Appendices in Bk1-Bk3

[Iume]

Style!

[Iume]

So, when books 1 and 2 I noticed two styles of infodump. #1 – It was in the style of an essay, discourse, or other material presented by an in-universe character. #2 – It was a plan infodump.

I really liked the first approach. Even if we never meet a particular character that wrote the text it was written in such as a way that it avoided those awful tables and it gave a sense of “this is lore” rather than “this is what the author designed”. I was wondering/hoping, but could you make book 3 appendices (even those mid-story/interlude) all in the first style?

It is less jarring and helps with flow.

[The Author Guy]

Yeah, that was for various reasons.

In the first edition of Book 1, the appendices were interstitial, meaning that the vast majority of them were not at the end, they were between chapters where appropriate. So they fit better as “lore”

That however, drove lots of people nuts, they found it very interrupting of the story. It’s less of an issue in a paperback, because you just flip a page or two to skip. But it’s much more annoying on a kindle, particularly when you have little pages.

So I moved most of them to the end and just put links to them where they used to be. Which is a pain for paperbacks, but nice for kindles. And 99.99% of sales are kindle.

In the second book, there was a lot less time, and yes it was an info dump at the end. There actually were a bunch of tables in book 1, but they were less obvious in that the were encased as lore. I think part of the info dump nature was time on my part.

I had been working a lot of long hours at my day job for 9 months and was really really behind on book 2 (hence going 18 months between books) so I was much more rushed to get it out there.

Now, in Book 3, we are going back to the lore style appendices, in particular because some of them are going to disagree with each other. We will have a treatise on the multiverse from both the Council of Wizards Library and from the Library of Doom. They will also be at the end. See Smuggling for an example.

However, there probably won’t be as many appendices this time simply due to space constraints in the paperback. Book 3 is going to be pretty long without appendices. Sorting that out now…I think.

Also another new format change will be happening and we’ll see how beta users like it…

Now rather that just a ~ between scene/POV changes, if the location/POV changes (or time by big margin) you will get the location and time of each scene. If the location stays the same, POV stays the same but it’s just a jump of a few hours you still get a ~

e.g.

[i][center]Nysegard, Krallnomton: Late Fourth Period[/center][/i]

If people like that, if it makes it easier to follow I will probably go back and do the same for the first two books in a revision. (BTW you can get new revisions for Kindle by going to Amazon Manage my devices/content)

[Author]

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