The Green Banana Lovers didn’t tap out this time until there was only one banana left, which isn’t enough to make banana bread.[efn_note]One of two acceptable uses for bananas, the second being bananas Foster (sans booze for me).[/efn_note] I considered making a half batch of the batter and baking it in a cake pan to use as a thin base for no-bake cheesecake filling, but then I remembered I had half a cup of leftover pumpkin puree in the freezer. Any time a recipe calls for some form of shredded or mashed produce, you can substitute an alternate produce of the same consistency[efn_note]Valuable information when a butternut squash seedling takes over the world like an out-of-control experiment in an old sci-fi movie. *haunted stare*[/efn_note], so I went halfsies and made banana-pumpkin bread.
Banana is still the dominant flavor, but it’s less In! Your! Face! because there’s half as much of it. Without the full dose of banana, it’s slightly less sweet than regular banana bread. (There happened to be a pumpkin bread recipe on the opposite page of the cookbook that called for a quarter cup more sugar, but I didn’t split the difference for my hybrid.) The walnuts come through slightly more without all the competition. Would make again if in possession of both one banana and spare pumpkin.
I got this site’s accessibility rating up to 100 by myself, since the theme developers seem a little salty about even WordPress’s moderate accessibility requirements for themes, never mind “please fix this” tickets. It’s a simple fix, two attributes added to an existing line in the header file, but that’s too much to ask of people who do this professionally, apparently. I’ll have to put it back in every time a theme update overwrites the change, but needs must.
While I was at it, I squished the background color of the sidebar titles to more of an underline. Background color might be a neat visual design feature if you could maintain contrast so the text was legible, but that color is baked into the theme to share the color of links. I used to have a compromise color at which both were reasonably legible to my eye, but I had to make the links much darker to pass the contrast test, and the background color obviously went along for the ride. There are other ways to fix it, but the one where I copy-paste a block of CSS and change one number was the simplest effective one and won’t need further fiddling when I change the header and colors to coordinate with the new book.
I’m taking a class in HTML/CSS[efn_note]That’s how ebooks are built, and if I’m going to format them myself, I want to do it properly.[/efn_note] that keeps accessibility at the forefront of lessons, and now I’m getting irritable when I come across cosmetic coding that either ignores it or actively fucks it up. Things can be nice-looking AND ALSO usable. “Express yourself” through your content, not hostile web design that penalizes a segment of users.
I was finally persuaded to switch my ebook buying from That River to Kobo. My first actual purchase was a preorder that’s still a few weeks away[efn_note]Charon’s Gold by Skyla Dawn Cameron, Book 6 in the Livi Talbot series, the only series I’ve stayed with longer than two books in forever. Highly recommend.[/efn_note], so I’ve been acclimating myself to their site with selections from their free page.
I don’t love that the preview option is removed from free books on Kobo. I’ve never been a fan of taking something just because it’s free. Yes, there’s technically no risk because it costs me nothing, and it’s not like a “gift bag” of unwanted physical garbage I’ll be adding to a landfill. But there are only two books I’ve gotten any substantial distance into, and I wouldn’t have bothered with any of the others if I’d been able to glance at the first two pages online. Now I’m on a bunch of authors’ “sales” reports and my recommendations based on “purchase” history are going to be a disaster, which is bad data on both ends.
These were all first-in-series reader magnets, intended to be a good entry point for new readers. However, I noted over and over and over again that they appeared dependent on an encyclopedic knowledge of the author’s previous 400 books.[efn_note]Well, being self-referential is the generous interpretation. It’s possible some of them never learned at all how to introduce worldbuilding or characters, but I’m not looking at their other books in the name of analysis without getting paid by the hour.[/efn_note] If you’re trying to entice a new reader, it behooves you to not skip steps at the start of an allegedly new series. Are you afraid existing readers will be bored hearing about the same history, rules, and characters for the fortieth time? Okay, (a) maybe it’s time to give them something fresh and (b) a new main character should have a different perspective. Your demon prince[efn_note]None of the books in question involved a demon prince (that I know of), so don’t use that as a clue to sniff out the offender, Holmes.[/efn_note] might be a sexy cinnamon roll to his love interest, but when it’s his older sister’s turn to be heroine, she views him as an annoying brat. To someone else, he’s a benevolent but intimidating authority figure. To yet another character, he’s an evil enemy. None of these people are going to describe him the same way! You can recycle anything you want, but not being boringly repetitive requires crafting point of view characters who view the world through a lens that differs from previous point of view characters, and then you have to build the world anew in each story in order to define your main character’s place in it.
As one of the first-time readers these free books are supposed to hook, when I don’t know who any of these people are and how I’m supposed to feel about them because the author took a “snore, I already wrote this somewhere else, figure it out” approach, my thought is definitely not “I need to go back and read all this author’s other books in hopes of gaining the necessary insight.” I’m going to assume unfavorable things about the entire backlist based on the slapdash first impression and move on to books that make an effort to welcome me into them.
If the goal of that free book is to get people to buy your other books, the free one can’t read like you didn’t put any work into it just because it’s not directly putting money in your pocket. It needs to wow. Otherwise, it’s like giving away samples of stale, moldy food—I won’t be eager to acquire more of it.