Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
Should this author have hired an editor? Here’s the first chapter page from a free novel by Carolyn Arnold, the first in a series of five.
NOTHING IN THE TWENTY WEEKS at Quantico prepared me for this.
A Crime Scene Investigator, who had identified himself as Earl Royster when we first arrived, came out of a room and addressed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Jack Harper. “All of the victims were buried—” He held up a finger, his eyes squeezed shut, and he sneezed. “Sorry ’bout that. My allergies don’t like it down here. They were all buried the same way.”
This was my first case with the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, and it took us to Salt Lick, Kentucky. The discovery was made this morning, and we were briefed and flown out from Quantico to the Louisville field office where we picked up a couple of SUVs. We drove from there and got here about four in the afternoon.
We were in a bunker illuminated by portable lights brought in by the local investigative team. A series of four tunnels spread out as a root system beneath a house the size of a mobile trailer and extended under an abandoned cornfield.
A doorway in the cellar of the house led down eleven feet to a main hub from which the tunnels fed off. The walls were packed dirt and an electrical cord ran along the ceiling with pigtail fixtures attached every few feet.
We were standing in the hub which was fifteen and a quarter feet wide and arched out to a depth of seven and half feet. The tunnels were only about three feet wide, and (snip)
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow.
I’m happy to see good, clean writing that doesn’t need a lot of line editing for grammar and punctuation, and the voice is good as well. This is a mystery, so a certain amount of setup is expected and the story questions can relate to the mystery instead of the protagonist at this point, but how well does this opening do at that?
For my money, not all that well. The first paragraph does a good job of establishing an aspect of the crime—there are multiple victims, and they are buried. But that paragraph wastes time and pace on the investigator’s allergies. He doesn’t appear in what immediately follows and his allergies have no impact on the story. A sign of overwriting, and that’s not a good predictor for a good read.
And then we get info dump and setup with how they travelled there and extreme detail about the tunnels—tell me there’s a tunnel and that men can walk in it and I can image it. No need to tell me that they are about three feet wide, etc. More overwriting, IMO. So no page turn from this reader.
Here’s a paragraph from page 2 that would have helped ramp up my interest if it had been on page 1 instead of all that description:
“It’s believed each victim had the same cuts inflicted,” Royster said. “Although most of the remains are skeletal so it’s not as easy to know for sure, but based on burial method this guy obviously had a ritual. The most recent victim is only a few years old and was preserved by the soil. The oldest remains are estimated to date back twenty-five to thirty years. Bingham moved in twenty-six years ago.”
You can turn the page for more here. Your thoughts?
Ray
© 2016 Ray Rhamey