Comparative and Competitive Book Analysis, by Catherine Fowler
From: Presentation at Write On The River, Wenatchee, Washington, on May 16, 2009
It is critical that writers understand how their books stack up against the competition in the marketplace.
Any good agent will perform a cursory market analysis before presenting a new book to a publisher. In actuality, the writer should do this in advance. It gives:
- the writer confidence that his/her product will compete well in the market for which it was developed, and it gives
- the agent confidence that he/she is dealing with a writer who understands the publishing process and is willing to do the homework necessary to help assure a successful project.
What agents want to know:
- what else is out there
- that the author knows what’s out there
- how this book compares to the competition, and
- the key differences between his book and others, and what is unique about his book.
Comparative versus Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis evaluates books of a similar subject and style.
Comparative analysis evaluates books of different subjects but that have a similar tone, style, format, audience, etc.
A successful title can show that there’s a market, and allows others to envision the style, format and tone that an author is striving for.
Develop an Excel spreadsheet of information. You can easily import it into a query if appropriate.
Key Resources include: bookstores, Google, Amazon.com and Publishers Marketplace.com.
- Bookstores
- what section will your book fit in,
- what other books are on the same shelf,
- if you don’t know where your book should go, or if you can’t find the right spot ask for help at the information desk.
- Always check the acknowledgements to agents and editors in these books – the can provide critical information for you.
- Google – a treasure trove of ideas regarding
- Marketing ideas
- Blogs and websites
- Recent press and reviews from all media
- Self-published?
- Experts and resources
- Coming events with the author
- Amazon.com – The Holy Grail of book information
- Search for Title Ideas
- Search on a variety of subjects, categories and key words
- Explore best seller sections
- You can cut and paste information directly from Amazon into your spreadsheet.
- Digging Even Deeper:
- Look at the “People who bought this book also bought” section
- Search the inside of the book: Table of Contents, a sample chapter, cover copy, index, etc.
- Is the publisher big or small, or is it self-published?
- Rankings
- Reviews
- Publishersmarketplace.com $20/month
- Searchable
- Cross-referenced
General Comments
When querying an agent, pay keen attention to the following.
- NEVER, but never, say there is “No Competition”. This only shows that the author hasn’t done his homework. There is always some form of competition.
- Avoid NOT including a key title in comparative research.
- Avoid incomplete research – be thorough.
- Avoid NOT summarizing for the reader (i.e., agent or publisher).
Good points to make in a query include:
- “this is the only book that _____________,”
- this book is more comprehensive
- speaks to a larger market
- is the most current and up-to-date
- provides a different viewpoint
- makes use of the author’s credentials
NOTE: Tell the agent or publisher concisely. For example “There are other books out there but this is how this one is different.”
About Catherine Fowler:
Catherine Fowler is the Founder of the Redwood Agency in Portland, Oregon. Ms. Fowler has more than 20 years of experience in book and Internet publishing, having worked for such prestigious companies as Random House, Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, Excite and WebMD. With the inception of Redwood Agency, Fowler is focusing on the core of her expertise: the development of informative and fun products, working with talented writers and editors, and negotiating contracts.
How Outlining Can Bring Out Voice, by Gabriela Lessa
From: https://janefriedman.com/2015/08/24/how-outlining-can-bring-out-voice
“I got some rejections where the agents said they liked the premise but it lacked voice. How do I fix voice?”
As a freelance editor, I hear this question a lot from my clients. It’s something that seems to baffle authors. What exactly is voice? How do you see if your character has a voice? How do you fix it?
The whole “it’s a subjective business” thing can be frustrating to hear, and voice might seem like the most subjective issue of all. It probably is. But when you’re completely lost, even if you’re not exactly a plotter, outlining helps a lot.
How can something as mechanical as outlining help with something as subjective as voice? By allowing you to really get to know your characters. Most of the time, lack of voice comes from not knowing your characters well enough. If you, the creator, don’t know these people you’re creating, it’s unlikely your reader will really want to know them. Voice comes from consistency (even if that means being completely inconsistent, if that’s your character’s main trait). Voice comes from personality. It’s not enough to throw in a few punch lines and call your character sarcastic, or to add a few current slang words and think you have a teenager. Voice comes from dialogue, internal thinking, and, most of all, reactions. Voice affects your plot. Only when you have a complete, believable person will you have a character with a voice. That’s where outlining comes in handy.
Before you begin, it’s important to know that not everything that goes into your character outline goes into your novel. If you outline well, less than half of the information will make it into the manuscript. But you need it anyway. Every detail counts when building your complex, three-dimensional people.
But where do you begin? How do you create people from scratch?
Begin with the big stuff. Fill in the gaps later.
- Character Arc
You’ve probably heard about this one. You’ve probably seen some sort of graph about it (which can be very helpful, by the way). There are several approaches to this, and you can pick the one you feel comfortable with. Regardless of the chosen method, it all comes down to asking the big, important questions that will affect your plot.
- Who are your main characters when the story begins?
- Who will they be when it ends?
- What is keeping them from getting to that ending (both internal and external obstacles)?
- What are their fundamental flaws?
These are questions that must be answered for your story to make sense. So write it all down. To sum it up in one question: What do you need to know about your characters in order to have a plot that makes sense? That’s the first thing you should outline.
- Main Traits
This is where your characters stop being just pawns in your plot and begin their transition to believable people.
Start with the basics, like physical description. You certainly do not need a big chunk of physical description in your manuscript (please don’t do that). But you need to know every detail about these people. Some won’t make a difference. But some will. Being a short, skinny boy in an adventure is not the same as being a big, strong boy. A story about a woman who is considered the most gorgeous lady in town when she’s a size 14 and has wild hair is a completely different story than that of a size 6 platinum blonde. So write down the physical stuff and see if it matches the character arc. Would such a small boy have the strength to beat a monster? Would a woman like this have a low self-esteem? Make sure it’s coherent.
Once you match your characters’ physical traits to their arcs, it’s time to map out their main psychological traits. What would be the main characteristics you’d notice about these people? What kind of qualities would they need to have to match the arc you built for them? Consider what would really stand out about their personalities. Ask yourself how people like these would react to each main event you have planned for them. Would they care about the inciting incident you planned? Would the crisis you imagined really be a crisis for people with these personalities?
Finally, it’s time to write down your characters’ back stories. Where did they grow up? How were their families? Do they have jobs? How did they get to this point? This is the moment to look back at everything that brought your characters to the inciting incident. Their history should help you understand how they got to this point.
Once you’ve done this, you should have people that make sense. Their history should match their personality. When you finish step two, you should be able to identify cause and consequence in everything your characters are and in everything they do throughout your plot. This is the time to think about reactions. Everything that affects the way your characters react to a big event goes here.
- Details
This is the fill-in-the-gaps part. This is the part that makes your characters really unique.
You should know anything that you would know about your family and closest friends. Birthdays (and whether they like to celebrate them), likes and dislikes, favorite foods, favorite drinks. It might seem unimportant now. But wouldn’t it be weird to read a story that unravels through the course of two years, with a main character who loves parties and celebrations, and never see a birthday party? These details make characters believable.
And finally, a very important question to ask: Do your characters have any quirks and habits? Hair-twirling, nail-biting, lip-chewing—all of that counts. This is the stuff that will make your beats. Many authors hear they should use beats instead of dialogue tags to show more, so they dump random actions in the middle of dialogue in the hopes of showing. It’s true, beats do help show and they do bring out voice. But only when done right. Beats have to in fact show something worth showing. If you have a very confident alpha man, it’s unlikely he’ll be scratching his head or looking down at his feet when talking to a woman. If your heroine is known for being completely relaxed, it doesn’t make sense for her to bite her nails and chew her lips all the time. Beats are not there just to fill in for dialogue tags. They’re a great way to build voice. And you can only build voice when beats bring out your characters. When reactions show personality, you have voice.
This might seem like a lot of work for details that won’t even be in the manuscript. But the good news is there’s no rule for how you go about this. You can create spreadsheets. You can write it all down on Post-its and fill your wall with them. You can have one long Word document where you write it all down. And most importantly, this is flexible. You can go back and forth. You can add details as you get to know your characters. As long as you have it all written down, you can always go back and see if the details match the main traits, and if the main traits match the character arc. As long as they complement each other, you will have strong, three-dimensional characters your readers can see as real people. After all, loving and hating these fictional people is the best part of reading!
Story Porn, by John Voorhaus
From: http://writerunboxed.com/2015/09/24/story-porn
I’m in the outline/development stage of writing my next novel, a mystery/thriller called Stella Blue, and as I do with every major new writing project I take on, I have lately asked myself, “What do I want to learn this time?” It has become clear to me that my writing gets better, faster and is more fun (well, scary fun) when I’m out on the face of the wave between what I know and don’t know about my craft.
This time out, I have a couple of goals in mind. One is to do a much better job of outlining and mapping the story before I start writing a draft in earnest. As some of you know, I’m a proudly self-defined “pantser” – I write by the seat of my pants. I’ve always claimed that this was because if I knew in advance where the story was headed, I couldn’t be bothered to write it. These days, I don’t think that’s true. If I’m being honest with myself (as I learned to be from writing my last book, how to live life) I’d have to say that part of me rejects outlining because I perceive it as dry, dull work – heavy lifting at a time when I want light skipping and jumping. But my growth as a writer demands that I part with the pantser model, at least temporarily, if for no other reason than to overcome a certain prejudice and find out, really, if outlining has anything to offer me at all.
The other goal, related to the first, is to see if I can come up with some brand new ways to think about story development. I understand outlining to be the part of the process where I gather raw material for the story. I want to do a better – and therefore must do a different – job of this than I have in the past.
Why do I need new methods for story development? Because I hate story development. In the early days of finding a story it seems like I’m mostly just staring off into space thinking of nothing at all. Sometimes this feeling gets so bad, so frustrating, that the story never develops at all. I don’t lament this – I never force a story to come – I just call it another dry well and move on to the next.
This time around, though, I’m making great progress and having great fun by using a simple new technique I call “story porn.” Basically, all I do is look at pictures that I think might be relevant to my story, and then wait to get excited by what I see.
For instance, Stella Blue takes place (among other places) in a commune in Vermont in the early 1970s. Simply by Googling images of commune life, I find my eyes (and therefore head) stuffed with thrilling bits of visual information. That’s the porn part. Such information causes all kinds of interesting questions to spring to my mind. What are the rules of life in my commune? Where do jealousies and rivalries lie? These people all look so happy – what could make them mad enough to kill? That’s the story part. Together they add up to story porn, an easy, effective (for me anyway) new path to story development.
It has a pleasing rhythm. I write until I can’t think of anything else to write and then, instead of staring off into space, I stare at pictures. I stare at pictures until I think of something to write, then I write. When I run dry again, I go back to my pictures. Words to pictures, pictures to words, back and forth in a nice, gentle, productive process of advancing my story and my understanding of all it has to offer.
To make this method work for me – really spin like a top – I find that there’s one significant process block to let go of, and that’s the need to be writing all the time. See, I used to think that staring at pictures was frivolous, lazy, or otherwise worthy of contempt. I was enslaved by “the myth of efficiency,” which believes that only the act of putting the words on the page is “real writing,” and everything else is one or another form of time-wasting distraction.
I’m training myself to be okay with distraction. I’m training my mind to let my searches take me where they will. I’m rethinking this whole idea of efficiency and recognizing (as I knew all along) that story development is an inherently inefficient process, just by its very nature.
I’m also letting go of the need to write things in chronological order. There’s so much I will have to know about this story, why should I limit myself to discovering things only as events unfold? If a picture gives me great insight into something that happens in the climax of my story, or somewhere in the middle, or at the beginning or before the beginning, I don’t bother asking how it all fits in. I just write it all down. I’ll sort it all out later. That sorting out… that’s called the first draft.
Another thing I’m mindful of here is the need to operate at an appropriate level of detail. There are so many questions I need answers to, but I don’t need them all right now. Just to give you one example, I hate a certain character’s name. Every time I write it, I remind myself that it needs to be changed. Yes, but it doesn’t need to be changed right now. As long as I understand that the current name is just a placeholder, I can continue in my development, unafraid to be wrong, or vague or undercooked on the page. That’s a big breakthrough for me.
I can’t write the same books over and over again, just as, per Heraclitus, you can’t enter the same river twice. I have to keep reinventing myself, my words, my stories, my approach. That’s the only way I’ll get better, and if I’m not committed to getting better as a writer, what the hell am I doing here in the first place? So now my browser history reflect my journeys to hippie times, mountain biking, religious cults, the Grateful Dead, the Green Mountain State, and how many hits of acid can be found on a typical sheet of blotter.
And my official Story Outline document is a big, fat hairy mess of what-ifs and maybes, sprayed all over the pages in no particular order.
That looks like progress to me.
Or anyway it looks like fun.
And not for nothing, but tomorrow is my 60th birthday, and if I’m still having this sort of ridiculous fun at my age, I have to think I’m doing okay.
What are the best parts of your process? What are the worst? What discoveries have you made about your approach that you can concretely share with others? Where does your writing day typically take you, and what can you do to take it some place new and different and lots more fun? [Share your thoughts with John at his post on Writer Unboxed.]
About John Vorhaus
John Vorhaus has written seven novels, including Lucy in the Sky, The California Roll, The Albuquerque Turkey and The Texas Twist, plus the Killer Poker series and (with Annie Duke) Decide to Play Great Poker. His books on writing include The Comic Toolbox, How to Write Good and Creativity Rules!
Donelle Knudsen’s Between Heartbeats Book Signing
Donelle Knudsen is hosting her Between Heartbeats book launch at Hastings Books: 1425 George Washington Way, on Friday, October 2 from 5-8 PM. Put your name in the basket for a chance to win a $10 Hardback Cafe gift card or custom-made Between Heartbeats swag. (Hastings is not part of this giveaway.) Hope to see you there.
Can life change between heartbeats? Diana awakens on her seventeenth birthday in a joyful mood. But at breakfast she is told, during a heated argument with her mother, that the man she has loved as her father is not her father at all. Diana decides to unravel the mystery of her childhood and the reason for their secrets and travels across the country to visit her step-father. And so, Diana begins a journey where she discovers shocking truths hidden just beneath the surface. Diana learns family is more than shared DNA and discovers who will help her when it appears all hope is gone. In Donelle Knudsen’s Young Adult novel, Between Heartbeats, a young woman’s quest to find her roots enables her to discover love and the power of forgiveness.
Congratulations to Maureen McQuerry – Washington State Book Award Finalist!
Whoo hoo! Congratulations, Maureen!
Wordherder Maureen McQuerry‘s book, Time Out of Time: Beyond the Door, has been selected as a finalist for Washington State Book Award, in the category of Books for Middle Readers. You can learn more in this announcement in the Seattle Times, “Finalists announced for the Washington State Book Awards“.
How To Write Children’s Picture Books, by Tara Lazar
From: http://writetodone.com/six-best-tips-writing-childrens-picture-books
“Anyone can write a children’s book!”
Yep, that’s the response I get when I tell people I write for kids.
“After all, they’re just kids,” they say with a flick of the wrist.
As if kids are simpletons. As if kids don’t care what they read. As if kidlit publishers will buy any drivel.
We know this is not true.
Kids are smart, and picky about what they read. Publishers are inundated with so many children’s book manuscripts (because ‘anyone’ can write for kids, ‘everyone’ does) that they have to be extremely discerning.
As a child, I adored Roald Dahl’s fantastical tales, devoured the “Fudge” series by Judy Blume, and discovered a bookish best friend forever in Ramona. So I decided to write a book.
I wrote my first fractured fairy tale at age 8, and boasted that a publisher would snatch it up soon. My grandparents, misunderstanding, revved up the Chrysler and high-tailed it to Walden’s, searching in vain for my book.
Fast forward 30 years. I now have one picture book in print and four more on the way. Grandma and Grandpa would be proud (and would find my book on the store shelves).
Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about how to write children’s picture books that I wish I’d known early on. Here are my six top tips.
#1. Concept sells.
Write about a subject that excites kids—robots, ballerinas, dump trucks, aliens, princesses, super heroes, and so on.
Imagine your cover on bookstore shelves. Ask yourself: will kids make a beeline for that image?
Stay away from overdone topics like getting a pet, having a new baby in the family, moving to a new home, or meeting the tooth fairy.
Holiday books have a limited sales window and a lot of competition, so it’s wise to avoid Christmas stories, too. Break in with something unique.
#2. Be aware of page breaks.
Most picture books have 32 pages, but not all pages are for story; some are used for end papers, the title page and copyright details.
Typically, there are 24 pages for story, which works out to twelve double-page spreads.
Take advantage of page turns – make them surprising and fun. Change your scene.
It helps to plug your story into a dummy when revising. Does your story fit the format?
Self-Ended Picture Book Layout
#3. Rhyme only if you can rhyme well.
Editors see a lot of bad rhyme, mostly in the form of common rhyme, forced rhyme and inconsistent meter.
Couplets like fun / run / sun and do / too / you are not original. It’s obvious when a writer gets locked into a rhyme scheme that dictates the story and sends it on an unbelievable path.
Examine the work of rhyming masters like Jane Yolen, Jack Prelutsky, Karma Wilson, Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen and Corey Rosen Schwartz.
#4. Keep it under 500 words.
The current “sweet spot” for picture book manuscripts is 500 words. Sometimes even fewer words are preferred. (My friend’s new book is only 20 words!)
Manuscripts with 800-1000 words don’t sell as well, so write tight to improve your odds of being published.
Remember that illustrations will tell half your tale, so you don’t need to be overly descriptive.
#5. Don’t be preachy.
Many children’s writers feel the need to teach kids a lesson.
“Message-driven” stories aren’t popular with children (or editors). It’s not fun to be lectured.
While every picture book should have an underlying emotional theme – like the love of family, friendship, or fitting in – it should avoid being didactic.
These five tips will give you a head start on how to write picture books. A great way to begin is my November writing challenge, PiBoIdMo (Picture Book Idea Month).
For a picture book, writing well is not enough – you must have a unique hook that jumps out and grabs the reader. They say that for every twenty ideas you have, you get one great idea, which is why I created PiBoIdMo.
The challenge is to jot down one picture book concept daily through November. At the end of the month, you should have thirty or more bright and shiny ideas from which to choose. At least one is sure to be a winner.
I promised six tips, so I owe you one.
#6. Read picture books.
Read a lot of them. Picture books have a unique rhythm and cadence, a certain subtlety that can only be understood by reading and absorbing them.
Examine how the art and text work together to form the whole. Don’t just look at what’s being said – see what’s left unsaid.
I suggest reading 500 picture books before you sit down to write your first manuscript. You’ll be far ahead of the competition.
So are you ready? Start writing!
If you’re seeking a literary agent, have 3-5 manuscripts ready to go. Agents rarely sign picture book authors on one book alone, because it’s not lucrative enough.
I assure you that with every picture book manuscript you write, your ability to write tight and clever will improve.
Tara Lazar writes picture books and witty blog posts. Her debut book, The Monstore, is available now from Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, with several more titles forthcoming. If you want to write for kids, join the kidlit party at taralazar.com.
The Second Draft, by Molly Best Tinsley
From: http://writerunboxed.com/2015/08/13/the-second-draft
In ancient times, when I was trying to leap the genre divide between short fiction and the novel, an editor turned down my first, full-length effort with this explanation: “You have a lot of activity in these pages, but I’m not discerning the action.” As a plot-challenged, right-brain lover of language and quirky characters, it’s taken me years to wrap my mind around the difference.
What my early novel lacked was structure, or meaningful action. Instead I’d offered what was basically chronology—activity. Activity, no matter how textured or ingenious, leaves the reader wondering where the story’s going and what she should be tracking. A strongly structured narrative, on the other hand, hooks the reader into a ride she can’t resist.
I know how that feels. I’ve stayed up too late plenty of nights lured on by just one more chapter. I really want to make that happen for an audience. I think that’s why I decided to collaborate on a spy thriller and then craft a sequel on my own. In that plot-based genre, authors are unabashed about deploying strategies that engage and manipulate their readers.
In the early drafts of a narrative, you are busy telling yourself the story. It’s probably best to banish a hypothetical audience from your mind as you free your imagination to discover the surprises lurking in its recesses. It’s fine to ramble into backstories and what if’s. You write through to the end because you need to find out where you wanted to go.
But once you’ve got a finished draft, it’s time to tackle revision from the other side, from the perspective of your reader—what does she need to keep going? Can you pretend you know nothing about the world you’ve created, open to page one, and answer the question: does this narrative do more than give a well-written account of interesting events? Are your textured description, snappy dialogue, and humorous moments serving a meaningful structure? These are the issues you tackle in what I’m calling “the second draft.”
I now assess and edit manuscripts for Fuze Publishing, the same way I work on my own. I break the text into three simple parts—beginning, middle, and end—in order to get at its structure.
The Beginning: Disrupting a pattern. For a story to have momentum, it must start with big bang, an attention-grabbing scene with the energy to propel the narrative forward.
Your entry point is not the time for a-day-in-the-life musings. When revising with an audience in mind, you need cut to the chase. Something must happen to destabilize your protagonist’s world. In a murder mystery, it’s the discovery of the dead body. In other narratives, it’s a “first”—a first meeting; an arrival.
A strong beginning challenges your off-balance protagonist to do something, anything, from simply struggling to regain equilibrium to saving the human race.
The Middle: maintaining momentum. Resistance is hot. When move hits counter move, energy levels rise. As your protagonist sets out to do something, let her encounter an obstacle course.
External challenges like illness, gender, or the Pacific Crest Trail, introduce resistance to your protagonist’s progress. Antagonists with ornery agendas add further dynamic, unpredictable obstacles.
But the most potent resistance to the protagonist’s endeavor should come from the inside–a personality trait, habit, or past wound that keeps interfering with progress. I call this the Fortunate Flaw because although it’s a weakness, this evidence of vulnerability elicits readers’ sympathy and forecasts the possibility of growth and change. It gives the protagonist’s story somewhere to go, the events acquire a rationale: the famous arc.
The Fortunate Flaw can be a simple idea: ambition, inability to trust, indecision, idealism. It becomes complex as it’s embodied by your particular protagonist.
If your narrative is heavy on plot, it probably plants many external, circumstantial obstacles in your protagonist’s path. To prevent her from seeming a pawn of events, it’s even more important to establish her internal life. You want the action to seem an extension of her character, the result of decisions she’s struggled with, a fate she is at least partly responsible for.
The End: from epiphany to showdown. At the high point of the protagonist’s arc, events cohere to produce an aha! moment, which inspires her to overcome that Fortunate Flaw. The revelation may enable her to solve a puzzle, make amends, and/or commit to a new plan. Strengthened by this internal change, she can go on to effect external change by confronting the antagonist in a showdown.
Initial disruption, continuous resistance led by the Fortunate Flaw, and transformative revelation make for meaningful action, which is what rivets readers to a good story. Does your narrative deliver? These components may be present but need to be pulled to the foreground. Can you turn up the volume on them to make their importance clear? Do they need to be decluttered of superfluous activity?
We all know that writing is really a process of rewriting, and that any given narrative can go through twenty drafts or more. But this process needs to include one final, crucial orientation. First we set down the material we actually wanted to write, capturing characters, setting, an action or conversation. This is the stuff that seems to flow as if inspired; for some writers it feels like “channeling.” Once we have a completed draft, we begin reworking it based on the needs of our imagined audience.
How can we deploy the elements of our story to pique curiosity, to keep our readers wondering what could possibly happen next?
Molly Best Tinsley taught on the civilian faculty at the United States Naval Academy for twenty years and is the institution’s first professor emerita. She is the author of My Life With Darwin and a story collection, Throwing Knives, as well as two spy thrillers, Satan’s Chamber (with Karetta Hubbard) and Broken Angels, and a memoir, Entering the Blue Stone. She also co-wrote the textbook, The Creative Process. Her fiction has earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sandstone Prize, and the Oregon Book Award. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, and her middle-grade fantasy novel, Behind the Waterfall, will be released in mid-November.
Molly is also the co-founder and editor of Fuze Publishing where she works with authors to sharpen and polish their manuscripts.
Book Release: Between Heartbeats
Congratulations to Donelle Knudsen on the release of her latest book, Between Heartbeats. Check it out!
Rivers of Ink Announces Agent
Rivers of Ink will welcome Douglas Lee from Kimberly Cameron Associates to the 2015 Conference!
Doug has an interest in Speculative, Sci-fi and Fantasy (SFF) fiction but welcomes many more genres.
Register now to save your spot at the Rivers of Ink conference! Early bird discount applies until September 18.
Story Glue, by Anna Elliott via WriterUnboxed
I found this article interesting, and thought the rest of the Wordherders might too. In Story Glue, Anna Elliott discusses what makes her pick up a book in her limited reading time.