Publishers of print books rarely give new authors a chance to build a following. There are some real quality authors doing e-books at novel length, but the short attention span of readers seems to push publishers and authors into a short format. As the Bard would say, “There’s the rub.” Look Alive Twenty-Five – which gets a D- (0.8*) from me – wasn’t even in the review listing. The stories can be on life-support and her ardent fans will buy and rave about them. Evanovich has made her millions, it doesn’t matter. Her fans are rabid, but sales are declining with quality. Her fans will consistently overlook all these flaws and rave about Steph, Morelli, Ranger, and Lula – never looking at the downward spiral of the quality of the plots and increasingly absurd ‘set pieces’ designed as humorous skits within the book, but unrelated to the story. Trite, reusing sentences and partial paragraphs in every damn book, predictable plots, everything a series that should have retired gracefully 15 books ago becomes, added the final insult – not one thing was truly funny. Her most recent bit of fluff, Look Alive Twenty-Five was so bad I ended up skimming it. Reading more has also shown the weaknesses of many highly acclaimed and/or bestselling authors. Shallow, empty, unable to engage me completely the whole thing is little better than a piece of cotton candy in print. The problem I’m finding with e-books, aside the egregious formatting issues, crap editing, awful proofreading, and total lack of spellcheck (Or authors really DON’T know the difference between imminent and eminent or the fact a point is moot, not mute!) is that authors tend to write long novellas or very short books, under 200 pages, that leave characters undeveloped, no time for world building, secondary characters that have great promise become a flash-in-and-out shallow non-entity, and I’m left feeling like that should have been really good, but it ended up little more than a dog’s dinner of a slightly fleshed out outline. Since my cataract surgery, I’ve been doing a lot more e-book reading and just reading in general.
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