Words That Go Bump in the Night: Does anyone even care about reviews?

 Full disclosure:  I obtained the Kindle edition of The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast by Sophie Love on 8 May 2021 when it was offered free on Amazon.  I do not know the author nor have I ever communicated with her about this book or any other matter.  I am an author of historical romance, contemporary romantic suspense, and assorted non-fiction.

I have no way of knowing how many copies of any given author-published book are actually sold or at what price.  Whether Sophie Love made a profit on this book is her business. How much she paid FreeBooksy.com to promote it is also her business.  (That's where I got the link to the free Kindle edition.)  How many reviews the book got from that promotion and the ratings on Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites is also her business.

As of today, Monday, 28 June 2021, the book has 1450 ratings on Goodreads for an average of 4.0 stars.  The written reviews number 160.  The breakdown by ratings is as follows:

5-star -- 500

4-star -- 558

3-star -- 299

2-star -- 79

1-star -- 14

On Amazon, it has 2361 ratings for an average of 4.3 stars.

 

So here's my first mostly rhetorical question:

If 1357 people liked it -- that's three stars and above on GR -- why is the author still paying a promoter to give it away for free?

The obvious answer, of course, is that by giving away the first book in a six-book series, she will interest readers in buying the subsequent books.  They will love Book #1 so much that they will plunk out from $2.99 to $5.99 each for the sequels.  That answer may or may not be accurate.

 

Look at the huge drop-off in just the number of ratings for those sequels!  From 2361 Amazon ratings for the first book to just 180 for the second? The sixth book, Disaster and Dessert, has only been published for a few weeks -- 8 June 2021 -- and only has 21 ratings on Amazon (none of which contain reviews that passed Amazon's criteria to actually be shown) and 16 on Goodreads.  The only text review on GR is a 1-star, in which the reviewer cites continuing problems with typos.  One might wonder why the reader continues with the series if this is a situation that bothers her enough to include it in a review, but she's absolutely entitled to leave that review.

Which leads to the second mostly rhetorical question: Who pays more attention to reviews -- readers or self-publishing authors?

I learned a long time ago, long before Goodreads and Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing, that reviews are always suspect. They were questionable back in the days of Romantic Times and Rave Reviews and I knew that from first-hand experience.  Fast-forward from those 1980s and 1990s print reviews to the system-gaming swap groups and fiverr shills of the 2010s, and the writing should have been on the wall that no review is to be trusted on its face.  There were too many verified examples of fake reviews.

Do readers continue to trust them?  I have my doubts.

I don't choose books based on reviews.  Not ever.  I may go by the recommendation of a friend whose opinion I trust, but not by strangers' reviews.  Am I typical?  Probably not.

When I read reviews, I almost always start with the one- and two-star opinions.  In fact, I can't remember when I've ever started with the five-stars. From my earliest experience with Amazon reviews in 2012 and then Goodreads, I knew the five-star reviews were far more likely to be bogus than the one- and two-star criticisms.  To this day, I can read one-star reviews that overtly state they don't know where all the great reviews come from because the book in question is lousy.

I suspect, therefore, that few readers actually rely on published reviews when deciding what books to read.  They may look at the number of reviews and maybe even the rating, but the text review is far less important than genre and price.  Yes, price, because free is attractive to the voracious reader.  I personally download anywhere from five to twelve free Kindle books every single day, thanks to FreeBooksy.com.  (Don't ask when I'll read them.  That's for another blog post.)  When Kindle books by established, traditionally-published genre authors cost $12.99 and up, all that free stuff is mighty attractive.

Often a four or five or nine book series is available for free.  Even if the writing is utter garbage, it's reading material.  And for the non-discriminating reader, the person who just lies on the beach or curls up on the couch to while away a few hours in another place and/or time, quality may not be a priority.

Do (traditional) publishers care about reviews?  Oh, maybe, as long as they're good reviews that promote the book and drive sales.  Publishers are less interested in quality and more interested in quantity; their only concern is the bottom line.  Publishers -- and of course this includes self-publishing authors and small press independents -- do not appear to care if the reviews are honest.  

Can a reviewer collect free books from NetGalley and post the exact same five-star review, not changing a single word, not indicating anything about the book, multiple times and get away with it?  Sure, as long as she has a 4.99 average rating on Goodreads over approximately 5000 titles.  No one cares if she actually read the books or liked them.  As long as she puts down at five-star rating, it's all good.  Three, four, five books a day, every day, five stars here, five stars there.  It's all good.

So then comes the third somewhat rhetorical question: Do the authors care?

Okay, that question goes beyond rhetorical and into facetious.

Authors, and particularly the self-publishing ones, only want five-star reviews.  They don't care how they get them, and they don't care if they're honest opinions or not.  They will buy them from fiverr and other shill outfits.  They will solicit them from friends and family.  They will establish sock puppet accounts on Goodreads -- less easily done on Amazon, but not impossible -- and rate their own books the best evah.  

They will insist that no one should ever rate a book -- especially their book -- negatively without reading the whole thing.  If the book is so bad the reader can't get past the second chapter, is the reader not allowed to say so? Apparently not.  Maybe it gets better in Chapter Five.  Or maybe not.  Regardless . . . .

No negative reviews.

They will insist that no one should ever post a one- or two-star review who hasn't also written a book, because only someone who knows the work that goes into writing can be justified in criticizing a fellow writer's work.  But they will also insist that no fellow writer should ever do anything but support a colleague.  So if you're a writer, you're only allowed to post positive, supportive reviews even if they're untrue.

No negative reviews.

Writers will say -- on Twitter, on Facebook, on Goodreads, on Amazon -- that they welcome constructive criticism.  Negative reviews are allowed (of other writers' work) if they contain suggestions for improvement.  Of course, the reviewer has no way of knowing if the author will pay attention to those suggestions.  And the writer has no idea if the reviewer is qualified to make those suggestions.  And then there are the readers: Do they want to take a chance that the author ignored the advice?  Do readers even know what's good writing advice and what isn't?

I know, I know, I know.  We've been down this road before.  At the end, we always come up against that great big huge gate where the reviewer is accused of being a gatekeeper -- or just a plain hater, or even a jealous hater -- and nothing is accomplished.  Turn around, go back the way you came, pick up another book that's got 1500 five-star ratings on Goodreads and hope for the best. If it's not the best, or not even good at all, don't say anything.  It's not allowed.

If you're one of those readers who has been discouraged from writing honest, critical reviews and who has increasingly turned to traditionally published books that tend to get more honest reviews or to old favorite comfort reads, do you ever wonder if there are new authors you might be missing?  Or do you weigh that loss against the risk of finding just another piece of crap?

Okay, that's not a rhetorical question.  It's legit.  Even though the odds against finding something good are rather high, there is always the slim chance of finding a good freebie.

But even less rhetorical is the question to the authors who aren't being read.  The authors who are being pressured to give away twenty thousand free copies of their books in the hope that someone will read them and give a good review and prompt other people to buy the book.  That question is, How do you feel when you see all the freebies going out and the five-star reviews coming in and you know the books are crap?

Which gets us back to the book mentioned in the opening disclosure.

I forced myself to read just about half of Sophie Love's The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast before I gave up in disgust.  The first two chapters were lively and interesting, and introduced the main character Marie, who is 39 going on 12.  Marie is locked in a dead-end job -- the book's description paints her as a successful dog groomer in Boston, but she's a down-trodden employee of the groomer -- and in a dead-end relationship. All the dead-endedness comes to a head, and Marie quits both job and boyfriend and takes off for Maine.  She inherits a seaside mansion from her great-aunt and decides to turn it into a bed and breakfast.  Three weeks later, she's up and running.  Sort of.

Marie has no clue what she's doing. Though she claims to have had this dream of running a B&B since childhood, she's never apparently done any research on how to do it. She sets up a website in half an afternoon or so and expects reservations to come pouring in immediately.

How is she taking payments?  What laws govern B&Bs in Maine?  Does she have insurance to cover liability if her guests get hurt?  What is she going to do for money?

Most readers won't notice any of this and won't care.

I noticed and I cared.

She starts major renovations on the house almost immediately; where is the money coming from? Her savings?  She had savings working as a dog groomer?  

Her contractor quits, or just fails to keep showing up, and Marie does nothing for several days until finally his assistant just starts doing the rest of the work.  The renovations in question are not one- or two-day jobs, yet she's planning to have guests in less than a month.

Oh, there's also a dog.  Named Boo.  Halfway through the book I don't know if he's a ghost ("Canine Casper") or not.

Halfway through the book, there's no murder, no breakfast. 

Halfway through the book, Marie gets her first paying customer and he does something to upset her to the point that she runs out of the house and heads for town, leaving this guy alone in her B&B.  I'm not sure if she runs to town or drives -- she has an ancient but reliable Saab (they stopped production in 2014) -- but she gushes out her tale of woe to her friend and no one suggests she go back to her business and, you know, take care of business.

It's not just Marie who is, well, TSTL.  Her paying guest, Brendan Peck, is just as bad.  

“I’m a photojournalist on assignment to sort of… well… hold on. Let me start again. Because I only tell people I’m a photojournalist when I don’t want to embarrass myself.”

“So then what are you?”

Brendan sighed and said, “I’m a paranormal investigator. I’m on assignment for a television network

Love, Sophie. The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast (A Canine Casper Cozy Mystery—Book 1) (pp. 80-81). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. 

He's on assignment.  He's some kind of professional.  He has some kind of experience.  Or at least that's what I thought.

But then he gets video footage of something paranormal inside the B&B and he posts the video to Twitter.

“I know, I’m so sorry. I should have gotten your permission first.”

“You really should have,” she said. She wasn’t angry… not yet. She was more disappointed than anything else. “Did you post where it was taken?”

He frowned, his eyes still on the ghost on his laptop. “Yes. But I can delete it! No harm, right?”

Love, Sophie. The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast (A Canine Casper Cozy Mystery—Book 1) (p. 85). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. 

Of course, it's all going to work out in the end, isn't it?  None of his 31K followers will have seen it, other than the 26 or 27 who liked or retweeted it . . . .

That's when Marie runs out and leaves him there.  She runs into town -- I don't know how far it is and I'm not interested in looking it up -- to have lunch with her friend.  While they're eating, the reservations come pouring in.  Brendan's tweet has saved Marie's business!  The one she doesn't know how to operate!  The one she just literally ran away from!

That's when I gave up.

Those are the structural issues, and they're serious.  The stylistic issues are less serious, but they're not inconsequential.  At one point Marie reminisces about sliding down the balcony in the house when she was a child visiting her great-aunt who lived there.  No, one slides down a banister.  Marie constantly refers to the house as a "manor." Well, maybe it is, but there are other words, too, and just using manor over and over and over makes it stand out.  

These are fine details a good critique partner probably would have caught and fixed.  Or a good editor.  It's pretty obvious to this reader that Sophie Love had neither.

I can't leave a negative review on Amazon because I'm an author of romantic suspense/gothic romance.  I can't leave a review on Goodreads because I'm banned there -- for writing honest but negative reviews.

Mostly I write reviews for readers, because I believe readers deserve honesty.  They also deserve to know there are better books out there and they don't have to settle for crap.  Sometimes that means writing a review based on one page, which invokes all kinds of anger from the self-publishing authors.  The writing problems manifested on page one are almost never resolved later in the book.  Writing problems that manifest on page one are problems with the writer, and the writer doesn't change.

But now I'm also reviewing for writers.  For those writers who really do want to improve, who don't want to be relegated to giving away boxed sets of a dozen full-length novels or selling them for $0.99 on Amazon.  Maybe they're making a lot of money via page views on Kindle Unlimited, but if so, why are they giving the books away for virtually nothing?

The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast might actually have potential. I got notice that there's been an update just since I downloaded it six weeks ago, but of course I have no way of comparing the two versions because Amazon will erase the old one when it downloads the new one.

I'll continue to write reviews like this.  Read and follow them if you like.  Respond if you care to.  I won't tolerate abuse, and I won't edit for free.

Word Perfection

No one is perfect.  Well, except Nadia Comaneci, and Torvill and Dean.

That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't strive for perfection.

I take a great deal of pride in my grammar, spelling, and proofreading skills.  I know that mine are above average, but I also know that the results of refining those skills are attainable by nearly every writer who dreams of uploading a manuscript to Amazon. 


I finished the actual writing of The Looking-Glass Portrait on 11 July 2016.  Because it was written using Word Perfect, I had to convert the document to Microsoft Word before I could upload it.  There are certain conventions of the two softwares that are not 100% compatible, so I had to go through the entire manuscript and make manual corrections to things like em and en dashes, tabs and ellipses, double breaks and so on. This also gave me the opportunity to look in both versions for marked spelling errors and fix them. 

Spell check tools are wonderful.  They won't catch everything, but they catch a lot.  Anyone who doesn't take advantage of them is just plain foolish.  I've seen too many author-published works on Amazon that have clearly never been run through even the most rudimentary spell-checking program.  This is unforgivable.

After putting my MSWord document through the conversion to HTML and then to mobi, I uploaded it to Kindle Direct Publishing on 18 July.  Yes, just one week.  No one else had read it.  No one else had proofread it.  No one else had edited it.  I knew I was taking a huge risk that I might have missed something major, but I was willing to take that risk and trust at least to my own proofreading skills.

The uploading process contains its own spell check application.  I used it, too, because you never know what the other programs might have missed.  And they had in fact missed one typo that I was able to fix before uploading.  I hit the "publish" button.

By Word Perfect's count, the book is something over 138,000 words long.  After a few readers got back to me, we had identified a grand total of three -- three -- errors that escaped my eagle eyes:  a missing space between two words, a wrong word, and a missing word.  All were easily fixed so the corrected document can be uploaded to Amazon.

Am I bragging?  Yes, I am!  But I'm also saying that this can be done by anyone who is willing to learn the skills or learn to rely on others who have the skills.  Your readers should be able to sit down with your book and read it, not correct it.  Are three errors acceptable?  Well, not by me!  Would I throw a book against a wall for three errors in 400 pages?  No, of course not.  But I wouldn't read past the first page if I found three errors on it.

It's not enough to put your heart and soul, your blood, sweat, and tears into you book.  You have to put your skill into it, too.  Language is the absolutely essential tool you have with which to build your literary world, and if you don't learn to use it with consummate skill, you probably won't be able to tell a story people will be willing to pay good money for.

Almost perfect words

I got a very rude awakening the other day.  I learned that the Kindle Direct Publishing platform has instituted some changes.  More than likely, these changes were announced and explained in the e-newsletter Kindle distributes, but after finding too many errors in the first issue of that periodical, I confess I haven't been diligent in reading subsequent issues.  Not that I have a whole lot of time for that, but it is unprofessional of me, so I will try to do better.

Due to an issue that had arisen while I was formatting Legacy of Honor in preparation for Kindle publishing, I thought I would recheck the three books I had already published online. 

When I published those three, the Kindle program offered only limited emulation for the author/uploader to see how the document would appear on the Kindle.  Over time, that emulation has been expanded to include Kindle Fire, iPhone, iPad, and several other devices.   I strongly advise any author who has published via KDP to re-examine their documents -- and continue to do so on a routine basis -- to see if there are any formatting glitches that may come to light with this expanded preview capability and changes in device software.  For example, I noticed that the paragraph indents on one of my books should probably be adjusted to make for a better reading experience on all the various devices.  This adjustment is very easy to make, and of course can be checked before hitting the final "publish" button.

What I didn't know until a few days ago, however, was that KDP now has a spellcheck feature.  How long this has been there, I don't know, but I admit with some embarrassment that it was a surprise to me.  And it wasn't a pleasant surprise, because it brought up a list of misspelled words from one of my books.

I pride myself on my proofreading skills.  Do I claim to be perfect?  No, of course not, and especially not with my own work.  I know that it's far too easy to see what we expect to see when we're reading something we've written.  I still find errors in my stuff when I've gone back to reread weeks or months or even years later.  Not a lot of them and not all that often, but I do find them. 

Most often, however, those errors are misused/wrong words.  "That" for "than" or vice versa, or "from" for "form."  Or just a word left out.  But I'm a pretty good speller and a fair enough typist that I can rely on autocorrect and spellcheck to catch a lot of the basics and on my own good eye for the rest, even if it takes two or three or more passes.

Seeing that list of misspellings pop up from the Kindle spellcheck software rather alarmed me.  Then I read through the words that had been flagged.

An invented name.
A slang word.
An invented descriptive word.
A contraction.
A misspelled word.

In other words (pun intended), out of approximately 110,000 words, I had missed exactly one simple typographical error.  One. 

Needless to say, I immediately checked both of the other books.  Again there were invented names and slang and contractions, but this time not a single misspelling in either book.

Out of roughly 350,000 words, ONE was misspelled, according to Kindle's own spellcheck.

All three of these novels were uploaded from my original digital manuscripts, not from anything any publisher had edited or fixed or formatted or typeset.  These were not OCR scans of printed pages.  I will take the blame for any errors, but I will also take the credit for very, very clean writing.

The point of this?  Oh, partly it's just to brag and pat myself on the back.  But it's also to put the lie to those lazy and incompetent writers who defend their self-published pieces of crap with the old "It's impossible to catch all of one's own errors."

Kindle will do at least part of it for you, if you weren't diligent enough or competent enough on your own.  Can't you at least do that much?

Words as therapy, words as dreams

One lovely Sunday morning in August of 1963, I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled to the little drug store near my home.  I purchased an ordinary spiral notebook there and pedaled home.  With pencil in hand, I sat down on the front porch of our house, opened the notebook, and began to write:

Sunday, August 11, 1963 (Morning entry)

I won't bore you with the teen-aged drivel-and-angst the followed.  After all, I was two months shy of fifteen so there was a lot of teen-aged drivel-and-angst to be written.

This was not, of course, my first foray into writing.  At a considerably younger age -- perhaps 9 or 10 -- I had started a number of the almost obligatory horse-and-girl fantasy stories, but by the time I reached junior high, my range of reading material had changed.  I was only in sixth grade, so not yet 12, when I began writing a pirate story in the style of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood, with a bit of treasure from The Count of Monte Cristo thrown in for good measure.  The summer before the diary was born, I had started what would today probably be called a dark ages historical romance, set during the barbarian invasions that collapsed the Roman Empire.  Though none of that manuscript remains in existence, I remember enough details of the story to know that my historical research for that period was pretty much non-existent!  Can you spell "anachronism"?

Sometime between the summer of 1962 and the summer of 1963, however, I began work on yet another novel, a contemporary mystery romance titled A Party of Ghosts.  The plot is kind of not really there and the main character is very Mary Sue-ish.  But there are themes of murder and sexual violence and non-marital sex and there may even be an illegal abortion.  This was pretty strong stuff for a 14 year old.  I'm not sure how far along I was on this novel by August of 1963, but I had definitely made a healthy start on it.  Writing the diary was not a new adventure for me.

Interestingly, though, I kept at it.  And I kept at the other writing, too.  Eventually, perhaps in the summer of 1964, I finished A Party of Ghosts.  The first draft -- chapterless and single-spaced on an ancient Remington manual typewriter -- is about 100,000 words, and I still have most of it.  There are a few pages missing, and I'm not sure why, but most of it resides in the file cabinet next to my desk as I write this.  Like the diary, it's filled with a lot of teen-aged drivel-and-angst.

I continued to write through high school, through my first stab at college at the University of Illinois, through my wanderings to New York and France and Spain and back again, but none of my fiction reached the completed manuscript stage.  And again, I still have a lot of it, tucked neatly in file folders or three-ring-binders.  Most of it is, um, not very good.

With my marriage in June of 1969, I vowed not to write fiction any more and instead to put my energy into being a wife and eventually a mother.  That vow lasted a few months.  But I had never promised to give up the diary, and it went on.  Yes, by that time, the diary was almost six years old.  It had gone beyond that spiral notebook and now filled several.

As the years went on and I continued to write fiction, I continued to keep the diary as well.  It now, almost 50 years later, comprises 23 spiral notebooks of various sizes and has recently entered the 24th.  I spent a great deal of spare time over a  period of about eight years actually transcribing it all, often horribly embarrassed in the process.  Was I really that angst-ridden at that age?  And "that age" wasn't necessarily as a teen-ager!

Would I ever want the diary published.  Good goddess, no!  I'd be mortified.  As Susan Douglas writes in the "Introduction" to Where the Girls Are: Growing up female with the mass media:  "Reading the diary I kept as a teenager is now excruciating, so mortifying that, if someone were to find it, I think I would blind myself with hot coals or simply commit hara-kiri.  I look back at my former self . . . the words she wrote in her spiral notebooks obsessed with two topics -- boys and sex -- and I wonder:  Who are you?  How could you have been so insipid?  Are you related to me?  How did you become me?"

When I read the first page of Douglas's marvelous, witty, and yet devastatingly honest book, I knew exactly what she was talking about.  But I also felt she had missed one point:  The importance of being able to look back at that former self.  Douglas's book, however, is not about the value of keeping a diary.  And keeping a diary is not a luxury everyone has or wants to have.

But as recent events have unfolded regarding the publication of unedited, authentic personal accounts, lost in the legal ramifications is, I believe, the true empowerment value of being able to express, without reservation and without qualification, one's feelings, all the drivel-and-angst that assails all of us at any age.

I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to  write.  It was never a matter of wanting to; I simply did it.  And I can understand that there are people for whom writing isn't the joy it is for me.  But as I've read some of the personal accounts of people who have endured traumatic personal events, more and more often I've read that they found some comfort, some relief, some healing in the venting of their feelings through writing. 

This kind of personal satisfaction doesn't rely on good grammar or perfect spelling.  The writer doesn't need to know or care about the difference between affect and effect, accept and except, writing and writting and written and wrote.  None of that matters, and it shouldn't.  That's the kind of writing that is for the writer.  She and only she is going to read it, and she knows what she means and what she wants to mean.  Eyes off and hands off her words.  They don't belong to anyone else.

That's how I feel about my diary.  When someone once read a part of it, I felt absolutely and totally violated, as though he had drilled a hole in my head and not only entered my thoughts and feelings but took them away from me, claimed them for himself, deprived me of my most personal possession.  For that reason, I never ever ever violated my children's privacy.  I never listened in on their phone calls.  I never looked through their dresser drawers.  When I found  a little "diary" that my daughter had written at the age of about 13 or 14, I returned it to her unopened and unread -- and it didn't matter that she was by then in her 30s!  The privacy of thoughts was sacrosanct.

When a writer decides to share her words, whether it's with one other person or with "the public," all those things that didn't matter before suddenly do matter.  Grammar and spelling and punctuation and using the right words.  All that stuff.  Why?  Because now she wants someone else to read her thoughts, and she has to use the tools of language to make those thoughts as clear as she can.  And the more people she wants to share it with, the more important her skill with those tools become.

As angst-ridden as my diaries from those teen-age years are, they are at least competently written.  As shallow and plotless and Mary Sue-ish as A Party of Ghosts is, at least a reader would understand what I was trying to say.  The verbs are right, the pronouns have proper antecedents, words are spelled correctly, commas are used where they're needed and not used where they aren't.

But that's because I always wrote.  I took the lessons learned in "language arts" class, as it was called at South Junior High in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and I used them to hone my storytelling skills.  These were the absolutely essential tools of the writing craft.  In all the years since then, I have often wondered if they might not also be the absolutely essential tools of living.

Maybe not.  Maybe now, in the days of Twitter and texting, when speed and brevity are more important, when feelings deeper than a :-) or a :grr: have no emoticons, when "IKR" is a whole sentence, what difference does writing make?

Writing makes a difference because we can't dream in emoticons and acronyms.  We still say "I know, right?!" in a way that means so much more than "IKR."  Maybe that will change with some future technology.  Maybe someday there will be tablets that you touch an icon and a whole emotional paragraph will appear on the screen or be broadcast through the speakers.  Who knows?  But for now, words are all we have to take what's in our hearts, our souls, our dreams, and make it real enough to share with someone else.

Sorrow shared is sorrow cut in half; joy shared is joy doubled. 

Sometimes it helps to share our sorrow, our grief, our fear, our anger, even if the only one you can share it with yourself.  Write it out, put it on paper or on the computer screen, and even if you don't share it with anyone else, even if you don't send that angry email or post that vicious comment or publish that scathing blog, just getting the words out can help.  Maybe it's just a vent for pressure and steam, or maybe it puts ideas into context, or maybe it helps understand.  If it's for yourself, that's enough.

But when the time comes to share the dreams and fears and joy and pain, then it matters how you write it.  It matters if you want someone else to be able to understand and feel what you felt. 

We do that, we who write, by following conventions so everyone is on the same page (pun intended).  Some of those conventions are so obvious they don't seem to need much explanation.  We all use the same alphabet, for example.  We all know what most of the common words mean: a, the, and, book, story, large, small, running, walking, eating.  We know, as both readers and writers, that something that doesn't follow those conventions won't make a whole lot of sense.

For example:

Deer Sirr:

I seed yoo wokkin outer the pos offiss yessaday an is hoppin yoo fown mi wollet gotz sum munny init.

Can you figure that one out?  Would it have been easier to read if I had written

Dear sir:

I seen you walkin outta the post office yestiday and I is hopin' you found the money what I lost.

In creating fiction, the writer has lots of options for re-creating the differences between what we consider standard English and non-standard.  Does the exact same feeling come across?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the compromise gives the same impression -- the person who wrote the note is not well educated and probably doesn't speak any more literate than he or she writes -- while still leaving the text intelligible for the reader without forcing her to back out of the reading experience to understand it.

This is part of the "invisible manuscript" technique that's so important for every writer.  You want the reader to forget she's just looking at letters and words on a page.   You want her to enter into the experience you're describing.

Some of us are lucky enough by fortune and experience to have acquired the language skills necessary to do that, and to have acquired them before we embarked on anything resembling a writing career.  For those who didn't, however, there are options.  Not everyone, of course, plans to become a writer.  Many who never wanted to write or who even actively disliked writing when they were in school find themselves years later wanting or needing those skills. Some never had the opportunity to learn.  But no matter what the reason, failure to write in a manner that allows the reader to enter the story rather than struggle to discern the meaning pretty much guarantees that the work will not find an audience.  If you want your story read, if you want people to get your message -- whatever that message may be -- you must make sure your writing conforms to the conventions established.

Does this mean you need an editor?  Yes, it does.

The necessity for a good, competent editor is never more apparent than when a good story that's been badly written is published, and all the world gets to see how terrible the writer is.  No matter how wonderful, how powerful, how emotional the story is, if the reader can't read it, all that wonder and power and emotion are lost.

Again:  If you are writing for yourself, if you are writing to get out the pain and fear and joy and frustration and excitement, none of it matters.  When you want to share that pain and fear and joy and excitement, it matters a lot.  And only a fool thinks it doesn't.

Edit, editing, edited: Do you even know what the words mean?

Warning and disclaimer:

This is a rant.  It is an angry rant that may be filled with "bad" words. 

IF YOU ARE A SELF-PUBLISHED WRITER WHO HAS HAD NEGATIVE REVIEWS BECAUSE READERS HAVE SAID YOUR BOOK CONTAINED MISSPELLINGS, PUNCTUATION ERRORS, WORDS USED INCORRECTLY, OR NEEDED EDITING, PLEASE PUT ON YOUR BIG GIRL PANTIES BEFORE READING.


I've written before about there being a difference between proofreading and editing.  Let me explain it again.

Proofreading generally is intended to fix errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and word usage.  In other words, errors on a micro level of writing mechanics.

A proofreader may -- but may not -- correct errors of grammar such as replacing "had went" with "had gone" or "several ladys's coats" with "several ladies' coats."  A proofreader may -- but may not -- correct errors such as a character's name changing from Harry to Woodrow in the middle of Chapter 3 or point out that the hero has brown eyes in the prologue and blue in the middle of the opening scene.  A proofreader will probably not tell you that your scene set on the corner of Dearborn and LaSalle in Chicago violates the known cartography of the city because Dearborn and LaSalle run parallel to each other.  A proofreader will almost certainly not correct historical inaccuracies nor inform you that the character on page 75 who is sharing a carriage with the heroine had in fact been killed on page 62.

A proofreader is not an editor, and proofreading is not editing.

How difficult is this to understand?

A proofreader is not an editor, and proofreading is not editing.

Allow me to illustrate:

Thomasina watched out the window in the front door until her mother and brother had went, then she locked the door. Now that the confrontation was over, she gave in to the overwhelming weighth of stress. Much as she wanted to follow commonsense and secured the locks on the back door, she stumbled only as far as the stairway. Her knees were weak, her head ached, and she feared she would collapse in hysterical tears if she didn't give herself a receipt.

She sank down onto the bottom stair and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, forehead on her upturned palms.

"I should of stayed in Seattle," She lamented aloud, but even as the echoes faded in the stillness, a shivery tightening in her stomach reminded her that if she had not came back to Ridgewood, to the confrontations with her family and questions of the House, to the enduring and now pressing mystery of her Father's death, she would of never re-established contact with Steve Angelotti.

She took a deep and calming breath and tilted her head back, then to each side, stretching the taunt muscles in her neck and shoulders. Whatever the problems, the decision to return to Ridgewood were her own to make. 

She was hungry, too.  A glance at her watch told her it was nearly half past seven, her sandwich and salad lunch with Steve was hours ago. But as she glanced down the hall toward the kitchen, she wondered how she would ever keep anything on a stomach as knotted as her's was right now.

Let's try that again:

Thomasina watched out the window in the front door until her mother and brother had gone, then she locked the door. Now that the confrontation was over, she gave in to the overwhelming weight of stress. Much as she wanted to follow common sense and secure the locks on the back door, she stumbled only as far as the stairway. Her knees were weak, her head ached, and she feared she would collapse in hysterical tears if she didn't give herself a respite.

She sank down onto the bottom stair and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, forehead on her upturned palms.

"I should have stayed in Seattle," she lamented aloud, but even as the echoes faded in the stillness, a shivery tightening in her stomach reminded her that if she had not come back to Ridgewood, to the confrontations with her family and questions of the House, to the enduring and now pressing mystery of her father's death, she would have never re-established contact with Steve Angelotti.

She took a deep and calming breath and tilted her head back, then to each side, stretching the taut muscles in her neck and shoulders. Whatever the problems, the decision to return to Ridgewood was her own to make. 

She was hungry, too.  A glance at her watch told her it was nearly half past seven; her sandwich and salad lunch with Steve was hours ago. But as she glanced down the hall toward the kitchen, she wondered how she would ever keep anything on a stomach as knotted as hers was right now.

If you don't know what the mistakes were and couldn't correct them by yourself, you need a proofreader.

A proofreader, however, will not fix bad writing, poor story construction, lackluster characterization, static description, research errors, implausible motivation, impossible logic, or any of the other macro level problems that beset far too many self-published works.

If all you've done is hire someone to clean up the punctuation and spelling, DO NOT claim that you've had the book edited.

The above selection is from a contemporary gothic romance I'm writing titled The Looking-Glass Portrait.  I had to create the errors in the first sample so there would be something to fix, and then, by the goddess, I fixed the errors.

If the person you hire doesn't, can't, or won't correct all of your grammar and syntax errors, they haven't done any editing, and they haven't even done a competent job of proofreading.



Here's a brief passage from Leah Banicki's Seeing the Elephant originally published in 2011:

Corinne stands waiting in her Aunt's fashionable 12th street Boston home. The walls gilded in pinks and golds. The chandelier weeps with great drops of crystal. This place doesn't look like a prison, but Corinne lost her freedom the moment she tied her first whalebone corset around her petite frame.

Banicki, Leah. Seeing the Elephant (Wildflowers) (p. 5). Smashwords. Kindle Edition.

The book received some nice reviews on Amazon, but also some very harsh criticism for the poor grammar, especially the shifts in tenses.

Today -- 4 December 2012 -- the revised version of that book was free on Amazon, with a new cover, a new title, and an announcement from the author that it's been revised, rewritten, and "professionally edited."

Here's that same passage from Finding Her Way, the revised version published 27 October 2012:

Corinne waited in her Aunt's fashionable 12th street Boston home. The walls gilded in pinks and golds, great drops of crystal cascaded from the chandeliers, the grand staircase wrapped elegantly around the back and majestically descended into the great hall. Halfway down the stairs there was a great view of the parlor on one side and the ballroom on the other. Artisans from Italy and France laid the exquisite marble floor. The fireplaces designed by a famous stonemason, the iron grates, and tools imported from the best artists and craftsmen from around the world. Few houses in Boston could boast of finer rooms or impressive displays of wealth. It had been a long while since it even fazed Corinne. This place did not look like a prison, but Corinne had lost her freedom a few years ago when she tied her first whalebone corset around her petite frame. The grandeur came at a price.

Banicki, Leah (2012-10-27). Finding Her Way (Wildflowers) (Kindle Locations 150-171). . Kindle Edition.

The segment has quite obviously been rewritten and expanded. The mix of present and past tenses has been fixed. But "Aunt's" should not have been capitalized in the first section and that error wasn't fixed in the rewrite. The Boston address of "12th Street" should have been capitalized, and that error wasn't fixed either. The short incomplete sentence about the walls in the first passage was expanded for the second, but it remains an incomplete sentence, sort of, but mixed with others to make a ghastly run-on sentence.  The second highlighted description is a similar combination of fragments and comma splices. The use of the word "impressive" is incorrect, since the sentence structure implies "few houses in Boston could boast of impressive displays of wealth." Should the word "more" have been inserted? I don't know. All I know is that in this single paragraph there is more than enough evidence to show me this book was not "edited." It wasn't even proofread very well.

I've said often enough that I'm not going to do book reviews here on this blog, but I have to say I'm sorely tempted right now. Except that there is no way I could even begin to read, let alone review, this book without indulging in some very heavy critiquing. The opening is all tell, no show. There is a major historical error on the opening page. There are still words being used inaccurately.

Is it an improvement over the first version? Yeah, I guess so. But it hasn't been edited. And that's the point I'm trying to make. I'm sure Leah Banicki won't read this. I'm sure dozens of other self-publishing writers who are paying for "editing" services won't read this either. They'll go into denial, they'll insist there are no errors, they'll call me a hater or a jealous competitor or something. And they will never admit that they screwed up. They will never admit their stories are flawed, their writing is inadequate, their research is flimsy, their characters are wooden/TSTL/whatever. Most important, they will insist until the cows come home that the book must be absolutely flawless because they've had it "professionally edited."

Except they haven't. They don't even know what the word means.

"Perfect" is not a word I use very often

And with good reason.  Almost nothing is "perfect" anyway -- except some verb tenses.

That doesn't mean perfection isn't an acceptable goal.  The closer we approach it, the better we are at whatever it is we're doing.  Believing we've reached it, however, too often signifies we've lost sight of reality.  This is especially true of writing.

The other day, a reader pointed out to me that there were still some small errors in the Kindle version of Firefly.  As I explained to her, I knew about them but had left them because of my on-going battle with Amazon over the Kindle for PC application software.  These errors only appear on certain Kindle device displays, not on all.  And since the author has no way to know if a "fix" to an error will end up making it actually worse on other devices. . . . well, you see the dilemma.

At the time  Firefly was published on Amazon, the KDP preview only allowed the publisher (that's me) to preview how the document would appear on the basic Kindle device.  Amazon has now enhanced the KDP process so that the publisher has a variety of preview options and can now see how the document will look on the Kindle, Kindle Fire, iPhone, and others.  This is certainly an improvement.  So I was able to take the comments from this reader and check out what the errors looked like on the various platforms, something I had not been able to do before.

This allowed me to confirm that the formatting errors do appear on all the other devices -- but not, ironically, on the Kindle for PC!  So I've decided to proofread the text as it is previewed for the Kindle Fire and locate the errors.

Unfortunately, I found something else.  And this is why I cringe at the word perfect when applied to anyone's writing.

It's not a typo or a formatting glitch, nor is it a problem created by the conversion of the original 1987 Symphony documents into Word Perfect 4.0 for DOS and then through a succession of Word Perfect for Windows versions and finally into MS Word for the uploading to Kindle.  Yeah, there were a bunch of those, and they were a nightmare, and they provided the foundation for those lingering bugs in the Kindle version.  Nope, it's not anything like that.

It's a continuity error that's been in the book since that 1987 Symphony version.  I never caught it, and neither did my (cough, cough) editor at Pageant Books.  All the times I've read Firefly since, and especially all the times I've gone through it in preparing it for digital publication, I never caught this particular little mistake.

But there it is, so minor and insignificant that in all these years, all these readings, no one has mentioned it.  Does it affect the story?  No, not at all.  It can be corrected by deleting, or revising, a single sentence.  In fact, replacing one verb with another will do the trick, and that's probably what I'll do since I have to upload a revised version of the text anyway to fix the formatting errors.

The point is, even someone as nitpicky and perfectionist as I can make mistakes.  And having made them, I can miss them in proofreading and revising and editing and everything else.  Is it embarrassing?  Sure!  And do you think I'm going to tell anyone what it was?  Hell, no!  Neither am I going to make a big deal about the fact that the (cough, cough) editor missed it, too.

These things happen.  No one's perfect. 

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.  And it certainly doesn't mean we should excuse, dismiss, or -- goddess forbid -- defend our mistakes.  Admit it, fix it, and move on.

Giving the words away, or who are you writing for anyway?

One of the reasons I subtitled this blog "Adventures of a Resurrected Romance Novelist" is that part of my adventure involves pulling the past into the present and future.  It's about revamping and republishing old books.  It's about finishing and then publishing books I started years ago.  It's about taking lessons from the past and applying them to the now.

The little "lessons" I've included are, of course, similar to those I offered to fellow writers in the past.  Between about 1983 and 1998, I was active in several different critique groups, belonged to three local RWA chapters, judged dozens of manuscripts for contests, and taught non-credit creative writing classes through Estrella Mountain Community College.  I saw a lot of unpublished writing, and recognized that most of it did not meet the standards to make it publishable at that time.  Now, of course, the technology has altered, to a certain extent, the need for writers to meet publishing standards.  If it's a .doc file, it can be published seems to be the only requirement. 

The book doesn't actually need cover art, although it's possible to slap one together for next to nothing.  I did the cover for Half Heaven, Half Heartache, my undergrad honors thesis on romance novels, using a photograph I'd taken of a rose in my back yard and some inexpensive fonts. 

As can be seen by perusing the offerings from Amazon and Smashwords, there's no requirement that the book be proofread, that the formatting be correct, or even that the writing be stellar.  The writing doesn't even have to be. . .adequate.

I've blogged about this before when I've pointed out some of the really horrible (imho) products out there, the ones in eye-scorching bold fonts with incomprehensibly creative spelling and bizarre, almost random punctuation.  But I'm not alone.  Other readers complain in numerous reviews that they had a difficult time reading the text because of the problems with tenses and grammar and spelling.  And I suspect 95% or more of the time, those complaints fall on blind eyes.  Either the writers don't care, don't understand the complaints, or don't know how to recognize their own errors.

But then there are those writers who defend their errors with the excuse that they did it all deliberately to create a certain mood or convey a certain feeling.  There's an attitude floating around out there that rules don't apply to these authors.  They sometimes go public with statements to the effect that they know how to write, they know how to punctuate, they know how to spell, but it's their story and they will tell it their way.  And furthermore, any reviewer or critic who doesn't like it is just a hater and a stupid head who doesn't understand great creative work.

Uh, no.

I've explained often enough that the rules of grammar and spelling aren't restrictions on a writer's creativity but rather they are tools for unlocking that creativity.  They are the chisels and gouges that remove the excess marble and release the masterpiece hiding inside the stone.  And I've tried to get the point across to writers that if the reader doesn't get it, if the reader can't figure out what the author is trying to convey, then the author has failed.

It is not the reader's job to figure it out.  The reader isn't getting paid to fix the spelling or figure out that the writer didn't know the difference between "allude" and "elude."  The reader can't be blamed if the main character is named Larry in the first two chapters and then somehow morphs into Wayne in the middle of Chapter 3.  And it's not the reader's fault if she gives up in disgust and posts a DNF one-star review.

No, all you Special Snowflakes out there, it is always, always, always the writer's fault.  Even when the reader is wrong, it's the author's fault.  The author, and especially the self-published author, is always and entirely to blame.

Yes, you.  After all, who were you writing it for?

And that's the question every author should ask herself/himself at least 10,000 times before putting the book online for sale, before reading any of the reviews, before commenting on any of the reviews, before ranting and raving and threatening a reviewer who had the unmitigated gall to tell you they can't pronounce the name of your character.

Who were you writing it for? 

Were you writing it for yourself?  Fine.  Do whatever you want.  You can use ghoti=fish spelling if you like.  Youcanignorespacingbetweenwordsifthat'swhatfloatsyourboat.  YOU CAN WRITE IN ALL CAPS AND SCREAM AT YOUR READER or in a bold italic that lacerates the eyeballs.  If it's all about you and what you want and what you like, then why not just keep the book to yourself?  It's your baby, your darling.  It's the opus you've slaved over for years and years and years.

Were you publishing it just so you could say you did it?  Fine.  It's published, now you're done, now walk away from it.  Pay no attention to the critics, the haters, the one-star reviewers, the DNFers, the MFs, the trolls and sock puppets who have blasted your precious words.  You weren't writing it for them anyway, so what does it matter what they think?

Did you upload it to Amazon and Smashwords and then ask all your friends and family to post OMGyougottareadthis reviews?  Why?  Unless you wrote it for other people to actually buy and read, why do you care about reviews and ratings?

Did you write it to make money?  Well, honey, then you wrote it for the readers, and you have to pay attention to what they want and what they like and what they don't like.  And you have to pay attention to what they say.  And you have to not attack them.

Some people can be very mercenary when it comes to their writing and the money they make from it.  They can write anything, even stuff they don't like, so long as it sells and they get paid.

Other people can only write what they love, whether it's poetry or cozy mysteries or rousing pirate adventures.

But no matter what they write, if they want to make money from it, they have to write for the reader.  Because the reader is the one who's got the money you want.  Duh.

And the writer has to understand that if the readers like what they read, they will come back for more.  If they don't like it, no amount of bullshit will persuade them to part with their money.  No amount of bullying, of insulting, of attacking, of browbeating, of whining, of pleading, of lying, of threatening will alter the simple truth: the readers don't like it.

And it's the writer's fault.  Always.  Got it?  Good.

Just a few words about words about words

The knights paraded onto the tournament grounds riding magnificently comparisoned horses with their lances raised.  Once the competition began, the steeds would be given free reign, but for now they pranced in anticipation.  Sir George of Luxling, the only warrior out of the dozen on the field whom carries an unmarked shield, turns his red stallion in a tight circle until they are facing the lord's and ladies whom were seated under the royal canopy.

Lady Ashleigh sat near the end of the canopy between two older women wearing an emmerald green gown and silver crown.  She is the most beautiful woman Sir Luxling had ever seen, he immediately wondered who she was, what her name was, if she married or not.  Lowering his visor and planning how he would make the ladies acquaintance after the tournament, the red stallion snorted and pawed the dusty dirt.

If the preceding two paragraphs don't make your brain hurt, you could be a one-star self-published author -- or an editor at a small digital publisher.

In other words, just because your book was "edited" by someone other than yourself doesn't mean it's free of errors.  Errors of verb tense.  Errors of misplaced modifiers.  Errors of peerage titles.  Errors of pronoun case.  Errors of word usage.  Errors of missing words.  Errors of spelling/typing.  Errors of punctuation.

When a reviewer complains that a book needed to be edited, the author should not insist that the reviewer is wrong.  Just because someone edited the book doesn't mean it's free of errors.  Sadly, I've been looking at a lot of digital books that have been issued by well-known digital publishers, and the books are riddled with exactly the kind of errors illustrated and listed above.

The author whose name goes on the cover has to accept full and complete and ultimate responsibility for the quality of the product.  Shifting the blame doesn't correct the errors.

And yet another update: Your words, my words, and Amazon

Okay, folks, this saga just goes on and on and on, with no resolution in sight.  And yes, this is in progress and will be updated as I get more information.

A second lengthy online chat with an Amazon service representative on Friday, 13 July 2012, yielded more misinformation, but it did not provide a workable solution to the problem.

Amazon is still saying that the problem with the formatting of Norma Beishir's Angels at Midnight as it appears on my Kindle for PC is caused by my Kindle for PC and that the only way to fix it is to de-register all the various Kindle for PC apps that have somehow appeared on my laptop computer, uninstall them, delete all of my Kindle content, and start from scratch.  This would involve redownloading 628 books.

When I tried actually installing the Kindle for PC app on my desktop computer, guess what happened?  ALL THE OTHER KINDLE FOR PC APPS also appeared.  Worse, however, was that some 54 of my downloaded books DISappeared.  Or so it seemed.  The suggestion I made to Amazon -- and documented in the chat log -- was that it looked like the 54 missing books could very well be free samples that I had downloaded, and some of them were for books that were no longer available on Amazon.  I had no desire to lose those free samples, at which point the Amazon rep told me there was nothing they could do about it.

In fact, she had no clue what she was talking about, because it turned out those missing books were NOT the free samples.  I still have no idea why there is a discrepancy of 54 books between my Kindle library as it shows for the Kindle for PC that I downloaded to my desktop computer and the Kindle for PC app on my laptop.

So I spent a good portion of yesterday -- Saturday, 14 July 2012 -- making sure I had back-ups of all my Kindle content.  Don't ask me how I did it.  You don't want to know.  At least not right now.  I finished that project this morning, which involved deleting and redownloading approximately 25 of the 627 books already on the device.

No one seems to know why that was necessary.

Sidebar update:  It appears, but it is not confirmed, that an update to the Kindle for PC app was made sometime in March 2012 and this may have caused all existing Kindle content to require the delete-and-redownload process.  Again, this is what appears to have happened, but I have no confirmation.  For some reason or other approximately 25 of my Kindle books had not been redownloaded at that time, and they required that process in order to facilitate the back-up process.  All of my Kindle content has now been backed up.


But with everything backed up as securely as I could make it, I decided to try downloading a new book.  On today's free list was Danger at Mellin Cove by Rena George.  I downloaded it and opened it in my Kindle for PC.  And the formatting was screwed up.

Although it's not easy to see on this screen shot, the problem is so bad that I cannot read the book:  At the beginning of each line of text on the left margin, about half of the first letter is missing.  The first letters of indented lines are fine; only the very left edge is affected.  And this goes through the entire book, making it unreadable.  One has to stop at the beginning of each line to figure out what the missing letter should be.

Here's the "Look Inside" version:

As you can see, this version has indented paragraphs, and all the letters are clearly visible.  Not at all like the version that showed up on my Kindle for PC with its indented block paragraphs and chopped off letters.

The  first thing I did was report this to Amazon via the book's page.  I explained what the problem was and that it was through the entire book.  About an hour later, I received a stock message from Amazon asking me where in the book the problem was and what the problem was.  As you can imagine, I was not particularly polite in my reply, since that is exactly what I had already told them.

About two hours later, I received another canned reply from Amazon informing me that due to the formatting error, Danger at Mellin Cove was being pulled until the problem could be fixed.  As far as I've been able to determine, the book has not been pulled and the problem has not been fixed.  Again, the problem doesn't show up on the "Look Inside" preview. 


Update:  16 July 2012:  Danger at Mellin Cove was briefly unavailable in the Kindle edition.  It is currently available for $1.54, which may be a conversion of the UK price.  I don't know. 

In the space of a week now, I've discovered two self-published books that are not showing up correctly on the Amazon Kindle for PC application.  I already know about the problems that cropped up with Firefly and which I now have no real way of verifying if all is well.  There was a huge and very nasty brouhaha in the Amazon "Badly Behaving Authors" thread a week or so ago because of another book that didn't show correctly on all devices; it was actually removed from circulation and some changes made, but that book, Wisteria Falls, remains not-quite-right on my Kindle for PC.

Self-published authors should not have to purchase every single variety of Kindle device in order to be sure their product is being published correctly.

Another update: Is Amazon messing with your words?

I am going to publish this in an incomplete form because I want to get this information out as soon as I can.  The basics are here now, and I will be providing the balance over the next day or so.  Unfortunately, I have to devote some time to my day job.



At the moment, Thursday evening, 12 July 2012, I'm so angry I can scarcely type.  And considering my day job consists of transcribing recorded interviews and I'm several hours behind on today's work, I'd better get my fingers back under control.

I just spent an hour and a half "chatting" with "Shiela" at Amazon.  She may be a real person, or she may be a cleverly programmed bit of software designed to answer customer questions.  I don't know for sure.  But here's what happened.

This morning, while I was at my favorite coffee shop, I downloaded the free Kindle edition of Norma Beishir's Angels at Midnight.  I already have a print copy of the 1989 edition, but I'm trying to clean out some of my paper books and this looked like a way to eliminate one more.  After downloading, I popped open the Kindle for PC app and sat back to read for a while.

Unfortunately, I couldn't read it.  The formatting was totally messed up.  I went back and checked the "Look Inside" preview on the book's listing to see if I had missed something, because what I was looking at on my Kindle for PC was totally unlike what I'd seen in the "Look Inside" feature.

Here's what I saw when I looked at the preview:

Standard Times Roman font, indented paragraphs, just like one would see in a "real" book.  Since Norma Beishir is a long-time publishing professional, this was nothing less than I expected.

What showed up on my Kindle was something entirely different!  Arial font, double spaced indented paragraphs, it was horrible! 

So I reported the formatting problem to Amazon via the book's page, and not too long after that I got an emailed reply from Amazon with directions on how to fix it:  Remove and redownload the book, and if that didn't work, make sure I had the current Kindle for PC installed on my computer.

By the time I got that reply, I was at home on the main computer and couldn't access the laptop where my Kindle app resides, so it wasn't until this evening that I got around to trying that fix.  Ultimately, it didn't work -- the Kindle version was still horrible.   I first did the remove and redownload of the book.  Then I installed the latest update to the Kindle for PC app.  Still no change.  I deleted the book and downloaded it again.  No change.

And so I got on an Amazon chat with a technician to fix it.

Guess what.  It can't be fixed.  Period.

The first solution "Shiela" offered me was to de-register and re-register my Kindle for PC.  That would involve removing and re-downloading all 626 books I've already downloaded.  Since some of those books are no longer available at Amazon and I didn't want to lose them,  this was not a preferred option.

As it turned out, it wouldn't have worked anyway.

When I told "Shiela" I wasn't willing to do that just to fix a formatting glitch on one book out of 626, she went to find another solution.

The second option involved her checking to see if the file had been properly formatted.

After putting me on hold for several minutes, she came back and told me she had checked the document as Beishir intended it, and that's what I was seeing.  In other words, best-selling author Norma Beishir is uploading documents to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform that don't look any better than what the most rank amateur SPA does when she/he uploads a badly written short story.

Somehow or other, I just didn't trust this answer.

I then asked why the "Look Inside" preview was fine, if the actual document wasn't?  Again, I was on cyber hold for a long time, and finally the answer came out:  ALL BOOKS are converted to Times Roman font for the "Look Inside" preview, regardless what they look like in actuality.  When I pointed out that there was no such disclaimer, "Shiela" gave some rambling nonsense but eventually agreed.  She said someone in another department would be informed.  And that was pretty much it.

Now, remember the suggestion that I de-register my Kindle app and re-register it?  Well, that proved to be more than a little bit problematic as well.

The original email from Amazon after I reported the problem said to delete the book and redownload it.  I tried that, and it didn't work.

The second part of that email said to make sure I had the most current Kindle for PC version.  The email contained a link to the Amazon page to do that.  I tried that, went back to the new version of Angels at Midnight but the problem persisted.  The font was still Arial and the paragraphs were still double-spaced.

I then tried deleting and redownloading the book again.  Still no improvement.

And I know I'm repeating myself here, but I want to make sure I'm not leaving anything out.

In the process of doing this, however, I discovered that somehow or other I had four versions of Kindle for PC on my computer and on my account.  I have no idea where they came from, but I did know that I had set mine for automatic updates.

"Shiela" informed me that updates require that the existing Kindle for PC app be uninstalled and the new one installed.  But I had personally never done that manually, and so I asked if it had been done automatically via the "Tools" button.  Her answer made no sense.

Shiela:For updates, we need to uninstall and re-install the application.8:52:22 PM

Me:That didn't answer my question: Do I have to de-register, re-register, and redownload 626 items when you do an automatic update?8:53:23 PM

Shiela:If we will re-register an application, we will be needing to re-download the books. There is actually no automatic updates for Kindle application for PC.8:55:02 PM

Me:Then why does it have a box to check for automatic updates? And how did I get all of these applications on one computer if I only installed it once?8:55:42 PM

Me:(Oh, by the way, the box for automatic updates cannot be not checked.)8:57:39 PM

I will post the entire conversation on another post so anyone who wants to can follow the entire conversation.  What eventually came out of it was this:

1.  All "Look Inside" previews of all books on Amazon are displayed in Times Roman font, regardless what the actual book will look like.  Neither readers nor authors get an accurate view this way.

2.  There is no disclaimer anywhere on Amazon that explains the "Look Inside" preview may in fact be significantly different from the actual product.

3.  The Kindle for PC application may or may not be automatically updated by Amazon.  The button on the program for opting out does not operate, leaving the user to believe that automatic updates are, well, automatic.  At least one service rep has stated, however, that Amazon does not automatically update the Kindle for PC application.

4.  I currently have four installed Kindle for PC applications on my computer.  Earlier this morning I had six, because I have managed to deregister two of them.  At no time when I downloaded the "newest" version last night did Amazon ask me if I wanted to replace the existing application.

If you've stayed with me through all this, you're probably wondering why this matters.  Well, check out the next blog post and you'll find out why.

Update: Those very expensive words

Well, well, well, well, well.  You learn something every day.

Or at least you ought to.

Over this past week-end, I began the process of publishing Firefly via Smashwords.  The exclusive listing for Amazon's Kindle expires on the 17th of this month, and I wanted to make sure I had sufficient time to check out the various formats offered by Smashwords.  After uploading what I believed was a "clean" copy of the file, I checked it using Smashwords' own applications.

This is a screen capture of a page from the Amazon Kindle version as it appeared via the Kindle for PC app, the copy that I downloaded when the book was offered free in April:

As I think you can see, the bottom line on this page reads: 

She was a good cook, she smiled proudly to

Now, here's the same passage as it reads in EPUB format via Smashwords' conversion:

Again, that line is down toward the bottom, and everything looks fine.

The third downloadable version I checked was the Smashwords Kindle/mobi version.

That stopped me cold.  Where did that screwed up font come from???

What I discovered on going through the entire file was that every time I used italics, the font changed from Times Roman to "ugly" courier for the entire paragraph, then switched back to Times Roman. 

I also discovered that the original Table of Contents I put into the Firefly file for Amazon, then revised for Smashwords but ultimately removed prior to uploading to Smashwords is still present.  This is, of course, a MicroSoft Word .doc file, which is what it has to be to upload to Smashwords.  And to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform.  I will have to go back through the file to find out where this TOC formatting hides and remove it.  Even though it actually functions as a TOC, I don't want it there.

The next thing I checked was the "preview" from the Kindle Direct Publishing platform.

Again, the single word is italicized, but nothing else.  This was exactly what the file looked like when I uploaded it originally.   There was nothing to indicate that the whole thing would appear on some customers' devices in "ugly courier."  The screenshot of the Amazon Kindle version above is, in fact, from this same original upload and not the later "corrected" one.  That's why I had no idea it would download in another format.

Here's yet another version, the "Look Inside" sample from the Amazon offering:

Once again, just the one word is italicized, the way it should be.  And this is from the current, updated, supposedly "clean" version, yet it now has lost its right justification, which shows on all the others!

This is how the various digital publishing software packages transform the author's file, and this is why it is so very very important that the author check each and every version.  Sometimes there may be absolutely nothing you can do.  But if you can do something and you don't do it, it's no one's fault but your own when a reader complains.

At this point, I'm not sure if the complaints about the "ugly courier" font on the reviews for Firefly on Amazon were because of something I did or something inherent in the Amazon software or something in the hardware devices the readers were using.  I do know that I've done whatever I can think of to make sure the version readers download is as close to what I want them to see as I can get it, but obviously it's not as perfect as it needs to be.  So I'm going to keep working on it.

Which of these words don't you understand?

As often happens, reading someone else's writing sparks my own thoughts, and I suppose that's not unusual in a community of writers and readers.  Writers were, after all, readers first and still read.  Readers read what the writers have written.  There will always be cross-pollination.

So I'm going to start this rant with a link to Sunita's original blogpost here which was further disseminated via Dear Author here and explain that the subject is titled (by my predecessors, not I) "When I bought your book, I didn't sign up to be your beta reader."


I added several posts of my own to the Dear Author thread, so I'll only briefly here restate that I think it is very wrong for authors who are digitally self-publishing to engage in this particular practice, which consists of:

1. E-publishing an uncorrected, unedited, unproofread rough draft of their "book" and charging cash money for it, without noting in a prominent way so the reader is aware before purchasing that it is in fact a rough (or very early) draft.

2.  Revising said work based on reviews and/or comments made by people who have purchased said work, such revisions to include but not be limited to fixing typos and other mechanical errors, revising plot lines to improve logical progression, altering characters and/or character motivation, changing the ending to make it more popular with readers, adding or removing significant events from the story.

3.  Re-publishing the work as a new edition and charging new readers for the privilege, with or without notifying previous purchasers that a new edition is available.


Those are the basics.  There are other corollary things the author can do to make the experience even worse, but those will wait for later enumeration.

I'm also going to offer a couple of qualifiers to the three main points, one of which has already been mentioned in #1.

If the author makes it clear that the publication is a work in progress that's one thing.  Then the reader knows that she should not be expecting a polished product.  It's probably still bad form to do this, but at least the author is being honest and the reader can make an informed decision whether to buy or not.

Offering the work for free is not an excuse.  Again, if the author makes clear that the work is unpolished, that's one thing, but merely offering it at no charge without such an announcement is unfair to the reader.  The reader expects that the product, free or not, is finished.  A rough draft is not a finished product.

I can't stress this enough.  The reader buys expecting a finished product, ready to read, to all intents and purposes it's DONE.  In essence, it's ready to provide a reading experience in which the text becomes invisible (see my blogpost about invisible words here) and the reader is immersed in the story.

But what appears to be happening more and more often is that the reader buys something that's not finished.

Here's a review of The Duke's Reform by Fenella J. Miller, in which the reviewer laments:

Spoiler alert: I hate to write a bad review so I will start out with the good. This was a good story. Could have been a much better story. It was poorly told, punctuation and vocabulary and missing words and words added in that did not relate to the sentence they were in combined to make this a very difficult read. When I read a story, I want to read what the author wanted to tell, I don't want to have to guess and fill in the story every other page.

. . .

This could have been a good read if only they had had an editor. The Kindle version has some serious formatting problems with new paragraphs beginning in the middle of sentences, some paragraphs in bold and other in italics for no apparent reason. Commas and other punctuation are just, willy nilly throughout the book. A stilted and unbelievable dialogue. I wanted to like both the H and the h. I really did.

I am left wondering why I read this book to the end except that, I really wanted to like the H and h and I wanted them to have an HEA.

But if you must, get a dictionary and keep it handy, you will need it. This is a long read and by the end I just wanted it to be over

Then there's The Taming of the Hart by Lorraine Burgess which was uploaded to Amazon sometime prior to 22 June 2012 based on the date of the earliest review.  Selected comments from the reviews:

Didn't anyone take a look at this book before it was uploaded to Amazon? This is a good story. It deserves better.

I don't only not recommend it, I caution against it because it literally gave me a headache while trying to read it.

Please use a proper dictionary and check the spelling of even small words like seem and such. It is a large hindrance when the technical parts of writing get in the way of the story.

A few days later the author issued an apology and stated this was her uncorrected version written for herself and she would have a corrected version uploaded "within 24 hours."  Three days later, that corrected version has not yet appeared.



As you can see even in this not-very-clear screen shot, the version Ms. Burgess uploaded contains errors in the very first sentence.  The bold italic font continues through the entire text, sometimes Times Roman, sometimes Arial or a similar sans-serif font.  She claims this uncorrected version was uploaded "by accident," and it's obvious from the text of her apology that she's still having problems with spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation.  None of her friends told her of the problems, which suggests either her friends never looked at it or they weren't skilled enough to recognize them or they chose not to tell her; but none of those explanations explains why she herself didn't take even the quickest glance at what she uploaded.

When she did upload a "revised" version a few days later, most of the problems remained.  A few of the usage and spelling errors were fixed, and it's no longer in Italic font but the bold text continues throughout and it's a mess.  It's a horrible mess.

Now, allow me to throw this out here:  Yes, I uploaded a slightly imperfect version of Firefly to Amazon, an error I related here, and had I purchased a copy and checked it all out, I probably would have discovered the problem.  However, I did at least make sure I hadn't uploaded a version that contained numerous spelling errors.  I also made sure the version that was uploaded was reasonably well formatted, and in fact on my Kindle for PC app, the font was a standard Times Roman, not "ugly courier" noted in the early reviews.  The courier font and font-related glitches only appeared, as far as I'm able to determine, on the actual Kindle device.  It did take some extra finagling for me to get the right version to show up on the Kindle, but at least I did check somewhat before I put the thing live.  Yes, I could have checked more, but as I have learned since then, even purchasing a copy might not have revealed all the problems.

And regardless, I would never have uploaded something that had such appalling errors as "belt of lightening."  Come to think of it, I would never write "belt of lightening" when I really meant "bolt of lightning" in the first place.  My fingers wouldn't let me.

Sometimes these books have many, many, many five-star reviews that rave about how wonderful the book is and how the reviewers just can't wait for the author's next book.  There may be a few that point out errors and only grant one or two stars, but frequently the author (or their surrogates???) counter these negative reviews with staunch defenses of the wonderfulness of the story, or they attack the reviewer personally.  Often the errors cited are never addressed, or even admitted to.  It's as if the authors are in absolute denial of the problems in their books.

When I did my original analysis of self-published books that had garnered a bunch of five star as well as one star reviews, I was specifically looking for titles that had both because I wanted to try to get some sense of whether the five-star reviews had any suspicion of being planted by friends, family members, the authors themselves, or "shills" who were actually paid to write glowing reports whether they had liked or even read the book or not.  As I expanded my data base (if you will) of these titles, I did indeed begin to see a pattern with the works that were original to the digital self-publishing platform.  In other words, the books by authors who had never published in print prior to uploading their books to Amazon.  (And of course the qualifier here is that I had not looked at any other e-publishing format.  More about that later.)

Secrets of Moonshine, by Denise Daisy is one of those books with a lot of five-star reviews but is still very badly formatted.  Although the author claims she paid an "editor" $900 to turn this into a "squeaky clean" product, typos and punctuation and syntax errors abound.  I feel like telling Ms. Daisy it wouldn't have mattered to me if she had paid $9,000 or even ninety million dollars for that editing job: The book remained a pathetic mess.  Telling the reader that it was edited does not make it so.

Asking -- or worse, expecting -- the reader to fix the errors is grossly unfair.  Remember what that reviewer of Fenella Miller's The Duke's Reform wrote:  When I read a story, I want to read what the author wanted to tell, I don't want to have to guess and fill in the story every other page.

It is the author's job to tell that story.  That is what the reader has paid the author to do, with payment being made sometimes in cash but always in time and in trust.

Many years ago, in an article published in Writer's Digest magazine, authors George Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer, and John Ashmead reiterated what they called "The Ultimate Rule," which was an expansion on instructions laid out by Robert Heinlein.  I personally took that Rule to heart, and I have passed it along, always with attribution, to every aspiring writer I have ever come into contact with.

1.  You must write.
2.  You must finish what you write.
3.  You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
4.  You must put your work in front of an editor who might buy it.
5.  You must keep it on the market until it is sold.

Obviously, with the rise of digital publishing, #4 and #5 are no longer as "ultimate" as they used to be.  And given how my attitude toward traditional publishers has soured, I'd have issues with those orders anyway.

But how does Heinlein's dictum apply to today's publishing scene? 

First of all, #3 specifically refers to the traditional publishing professional who, as the middleman between writer and reader, is trained to acquire those properties most likely to turn a profit for the publisher and is trained to put those properties into publishable shape.  Unlike the random reader who looks at the free sample of a book digitally published on Amazon and who may or may not know anything at all about writing, about editing, or about the factual accuracy of the book and whose suggestions may be completely wrong, at least under the traditional publishing model the editor is probably going to do much more to improve the work than make it worse.  What the shift to digital self-publishing has done is to split the gatekeeper function from that of purchaser by eliminating that editorial middleman.  And that means that the author must now take full responsibility for all of that editorial function, while purchasing is directly in the hands of the final user.

Second of all. Heinlein's #3 never meant the author should complete the roughest of first drafts and immediately start schlepping it around to the top editors and agents.  It does mean that when you have a clean and polished version of your work, stop messing with it and get it out there.  It does mean that you need to develop the professional writing skills that will allow your prospective reader -- whether that is an agent, a publishing house editor, a small e-press editor, or the person who downloads your digital book from Amazon -- to read your story as if it were ready to be set in type.  It does mean only listen to the complaints and criticisms and orders from those who are competent to voice and demand them.

Third of all, the writer must understand what #4 really means in the age of digital publishing.  Again, that "editor" now becomes any potential reader, and just as the traditional publishing industry demanded that the author deliver a manuscript as spotless as possible when trying to land an editor, today the digital shopper fills that role, not as editor but as acquirer.  The author must take on the responsibility that formerly fell to the publisher: making certain that the product is ready for the consumer to use.

Unfortunately, so many of the people putting out digital books are so lacking in even basic writing skills that they should never get past #1.  And they don't understand that #2 doesn't just mean writing "The End" after the first draft is cranked out.  "Finished" means ready for real people to read it.

Essentially, self-publishing means that the author has to take on all the roles of the publisher, and that doesn't mean foisting them off on an unsuspecting and perhaps unqualified reader.  The author must either be qualified to be editor, proofreader, copyeditor, line editor, cover artist, publicist, accountant, and legal specialist, or she must find and pay other professionals to perform those tasks.  Self-publishing is not just uploading a text file to Amazon or Pub-it or Smashwords. 

Nor should self-publishing be a vehicle for authorial deception.  We've already seen too many instances of authors just plain stealing other people's words and trying to sell them.  Whether it's Janet Dailey or Cassie Edwards, Cassandra Clare or anyone else, plagiarism/copyright infringement is just plain wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.  No excuse, no defense, no forgiveness.

But also wrong is this ongoing business of posting deceptive reviews to self-published books.  The reader who browses the Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Kobo or Apple catalogue should not be bombarded with bullshit "reviews" that are nothing but the author's friends and family members and paid ad copy writers posing as unbiased reviewers.  Of course your mother is going to give you a good review!  We know that.  As readers, we want to know what other real readers thought. 

However, some authors are now turning to another tactic, and it's not being done to make their books better but rather just to sell them.

Among the intial group of novels I analyzed back in March was one that, as I began to read the free sample, struck me as having enormous potential to be a really, really good book.  Unfortunately, it was riddled with errors of just about every type: typos, wrong words used, historical inaccuracy, bad formatting.  And I noticed that while there were a whole bunch of kind of generic five-star reviews, there were also a lot of one- and two-star reviews that cited those problems. 

Now, if I were an author whose book received numerous detailed criticisms about specific errors, I'd be sure to consider those issues very carefully, research to find out if perhaps the critics were right, and then I would do my very best to fix them.  And as a matter of fact, the few reviews I've received on Firefly have brought up the issue of that Arizona ice cream -- but there's nothing historically wrong with it!  And I addressed that in the Afterword.  No, of course Del and Julie didn't take Willy to the local Baskin Robbins or Coldstone Creamery, but ice cream was not anachronism.

What I wouldn't do, however, is ignore a slew of criticisms and just remove the book from Amazon, then republish it as is on Smashwords, with a new title and a new pseudonym, with no reference to the original on Amazon and no correction of the errrors, which is what I discovered the author had done.  I only noticed it because she republished her book almost the same time I published Shadows by Starlight at Smashwords, and I saw hers as I was checking the status of mine. 

When an author does something like that, at that point the whole operation becomes nothing but deception and a ploy to make money off the gullible.  That, too, is wrong.  It's even more wrong when she chooses a title identical to that of another historical romance and a pseudonym very very similar to that of the author of that book.

Once again, self-publishing means the writer takes on the responsibility of fulfilling all the tasks traditional publishers would have done.  As far as I know, that never included making the reader do the work or intentionally deceiving the reader.

Now, self-publishing authors, what about this don't you get?