There's several things that tick me off about all of us, but I will just stick to two points.
1) As many people said, this should have been given away for free. It's common practice for an author to spill the beans on the first chapter of an upcoming work on their website as a download in order to pique some interest. Some authors go a step further, and put larger amounts of downloadable content out there as a thank-you to their fans. If LKH wants to charge a buck for this, I guess it's a free country and she can do so... but three dollars for 33 pages? Extrapolate that to the usual length of a novel and it sets a price tag of about thirty dollars for the full work... at Kindle prices. The price-to-content ratio here is hopelessly out of whack and sadly, it doesn't even seem to be much good, besides.
Which leads directly to point #2...
2) Goddamnit, remember when LKH was good? And honestly, remember when calling her "good" was selling her short? She was great. The first nine books of the Anita Blake series were about as good as anything else I've read in modern fantasy. That's what makes this even more painful; it's not like we're talking about Danielle Steele here, who has been crap since day one and hasn't changed in forty years. She was awesome out of the gate, and I think sometimes we forget that given how things have gone lately.
Somewhere at the turn of the millennium, LKH went batshit with the ardeur storyline and hasn't looked back since. Oh, and incidentally, exactly when is that fucking albatross going to be given a decent burial? LKH said it was a storyline with a point and would have an ending, but we're now eleven books into that particular plot bunny, and it shows no signs of keeling over and dying. If anything, it appears to be picking up steam.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-05-25 09:20 am (UTC)1) As many people said, this should have been given away for free. It's common practice for an author to spill the beans on the first chapter of an upcoming work on their website as a download in order to pique some interest. Some authors go a step further, and put larger amounts of downloadable content out there as a thank-you to their fans. If LKH wants to charge a buck for this, I guess it's a free country and she can do so... but three dollars for 33 pages? Extrapolate that to the usual length of a novel and it sets a price tag of about thirty dollars for the full work... at Kindle prices. The price-to-content ratio here is hopelessly out of whack and sadly, it doesn't even seem to be much good, besides.
Which leads directly to point #2...
2) Goddamnit, remember when LKH was good? And honestly, remember when calling her "good" was selling her short? She was great. The first nine books of the Anita Blake series were about as good as anything else I've read in modern fantasy. That's what makes this even more painful; it's not like we're talking about Danielle Steele here, who has been crap since day one and hasn't changed in forty years. She was awesome out of the gate, and I think sometimes we forget that given how things have gone lately.
Somewhere at the turn of the millennium, LKH went batshit with the ardeur storyline and hasn't looked back since. Oh, and incidentally, exactly when is that fucking albatross going to be given a decent burial? LKH said it was a storyline with a point and would have an ending, but we're now eleven books into that particular plot bunny, and it shows no signs of keeling over and dying. If anything, it appears to be picking up steam.
Anyway, rant #213 off.