Hey, I'm Caleb Teal, and once per week I review a book written by my fellow Authors from around the world. People who read my reviews will notice I give bonus stars for doing something interesting with what I call, the presentation.
To earn that illusive bonus star from me, an author has to do something creative in the presentation of the book. I’m not talking about the story, the plot, the characters, or the world building. I’m talking about the writing style, the chapter layout, interesting illustrations, inserting foreign languages, and other stuff along those lines.
In one book I reviewed there were scenes with a extremely unique writing style reminiscent of computer command prompts. In another book I reviewed the author scrapped the chapter format and went with scenes prefaced by interesting headers to mark when it happened. In another story I reviewed the author interspersed foreign language into the dialog, yet somehow made it clear what was being said without taking away from the story. In my own books, starting with Avala Book 1, I started a strict part / chapter layout of three parts each with exclusively eight chapters, something that is rarely done. With Avala Book 3, I start adding the interesting presentation with the spirit-voice artwork to better get across what the spirit voice is like. In the upcoming Tales of the Alénarian book, I went with a Part > Codex > Chapter layout instead of the regular Part > Chapter layout done in many books. In that same book at the start of each Codex I have an in-universe quote, and I plan on releasing the book with artwork before every codex. In later books that I have yet to publish, I do things like have certain types of characters have different fonts for their dialog to really show off that something is different with them. In some of my unpublished works I do my own computer-inspired writing style. In another unpublished book of mine, I have the dialog written in a heavy fictional slang, with translations underneath. There are so many possibilities to make the presentation interesting and fun, and thus for any book I review to get that bonus star, they need to do something interesting with the presentation.
That's all from me, see you next time.
~ Caleb Teal, Author and Founder