In which trek reviews The Nasty Little Writing Book

I borrowed The Nasty Little Writing Bookby Madelyne Simone Rovenhauer from a fellow Lendler this week. It looked like an interesting tongue-in-cheek treatise on the publishing industry and in some respects that is what it is.

Rovenhauer (a pseudonym) opens with a disclaimer tagged "READ THIS FIRST". She then goes on to say that this is a satirical work and not a plan for actually becoming a best-selling author. Her description of what you should do with your copy of the book if you do not agree to abide by the terms of the disclaimer are amusing.

In terms of a work of fiction, the book is kind of funny and the satire is decently well done. A number of times I found myself thinking that the author was cynically describing exactly the opposite of real life - such as when she describes the publishing industry as "just about as warm and fuzzy as anyone can stand" (location 258). Other times her descriptions of how a writer might dress or how he might get the daily work done very well matched descriptions of writing environments I have heard directly from a writer's own mouth. Of course, she contends that writers lie all the time so as to hide the glamor of their true lifestyle from the reader. One other plus for this book is that Rovenhauer is unafraid to use esoteric words in her prose: readers who like to expand their vocabulary may find themselves grateful for the built-in dictionary of the Kindle. Of course, any book that uses the word asthete five times in only 132 printed pages is suspect (locations 54, 743, 920, 167, and 1606).

Having praised the Kindle's features, I must now criticize the Kindle edition of this book: it is just one more instance of an ebook being substandard in both layout and editing.

In my Kindle for PC client, the layout of the text is pretty good. It looks like any standard book. In my Kindle Wi-Fi,however, it looks very poorly planned. Vertical spacing between section headings and paragraph text is missing, for instance.

I noticed very early on (location 116) that the word "often" was being presented as "of ten". The first time this happened, I chalked it up to a miss on the part of the editor. When it continued to occur, I became a bit frustrated. Searching the book for the word "often" yielded a mere three hits (locations 115, 288, and 753). Searching for the string literal "of ten" returned a whopping 25 hits, fairly evenly distributed throughout the text. This is not the only species of typographical error I noted, just the most egregious. Another consistent misspelling is "of her" which is regularly transformed into "other" (as in "skin other shoulder" at location 594).

Several times a comma was replaced with another character, either another letter or a non-alphabetic character. While a reader with any intelligence at all can figure out the intended word quickly, it still interrupts the flow of the narrative to have to stop intermittently to re-read a word or phrase in order to bring sense to the sentence. Punctuation seemed to be optional occasionally, too. In some places, one sentence's ending and another's beginning was indicated only by a capitalization of the next word - no periods, period.

As interesting as this book began, I have to say that I am glad I did not shell out any cash for it. Granted, the current price for the Kindle edition is only 99¢ but I am glad that I didn't pay even that much for it. Shame on the publisher for bringing such a substandard edition to Kindle.

Also available in hardcover,where one hopes fewer typographical errors dwell.