Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate

As foreshadowed in yesterday’s blog entry, I have now identified a couple of small presses that seem legit, and sent them both queries for my YA fantasy series. I’m not going to say which ones I chose, because I’m about to be less than flattering.

One of the bits of advice I read this week was, when evaluating a small press, buy and read a couple of their books. This will tell you if their editors are competent, for one thing. It may also give you a hint about the sorts of things they like to publish.

So I did. The Kindle app is super for chores like this: Click, click, put a couple of bucks on my credit card, and I can start reading.

In the first novel I opened up, the copy-editing is mostly good. The story — well, let’s say I would have wanted to tinker fairly extensively with the concept to beef it up before I even started writing a rough draft. Writers of speculative fiction sometimes fall into the trap of making their made-up worlds too simple. Legions of creatures that are entirely evil and devoted to causing suffering, that type of thing.

Oops — that describes Tolkien’s orcs, doesn’t it? Well, you get the idea.

At the level of sentences and paragraphs, this small press author’s writing just wasn’t taut. Ideas jumped around like beans in a skillet. Excess words could have been deleted to smooth the flow. And in the opening incident, there was a piece of blocking — the theater director’s term for where the characters go on the stage — that made not a lick of sense. It was not remotely plausible. The author inserted a character into a scene in order to be able to include a certain conversation, when the character could not plausibly have been there.

Oh, dear. Let’s set this novel aside for now and look at the other one.

In the other one, I screeched to a halt before I even got to Chapter 1. The drop-cap at the beginning of the epigraph is screwed up. Let’s scroll down. Yes, the drop-caps that start all of the chapters are screwed up. And this is not a newly uploaded file: The copyright date on the book is a couple of years ago. Somehow this publisher, who seems to be one of the standouts, has for two years failed to upload a corrected file. I can think of several reasons for this, none of them entirely innocent. Maybe the entire publishing company uses Macs, and they never thought to check the file on a Windows Kindle app. Any other explanation would, I think, be worse than that.

Before I slink quietly away into the night, I’ll bet you want to know about the title of this blog entry. It’s a quote from Dante. It’s the inscription he describes as carved over the gates of Hell. In English, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”