Tuesday 28 September 2010

The death of the long set up 28th September 2010.

Sorry, I haven’t kept up with my self-imposed six times a week blogging schedule, but things have got a little hectic around here.

I’ve been very busy spending the last four days, including the weekend, formatting stuff for our new aggregator. I’ve had to extract all the bios, blurbs and extracts and then format all of them to a different set of standards.

Not difficult you might think but that’s because I haven’t told you the standards. Firstly I have to strip out ALL formatting – and I do mean all, and then insert a limited set of html tags to replace them. This limited set includes only three the tag <> for italics, the tag <> for bold and the <>tab for paragraph. I had fun writing this - when I copied it in, it activated the actual tags and turned everything into bold italic! Hence the unnatural spaces in the tags.

It doesn’t even include a centre tag – so for starters, how am I supposed to centre the scene breaks where there are any in the extracts?

Just to make matters worse each of the above are limited to 3750 characters in length. I mean, who counts in characters these days? Answer – they do. Since the introduction of blobs (colloquially know as bloody large objects) into database technologies twenty years or more ago, together with the inherent flexibility of html – you don’t need them. Still I suppose they have to work to the lowest common denominator among their clients.

It’s annoying though – almost all of our novel length excerpts had to be trimmed to fit – a couple of them by more than half! Given the excerpts are usually picked from the first chapter and the original excerpt (as seen on our web site) was carefully chosen to reflect the book in the best possible light, you can probably see why I’m finding this annoying.

This is where the long set up point, comes in. If you can’t complete the plot/character set up in a short number of sentences, you are going to have a problem when it comes to the retailers – they won’t/can’t take these long passages as the excerpts. Ergo – your excerpt might end up being half the set-up, no action and your potential readers (those who look at the excerpts at least) end up being put off rather than encouraged to read on.

Q.E.D.

Keep the set up short.

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