Snip-tease

Are you wondering what today’s blog is about? I know this is not one of my better titles, but it was all I could come up with this morning. I am sitting here at work trying to write this. So I guess you will have to learn to live with the title.

Moving on to what I am yammering about. I am writing about something that most people love, but I am very ambivalent about—excerpts. I know that sometimes they are really necessary, but I just can’t work up the enthusiasm that others do for them.

Now I have helped Mia pick out hers, and I have read other peoples. But I would rather just wait till the book comes out. I hate to read just a snippet and then have to wait weeks to read the rest of the book. I am impatient on my best day so to get teased with just a few hundred words is just kind of cruel. I don’t normally even read the back of the books. I know you are wondering how I decide what books I want to read. It is really simple. I collect authors in a non-Silence of the Lamb kind of way. I usually start with the first book of the series and then just read till I am caught up.

Let me tell you that it can be time consuming. I met Melissa Schroeder in the first month or so of Kris’s chats and decided I liked her. So I was going to read her backlist. Wow, I had no idea that she was so prolific. It took me a month or so to snag all her books that I could find and order them. Yes, I still buy actual books. Anyway, I never read a single one of her synopsis or snippets. I was not disappointed—at all—by any of her books. There were several of the first guests in chat that I just bought a couple of their books and then decided whether or not I was going to get the entire backlist. With others, it was love at first read and now my bookcases are out of control.

I understand why people like them. Most people like to know what they are getting with the purchase of a book. Others read the synopsis/excerpts and decide whether they like the author’s writing style. I am not sure either of these ways are accurate. To me, a synopsis just tells you what the book is about and really doesn’t give you an accurate reading of an author’s voice. The excerpt on the hand just gives you one scene. It might be the one good scene in the whole book.

I know that these may be the exceptions to the rule, but I have had each of these things happen to me. I read the synopsis and was expecting a fantastic book and all I got was a mediocre book—at best. The author had a great idea and it started off good, but it just failed after the first couple of chapters. I am not sure if the author got lost with the plot or what happened, but when I pay for a book, I expect a good book. It doesn’t have to be fantastic. I just expect the book to be coherent and not to get me lost in a maze of people and places with no real way out.

Now, I have never had a bad experience with an excerpt, but I just feel that an author is stifled with a word count to give you a hint of what is in a book. How can you draw reader into a 120,000 word book in just 500 words? I am sure that cutting a scene to make it fit makes the author as crazy as a reader, but I am not sure some publishers understand that. I want a whole scene, not just one that gets you started and then stops abruptly. That is my biggest pet peeve with excerpts. I have to wait weeks or months to get the rest of the scene. It is just so irritating to me that I have stopped reading them all together.

So now the question is do you like to read excerpts/synopsis of a book? Do you ever feel cheated by just the snippets?

Sinfully Sarcastic,
Shmuttmeister