There are treasures to be found on BookBub. Today is a bit of a shout-out for a series I found there. The price then was 99 cents, but it’s back to $14.72 for the whole series. I don’t know if the first page will be strong enough for you to make you turn it, but I am finding these stories great fun. It’s an example of the super bargains that sometimes come up on BookBub. On with the post:
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 are the first 17 manuscript lines from the first chapter of The Black Stiletto The Complete Saga. A flogging follows my opinion of this work.
My mother was the masked vigilante known as the Black Stiletto.
I just found this out today, and I’ve been her son for forty-eight years. All my life I knew she had some secrets, but needless to say, this is a bit of a shock.
At first I thought it was joke. I mean, come on. My mother? A costumed crusader? Yeah, tell me another one. And the Black Stiletto, of all people? No one in a million years would believe it. I’m not sure I do, and here I am being presented with hard evidence.
The Black Stiletto. One of the most famous persons on the planet.
And she’s slowly dying. In a nursing home.
Oh. My. God.
I really don’t know how I’m supposed to react to this.
It was sure something I didn’t expect when I was called to Uncle Thomas’s office this fine May afternoon. He’s not really my uncle; just a friend of the family. I suspect he was my mom’s lover at some point when I was a kid, but they remained friendly and then later he acted as her estate attorney. You see, my mom— Judy Talbot— is seventy-two years old and she’s got Alzheimer’s. It’s a terrible disease and it hit her hard and fast. It didn’t creep up on her like it does with most victims. It was almost as if she was okay one day, and then a couple of years later she couldn’t remember my name. Within five years of the onset of her illness, I had to put her (snip)
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow. You can turn the page here.
I’ve already given my opinion of the series. I did think the first page raised enough strong story questions for me to turn the page. If there’s anything missing, it might be a signal to jeopardy for the narrator. But the notion that a son wouldn’t know his mom had a secret life that made her famous, well, I wanted to know what that life was. The main character, the Black Stiletto, is a young woman with a lively personality. The series opens in the late 50s and reads like good historical fiction, though this is all focused on crime fighting and her evolution from an abused teenager to a mother protecting her son. I’m not finished with the books yet, and am having trouble putting it down. Raymond Benson is a best-selling novelist, and he shows his chops in this story. Highly recommended.
What do you think?
Editorial notes:
© 2016 Ray Rhamey