Am I just weird?

Well, if you are weird for liking backstory and info dumps then so am I. Check out the backstory / prologue in Richard Russo's "Empire Falls." It's one of the best I've read.

If you're doing something as a conscious stylistic choice, more power to you. You might have to research markets a bit more carefully, to find something that will take your book's style in stride. Good writing, however, trumps everything!

There obviously a market for character-driven stories because there are published examples. It also depends a lot on genre.

And I don't think a story always has to start with action. It has to start with something interesting. And if that is character detail, that's all to good. I don't always want to be dropped into a car chase or a bank robbery or a passionate love scene.

But there's the catch, the start has to be interesting.....

I'm with mirandashell. It doesn't have to start with action, but it has to start with something interesting. Often people end up starting with something useful that'll become interesting in six chapters time, but isn't interesting in this chapter.

Depends on the amount of detail. If it's Pynchon-esque, I probably wouldn't read it. (There can be only one.) If it's Tom Robbins -- detailed, but not to the Gravity's Rainbow degree -- I'd give it a concerted go as long as I find its premise interesting and its style keen.

_Richard

Put into the story what you think belongs there, and put it where it's most effective. Sometimes postponing backstory makes readers more interested in it (maybe they've been wondering why character A does A all the time, for example). Also, it depends who you're writing for. Thrill seekers will want a fast paced plot. Explores may want to explore the back alleys of your towns, too. Empaths need to tie anything to their favourite characters' (character's) emotions. And so on.

I have a finished first draft that would never pass the action crowd. Fantasy. Third limited. A point-point-of-view change about ever 2500 words (scene length varies). At least 12 recurring point-of-view characters. The occasional by-stander point of view. No clear protagonist. (Two characters do stand out, but if I made them the protagonists, the story would have a vastly different shape.) Subdivided into four parts (not series parts, but book parts), each with its own prologue type excursion. Parts 1 and 3 are named after setting elements and shed light on the world (no direct plot relation, but should help interpreting certain events). Parts 2 and 4 are named after characters, and their prologue is back story (part 2's prologue is also more a setting piece; but part 4's prologue gives you the relevant scenes that started the entire plot). Some scenes may not be plot relevant (could be cut, plotwise), but they're important to display different points of view. An example:

The story's set in a world where magic is fading. The two major powers who relied on magic - in this corner of the world - are, mages and priests (there's background pagan witchcraft, which is not much of a factor in the story), where mages have utility magic, and priests have healing magic. With magic dying, a third class rises to power, basically science - most prominently represented by surgeons. But they do icky stuff to bodies (like cutting them open) and they practice on corpses, so they're not well liked, even though they're pretty necessary these days. (People nickname them "necromancers", 'cause they experiment with corpses.) One scene shows a mage and a physician in a musuem looking at a dragon skeleton. The mage wonders whether such a thing as a dragon has ever existed, while the physician points out that the beast couldn't possibly have flown with those wings, and that only insects have wings on their backs... stuff like that. The museum, incidently, has what it claims is amber stones that have pixies inside - the chapter is titled "Nine Pixies in Amber" The dragon-bones-in-the-museum scene is totally expendable plotwise - it expands on characters you've met before, it sheds light on dominant ways seeing the world, on social dynamics (both the mage and physician are outsiders within their own faction, so they immediately get along)... All this could easily be brought up in other scenes. But I want to take my time. I want to develope the world in non-vital scenes. This is not a book for picking a character to root for and hasting through the plot. I'd have focussed on two characters, and made the rest side characters, and simplified the ending. The books designed so that you'll find it hard to pick sides and see no good solutions to a problem. But to do that, you must practically live in the world.

I've got a lot of editing to do (and the book's been on hold for two/three years, now - personal, non-writing-related issues), mostly because the setting is more conventional and less developed in the first half. (Halfway through the writing I realised I've set this thing on an island group, rather than on a continent as I'd thought; also the priests have lost their god - they used to be monotheists, but now they're the monotheist equivalent of ancestorworshipers [which helps metaphorically with the main event, too]... Lots of editing to do.)

If anyone reads this book from start to finish, they're not looking for a quick read or an exciting plot. I do hope the plot isn't half bad, but the book isn't designed to highlight the plot. It's highlighting social relations. If anyone cares, here's a short story in the same setting, but roughly 200-300 years in the current WiP's past.

Yeah, you're weird.

Depends on the amount of backstory or description. I like enough backstory or description (read: not too much to disrupt the flow of the story). I set aside my latest novel because when the author introduced one minor character, he went into this fit of description. One description lasted an entire page--and the pages were small print. Yeesh. I skimmed through the book and put it back on the shelf.

Personally I can enjoy something beginning with backstory and description if I care about the character, and there's conflict.

Conflict doesn't mean they're tearing down the road in a high speed police chase. That can absolutely be boring as well if I don't care about the folks in the car.

If there's anything the character wants, and something is in the way, that's plenty for me to go on. Especially if the writing is good. It could be the character wants to sleep but they're up late with a colicky baby. Or it's low tide and they're trying to collect enough shellfish for dinner before the water comes back in. A really good writer can weave an awful of lot backstory into scenes that also show us more about the characters. Enough to make us care about them.

Canotila hit it on the head for me--back story is great if I care. I need a reason to care, which usually means I need to be introduced to the character and their problem. I need to be invested in the MC solving the problem. I have to want them to succeed.

If the first several pages are all about the MC staring at her shoes while she reminisces about the carefree days of her childhood I will put the book back on the shelf. Why? Because I don't care about the carefree childhood of a random stranger. I need to know why I'm staring at this girl at this moment. It must be important, or else the author wouldn't be writing about it, right? So show me why--what drives her? What bothers her? Why should I care about her back story? That's what'll make me need to read the book.

Hope that made some sense and was at least a bit helpful

ETA: I don't think there's such a thing as a "good info-dump." That'd just be called "info." An info-dump takes the reader out of the story's flow--like a breaking news report. "We interrupt this novel to bring you the unintegrated story of how this random piece of technology came to be..."