The presentation is as important as the story. It can be an amazing story, well told, but if it's "arranged" and "presented" on the page in a weird, disruptive, unattractive, or confusing manner ... it's not going to get read. At the very least it will definitely be harder to read, and divert attention from the story as I now instead have to to puzzle out presentation and other decisions.
I look through a lot amateur stuff in certain subject categories. It is absolutely ridiculous how so few, so very few people understand that running spell check, and understanding basic grammar, is essential to making a story readable. How to use "quotation marks to indicate that, in fact, what is being read is dialog and not narrative text." How to begin a new paragraph each time the speaker changes.
Don't even get me started about Point of View. One of the fastest ways for me to immediately give up on any story is if they insist on writing in first person, but then want to change how many "first person characters" there are. Aka, Bob is "I", but then in the next section "I" is Jane, and then later "I" is Bob again, and then "I" becomes Phil, and on and on. Holy Crap is that annoying and distracting.
It is extremely distracting, to the point of being unreadable, to have to stop constantly to figure out ... is this dialog, or is it something else. Why are they using their instead of they're and your instead of you're constantly. Why does every single word ending in s instead end in 's.
As for "formatting presentation", that matters too. For me, since I read on screens for the past fifteen years, I have my reader app set in a way I like. A beige paper-like background, across which black text flows as I advance pages. The text file, aka the book, should just be formatted to supply the text with basic text formatting, not color or any other kind of formatting. Paragraphs, quotation marks, and we're good; tell your story now because that's what I signed up for. Which shouldn't be a tough ask since presumably the writer wrote it to tell the story in the first place, not show off design.
Now with a paper book, sure there's a thing about page presentation. But even there, I still mostly don't want to notice the presentation. I'm reading for the book, not for "oooh, look at what they did, how cute, how clever." "Presentation" should be invisible, should support the text and the story, not distract from it.
I want text on a page, and if the pages distract from the text, that's bad "presentation" and I'm much less likely to get more than a few pages in before I decide they focused on the wrong thing. If they cared that much about stuff other than the story, I figure they didn't care about the part I do, so we must not be a good match. On to the next story.
AskMeWhatISaid t1_j5lci8n wrote
Reply to Do the aesthetics of the book matter to you? by AnalFissureSmoothie
The presentation is as important as the story. It can be an amazing story, well told, but if it's "arranged" and "presented" on the page in a weird, disruptive, unattractive, or confusing manner ... it's not going to get read. At the very least it will definitely be harder to read, and divert attention from the story as I now instead have to to puzzle out presentation and other decisions.
I look through a lot amateur stuff in certain subject categories. It is absolutely ridiculous how so few, so very few people understand that running spell check, and understanding basic grammar, is essential to making a story readable. How to use "quotation marks to indicate that, in fact, what is being read is dialog and not narrative text." How to begin a new paragraph each time the speaker changes.
Don't even get me started about Point of View. One of the fastest ways for me to immediately give up on any story is if they insist on writing in first person, but then want to change how many "first person characters" there are. Aka, Bob is "I", but then in the next section "I" is Jane, and then later "I" is Bob again, and then "I" becomes Phil, and on and on. Holy Crap is that annoying and distracting.
It is extremely distracting, to the point of being unreadable, to have to stop constantly to figure out ... is this dialog, or is it something else. Why are they using their instead of they're and your instead of you're constantly. Why does every single word ending in s instead end in 's.
As for "formatting presentation", that matters too. For me, since I read on screens for the past fifteen years, I have my reader app set in a way I like. A beige paper-like background, across which black text flows as I advance pages. The text file, aka the book, should just be formatted to supply the text with basic text formatting, not color or any other kind of formatting. Paragraphs, quotation marks, and we're good; tell your story now because that's what I signed up for. Which shouldn't be a tough ask since presumably the writer wrote it to tell the story in the first place, not show off design.
Now with a paper book, sure there's a thing about page presentation. But even there, I still mostly don't want to notice the presentation. I'm reading for the book, not for "oooh, look at what they did, how cute, how clever." "Presentation" should be invisible, should support the text and the story, not distract from it.
I want text on a page, and if the pages distract from the text, that's bad "presentation" and I'm much less likely to get more than a few pages in before I decide they focused on the wrong thing. If they cared that much about stuff other than the story, I figure they didn't care about the part I do, so we must not be a good match. On to the next story.