The God in the Clear Rock (Randolph)

The God in the Clear Rock, by Lucian Randolph, 2011

I "purchased" The God in the Clear Rock as a free download after seeing it promoted on Reddit or, perhaps, some other site listing free ebooks. I'm glad I didn't waste any money on it, and I'm certainly not going to spend a dime on any of the sequels.

Full disclosure: I didn't get far beyond Chapter 1, but had I kept trying, I'd still be reading this book weeks later. I'm stunned by how poorly it's written. This isn't a case of misspellings and glaring typos. The prose itself, the descriptions, the dialogues, the analogies used in the exposition need serious work. The writing is terrible. The dialogue is terrible. The odd metaphors describing actions and objects are more distracting than helpful.

One of the dangers of self-publishing is that you try to do everything yourself and don't get good feedback. One piece of advice I've seen repeated is spend the money you need to on an editor and good cover art. The cover art is decent. The absence of an editor is obvious.

The writing was so distracting that I couldn't stay with it long enough to discover if the story (which the author states in the Foreward would be a cliffhanger in each part) was worth trying to follow. The other reviews I saw on sites such as GoodReads tell me that I made the correct choice.

The one bright side of this: I'm curious how many of these books his put out and what his sales are like. If this guy can make enough money on ebooks to write six novels, then anybody can.

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