye: the 1,000,000 seller.  If that's true, that this book has sold a million copies, it means one thing: over a million people have really, really, bad taste in books.  Because this book is a stinker.
It's not a romance novel.  I could understand it being a romance book, and selling over a million copies, and being something that I did not like.  I don't read romance books.  But this is not a romance book.  It's action, and adventure, and a tiny little bit of science fiction (sort of), and I would have expected that this would be a book I liked.
I say: Nay!  Nay!
Here is the main thing that threw me off: this is a book about advanced, global conspiracy, that kills everybody in the world, by using ancient alien technology.  Why anyone would want to do that, even if it were possible, I'm just not certain.  This is somehow going to release a mechanism that would jumpstart human evolution to the next stage.  Yeah.  Right.
There is SOME good news: I didn't find a single spelling error.
(when the best thing I can say about a book, is that I didn't find a single spelling error, well; draw your own conclusion.)
But this blog post is entitled "The Advantages Of A Really Bad Book." And truly, there is one advantage did this really bad below!  Here it is tell I don't want to read it.  Male, why would that be an advantage?  It's a cause that we'll see it's in my candle library, mostly on real.  And lately, I have found myself in a number of situations in which reading an interesting book just wouldn't be a good idea, for one reason or another.  But, an uninteresting book?  That's an appropriate read in all sorts of situations.  For example: it's late at night, and I want to go to sleep.  That is not the time for an interesting book.  If you read this blog, you know what I'm talking about, because you are a reader too.If you start an interesting book at night, you can just plan on being wide awake at 3:00 AM.  So, that's when you need to be in possession of a bad book.
Another time: waiting to see the doctor.  You aren't going to be able to do much concentrating anyway, so why would you waste the exposure to a good book?  All you really need is something to take your mind off the fact that you're waiting to see the doctor, unless they're running the Home Shopping Network on the waiting room television.  Then you need to be distracted from that as well.
In the end, though, I just don't understand how the legitimate need for a bad book would drive sales of a million copies.  So, there must be something else going on that I just don't understand.  Maybe there are lots and lots of people who like to read conspiracy books.  Maybe it's just the first 49% of the book that's awful, and the last 51% is going to be great.  Or maybe (and I think this is the most likely alternative) my taste in reading material is significantly different from a huge mass of book-purchasing people.
That last bit is rather scary.  My blog is mostly read by authors and  readers.  What if?  What if my appreciation is a sales kiss of death?  Maybe we need to try an experiment.  Keep sending the beta copies of your books and get my opinion; if I tell you  "this book is terrible," then immediately publish it.  If you start getting sales of 10,000 copies a day, maybe we are on to something.
It would be rather embarrassing for me, though.  That would make me some sort of bizarre literary Typhoid Mary, rotated in six dimensions.
It would give me some more things to read what I was trying to go to sleep at night, though.

No comments:

Post a Comment