admittedly I usually prefer reading 3rd to 1st person, but I’d never let that get in the way of reading a book that interested me.

lol @ trudi’s editor story. Tbh, this is why my protagonist is always male =/ don’t want men to pick up a book and think “girl main character? no way”.

maybe you’ll get really popular in third and people will go back to read your first person books because they’re by the same author and think “wow, I could get into this 1st person thing…” 😉

bdw rob, if you get confused in dialogue it’s because it’s been badly written 99% of the time

Then again, 1st person can be used very effectively (Robin Hobb used it very well I found, and Assassin’s Apprentice is a favourite of mine), but that is the thing – it must be used well.

Trudi, I take your point of course. But as I said, the reaction on message boards and forums was just the catalyst for me to start asking around. And I found the same reaction outside of the cyber world.

But as Hrugaar says, never say never…

Regarding the latter, I hate our convention of having every line of a speech begin with quote marks. Especially when there is more than 2 people speaking, it can be very difficult to know who is who.

I’ll take this opportunity to say how much I enjoyed “Isles of Glory” and look forward to reading more of your books.

Firstly, message boards aren’t a large or typical sample of the general reading community. The sorts of people who read mbs are only a fraction of the reading public. Secondly, only people with strong views tend to respond to discussions like these, and people with strong views are often in the minority.

People who are well read can be as varied in their opinions as those who aren’t. I wouldn’t take that as an indication of the tastes of the general population either.

And being well read doesn’t mean someone is a good reader, either. I once laughed my way through a well-read magazine editor’s article on first/third person in which he explained that he couldn’t read a first person female character because he was male, and he couldn’t put himself in the head of a female.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the editor’s problem. Most people wouldn’t have any trouble at all.

Write to your strengths, and be wary of basing your decisions on too small a range of people.

Just look at the answers on the previous post – Eyeris and Karen, both people who read widely in the genre, don’t like it. Even Russell is dubious.

The cover thing is interesting. That topic has also come up a lot. The answer tends to be that a good cover can sell a book. A bad cover, though, is more neutral. People say that they are so inured to bad covers that they take more notice of the blurb than the cover pix. The strange thing is that the publisher was so gung ho about those covers. You would think they – if anyone – would have an idea of what sells and, seeing they had no budget whatsoever for marketing the book, that they would take special care to give it a cover that would sell it.

Anyway, if that was what they thought, they were wrong. I suspect it did sell Book 1 – to the wrong people, who were expecting something else entirely, and were therefore disappointed.

Then again, I don’t have a commercial mind.

Or to put it another way, if a publisher’s PR people say “you must change how you write or you won’t sell”, they may just be making it up.