ANNOY ME AND I’LL TOSS YOUR BOOK!

Hi, I'm Sarah Raplee, author of surprising, touch-your-heart paranormal romantic suspense.

AUTHORS:   DON'T ANNOY YOUR READERS!!!

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always been a very forgiving reader. Until I was in my thirties, I’d never even considered (gasp!) not finishing a book. The idea felt rude, maybe even immoral. Shouldn’t I give the author a chance to redeem himself or herself somewhere before The End? After all, the story had potential. If they blew their second chance to grab me in this book, they’d lose me for life.

Young Reader Me was, however, okay with reading a page or two in the library or bookstore to see if an author could hook me before I would commit to reading the entire book. Many readers do this to try to gauge a new-to-them author’s mettle. “Hook the reader in the first five pages” is a writing guideline ignored by authors at their own peril.

Unfortunately, some authors spend a lot of effort on the beginning of a book and then get lazy or lose their way further in. For years, feeling sorry for them when they began to screw things up wasted a lot of Young Reader Me’s valuable reading time. Finally, a particularly bad fantasy novel—unsympathetic characters, nonsensical plot, poor description, bad copy editing—brought me to my senses. My attempt to read the book came to a screeching halt. The realization that I had no obligation to finish the horrible mess, and that in fact it was the author who had let his readers down, was freeing.

I haven’t made the decision not to finish a book often since. I've tossed a couple with a couple with morally bankrupt or otherwise unrelatable characters, but there have been far more that are simply too annoying to finish:

~the mystery author who repeats information as if I am too dumb to get it the first time;

~the romantic suspense author who describes the heroine shaking out her “mane of chestnut tresses” so often I can’t stay in the story; 

~the historical author who hasn’t done her research so she loses my trust; 

~the paranormal author whose characters violate the rules of the story world he built; 

~any author who obviously thinks they don’t need an editor (or even spell check!). I don't expect perfection, but too many grammatical errors and misspellings will annoy me. 

My advice to authors from Mature Reader Me is: 

Don’t annoy your readers. It’s like rubbing a cat’s fur the wrong way. Kitty won’t stick around for more discomfort, and neither will your readers.

I'm curious. What annoys you in a book?