Monday, January 28, 2008

Ho Lee Cow

Amazon.com is sponsoring a Breakthrough Novel Award thing in which they gather a bunch of unpublished novels through some kind of submission process and sift through them to see who should be given a publishing contract. Samples of the works are up for public comment. I've read some.

This is bad.

This is very bad.

This is wretched beyond belief.

If you enjoy pain you might want to wander over there and peruse your favorite genre. I guarantee you wont be better off because of it. It's writing like this that forces me to take a serious look at my own stuff. I don't think I'm bad. They don't think they're bad.

Someone is obviously wrong and I hope it's not me.

4 comments:

Emily Suess said...

I know that fear too. I'm reading a book for review right now, and wondering how I'll ever finish it. The writing is that bad. I either think like you do, and question my own writing--or I say to myself, getting a book deal some day (preferably when I've written a book!) shouldn't be THAT hard. :)

Jeff Draper said...

I know! It's absolutely staggering how many horrible books are out there. I'm a sci-fi/fantasy guy and I am continually floored by a) how much material is out there, and b) how much of it is just awful.

I've read some more of these amazon submissions and I can't get past the first page on some of them. "People!," he shouts in frustration. "Can you at least learn how to spell! Bad comma usage I can forgive but spelling is sorta required."

Art said...

OOF!

Stuff like that is just plain exhausting.

Jeff Draper said...

Yeah, I read a couple more and with each one I just shook my head and muttered, "It must be a cry for help."