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Kindle Unlimited adventures
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rachelmanija I'd start writing more about books, soooo ...
I signed up for a Kindle Unlimited subscription last year. They give you 3 months free, which is diabolically clever; I doubt if a week would have done it, but after months of being able to click on the little "borrow for free!" icon and have a shiny new book on my Kindle, I think I'm going to keep the paid version for at least a couple of months. I also have to give them credit for being surprisingly non-evil with the free subscription. There is a very large button right on the KU homepage showing you when your free subscription converts to a paid one and giving you the option to unsubscribe.
I've found that, as well as inundating me with new reading material, the most useful thing about it is that it has been very helpful for studying a new genre by reading widely in it. Back in 2015, I did this with paranormal shifter romance when I first started writing Zoe, but I had to do it the hard way by downloading a bunch of free books as well as cherry-picking the 99-cent bestsellers. The KU subscription is great for this because I can just click on almost any book that looks interesting or useful, and have it show up for free on my Kindle. In fact, this is why I looked into the subscription originally, because I wanted to get an overview of mystery and thriller in the same way as I originally did PNR (I'd like to try out writing that for a moneymaking venture in a similar way to how I've been doing romance). So I've been enjoying that, as well as exploring a few interesting-looking romance subgenres.
To be fair, I've downloaded and started WAY more books than I've actually finished. Honestly, though, just being able to read the first few chapters of a ton of different books in a particular category is its own kind of useful. (I have, in fact, done this both at the library and in my own book collection in the past, especially while studying opening scenes, so this is a convenient way to achieve the same result.)
Reading a ton of selfpub, particularly in some of the more niche genres, is also an exciting adventure in "what you see is not necessarily what you get." I'm starting to get used to books with fairly genre-standard covers that turn out to be something totally different. Here's an example: Ghosts of Gotham, which has a nice cover and a hook-y opening with a reporter hero who makes a living out of debunking supernatural scams. I expected that there probably would be supernatural shenanigans (ghosts maybe?), but I was still completely unprepared for ANCIENT BABYLONIAN ZOMBIE DEATH CULT, demons, Near Eastern gods, an entire office tower full of people in New York City dropping dead and no one seeming to care, and a love interest who appears to be some sort of immortal goddess/sorceress who bleeds out her eyes when she does magic. This book is bonkers but not really in a good way, or at least not in a to-my-tastes kind of way, and I noped out about halfway through.
And then there's the general issue of "suddenly Jesus," wherein a book that does not appear to be set up that way from the first few chapters turns out to be inspirational fiction, which is frequently (for some reason) either not even hinted at in the blurbs, or couched in dog whistle euphemisms like finding meaning in life, which I am completely into as a trope, but not, generally, like this. (I mean, I'm fine with the characters in a book I'm reading being personally invested in Jesus as an aspect of their character, but there's a big difference between that and "Jesus is actively manipulating the ending of this book," I'm just saying.)
I also made the mistake of reading Dean Koontz again. He has a bestselling series of Kindle shorts (the Nameless series) and I also read them, or at least skimmed them. I generally find his endings disappointing (to the point that, for awhile, my husband and I used to jokingly use Koontz as a verb, as in, to Koontz an ending is to really fail to stick the landing), but even going in with low expectations I was still unprepared for how utterly and infuriatingly the ending of that series would fail to achieve ANY part of what I want from an ending, not in a "suddenly Jesus" way but rather in a "Fuck you, Koontz, that's the WORST payoff for all the hints about the core mystery of these books that you could possibly have come up with short of just not giving us any answers at all" kind of way.
rachelmanija I'd start writing more about books, soooo ...I signed up for a Kindle Unlimited subscription last year. They give you 3 months free, which is diabolically clever; I doubt if a week would have done it, but after months of being able to click on the little "borrow for free!" icon and have a shiny new book on my Kindle, I think I'm going to keep the paid version for at least a couple of months. I also have to give them credit for being surprisingly non-evil with the free subscription. There is a very large button right on the KU homepage showing you when your free subscription converts to a paid one and giving you the option to unsubscribe.
I've found that, as well as inundating me with new reading material, the most useful thing about it is that it has been very helpful for studying a new genre by reading widely in it. Back in 2015, I did this with paranormal shifter romance when I first started writing Zoe, but I had to do it the hard way by downloading a bunch of free books as well as cherry-picking the 99-cent bestsellers. The KU subscription is great for this because I can just click on almost any book that looks interesting or useful, and have it show up for free on my Kindle. In fact, this is why I looked into the subscription originally, because I wanted to get an overview of mystery and thriller in the same way as I originally did PNR (I'd like to try out writing that for a moneymaking venture in a similar way to how I've been doing romance). So I've been enjoying that, as well as exploring a few interesting-looking romance subgenres.
To be fair, I've downloaded and started WAY more books than I've actually finished. Honestly, though, just being able to read the first few chapters of a ton of different books in a particular category is its own kind of useful. (I have, in fact, done this both at the library and in my own book collection in the past, especially while studying opening scenes, so this is a convenient way to achieve the same result.)
Reading a ton of selfpub, particularly in some of the more niche genres, is also an exciting adventure in "what you see is not necessarily what you get." I'm starting to get used to books with fairly genre-standard covers that turn out to be something totally different. Here's an example: Ghosts of Gotham, which has a nice cover and a hook-y opening with a reporter hero who makes a living out of debunking supernatural scams. I expected that there probably would be supernatural shenanigans (ghosts maybe?), but I was still completely unprepared for ANCIENT BABYLONIAN ZOMBIE DEATH CULT, demons, Near Eastern gods, an entire office tower full of people in New York City dropping dead and no one seeming to care, and a love interest who appears to be some sort of immortal goddess/sorceress who bleeds out her eyes when she does magic. This book is bonkers but not really in a good way, or at least not in a to-my-tastes kind of way, and I noped out about halfway through.
And then there's the general issue of "suddenly Jesus," wherein a book that does not appear to be set up that way from the first few chapters turns out to be inspirational fiction, which is frequently (for some reason) either not even hinted at in the blurbs, or couched in dog whistle euphemisms like finding meaning in life, which I am completely into as a trope, but not, generally, like this. (I mean, I'm fine with the characters in a book I'm reading being personally invested in Jesus as an aspect of their character, but there's a big difference between that and "Jesus is actively manipulating the ending of this book," I'm just saying.)
I also made the mistake of reading Dean Koontz again. He has a bestselling series of Kindle shorts (the Nameless series) and I also read them, or at least skimmed them. I generally find his endings disappointing (to the point that, for awhile, my husband and I used to jokingly use Koontz as a verb, as in, to Koontz an ending is to really fail to stick the landing), but even going in with low expectations I was still unprepared for how utterly and infuriatingly the ending of that series would fail to achieve ANY part of what I want from an ending, not in a "suddenly Jesus" way but rather in a "Fuck you, Koontz, that's the WORST payoff for all the hints about the core mystery of these books that you could possibly have come up with short of just not giving us any answers at all" kind of way.
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Every so often I get a student who wants to be a writer who "doesn't read because they want to be original." *snort* That's not how any of this works.
I am not surprised that there is a surprise!Jesus genre. Having been raised evangelical, I can bet you that the surprise part is deliberate, that the writer is hoping to hook people in with the beginning and then convert them with the appearance of Jesus.
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My parents have always been evangelical, but they didn't fall into the deep end until after I left for college. Most of the reading in my house during my childhood was sci-fi, fantasy, and old school romance novels. *Now* their house is full of that crap, and that's mostly what my mom reads, but I escaped it.
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aaaaaaaaaa
Yeah, I saw this in art school too. You could definitely tell the people who drew from a wide range of influence vs. the ones who either wanted to remain ~~untainted~~ or had learned everything they knew about drawing from a particular anime.
I agree with you about the probably-intentional aspect. I mean, that and sometimes I get the feeling it's just how the writer thinks the world works, which to be fair, everyone writes their own truth into their fiction, so if you LITERALLY see the hand of Jesus everywhere, I guess that's going to come across in your books.
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Still, if I ever become a writer of original fic, this looks like a good way to research writing in whatever area I want to write in, so I can certainly see its appeal.
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My to-read stack hasn't really gone down since I've been doing this, though. XD
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And yeah, I find that reading a few chapters can often give you a really good idea about the book in a way that's useful for writing in that genre.
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I do find his thing for golden retrievers to be pretty endearing.
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Oh ghod, I remember grading essays like that as a teacher. I think I got at least a couple of variants on the "little old man on the plane/in the hospital waiting room/at the scene of the accident" story every single semester.
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Using KU as a cheaper way to tear through a ton of material for genre-learning purposes is a brilliant idea, and I'm going to need to keep it in mind. I'm seldom a sufficiently prolific reader to ever get my money's worth from services like that, but if I had a specific project in mind--much better.
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I think my reaction hasn't really been recoiling in horror so much as just "oh, come ON." Narratively speaking, it tends to read like the author rearranging the book's underlying setup in order to make things work out for the characters as soon as they accept Jesus or whatever. It's LITERAL deus ex machina, heh.
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Re Ghosts of Gotham. LOL. I've read a couple of series by Schaefer that I actually kinda liked, but they went from random sorcerer to princes of hell in like no time, so I knew to be prepared :)
OTOH, I've ha on sudden mpreg coming out of nowhere which very much disturbed me and a random Jesus would really annoy me!!!
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I want to know the details!
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So the premise of these books is that the hero has total amnesia and doesn't even know his own name (he uses a series of disposable aliases). He's given assignments by a shadowy, vaguely sinister organization that sets him up with ID and weapons and sends him to rescue and/or murder people. Situations like: a sheriff running a small Texas town as his own private fiefdom has been raping and killing little girls, so he's sent in to kill the guy and rescue his latest victim; that kind of thing. He's also got precognition, so he gets flashforwards about his current mission as well as intermittent traumatic flashbacks to the past he doesn't quite remember. The implication is that this shadowy organization may have either created him or performed scientific experiments that made him like this.
At the end, he is having more frequent and stronger flashbacks, and manages to catch up with the shadowy organization people, and learns ...
... that they are his employees. He is just an ordinary average billionaire whose family was senselessly killed by terrorists, about which the government could do nothing, so he singlehandedly invented tech to make him a precognitive amnesiac, ordered his employees to wipe his memory and then find people who are operating above the law and send him as a one-man amnesiac army to take care of them, guided by cryptic instructions from a mysterious handler he never meets. The last thing he does in the book is have them wipe his memory again so he doesn't remember any of this.
Not only does none of this make any actual sense, but if you have a gazillion dollars and want to make the world better, or even let's say you've gone slightly off the deep end and want to set up some kind of extra-judicial vigilante organization, THIS IS LITERALLY THE STUPIDEST POSSIBLE WAY YOU COULD DO IT.
I mean, at the very least I had assumed they had more than one amnesiac assassin they were working with!
FUCK YOU, KOONTZ.
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Just... WHAT.
Why does he need amnesia? If he he wants to be a precognitive vigilante, why not just be a precognitive vigilante?
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Further issues:
- Is a tech billionaire really the most competent person you can find to do your actual action-heroing?
- WHY ONLY ONE?!
- Not telling him who he really is - okay, I guess you can buy into that premise if it's to stop him from turning into a basket case, but why all the OTHER secrecy, including prearranged hotels with information/gun drops and other setup designed to basically funnel him into each new case with as little contact with his handlers and as little contextual information about the case as possible, other than 'you're here to kill this person for reasons'? Especially given that at the end, they seem to think of him as a personal friend as well as their boss.
- HE BUILT A MACHINE TO MAKE HIM A PRECOG AND GIVE HIM AMNESIA, AND NO ONE SEEMS TO THINK THIS IS WEIRD.
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That does not explain why everyone else goes along with it. I guess if you're crazy Tony Stark you could set up some failsafe mechanisms to make sure they do even when you're amnesiac.
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His fans don't seem to mind, judging by all the 5-star reviews. Although I did enjoy this succinct one-star review that also sums up my feelings.
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Sexy!
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Of course, sometimes people really do just think in weird ways, which can actually be entertaining if they harness it into something that actually qualifies as a unique vision.
I had several Koontz novels back in the day that I read and enjoyed. I have since veered so far away from him that it's just a giant wall of NOPE. Among other things, he has a talent for coming up with premises I find riveting and then ruining them; I suspect that he does not want me, personally, to be happy.
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See, the thing is that I'm ridic privileged w/r/t ebooks and audiobooks reading from my library via Overdrive and Hoopla. From the most classic stuff to the most bonkers reverse harem, my library will get the license for them. So, in terms of paying almost $10/month of KU, it never made any kind of fiscal sense to me.
I do have to say that the fandom-to-profic line is close to non-existent on KU. There are so many trope-y AF books over there! It's fascinating to see what ppl (who I'm perhaps wrongfully assuming aren't in Fandom) will go head over heels for in KU. This isn't me looking down on them, btw. It's just that I often found myself thinking "huh, there are at least 10 epic length fics on AO3 that have this same trope".