Getting the word out about getting the words out.

I'm going to indulge in a bit of shameless self promotion here and post the cover to my recently self-published romance novel, The Looking-Glass Portrait.  I am not comfortable doing this, but I also don't want some of the other images presented in this entry to show up when I post a link.

Anyone who has been following me much at all knows that I frequently make reference to the old days of traditional print publication.  I'm going to do that again in this post, so if you're sick and tired of that subject, you can skip this one.  ;-)

Anyone who has been following me much at all also knows I am terrible at self-promotion.  I love talking about writing, expressing my opinions about good and bad writing, chatting up weird crap that happens in my life whether related to writing or not, showing off some of my artsy fartsy crafting.  But even here on my own little blog, I have significant difficulty promoting my own books.  This is nothing new.  I've always been reticent about tooting my own horn.

Part of the reason is that when I began writing with the intention of getting my work published, I was ridiculed and discouraged.  For many, many years, I was told I had no chance to sell my work to a legitimate publisher and that I was foolish -- sometimes the operative word was "stupid" -- to try.  Considering that I began writing adult fiction at about the age of eleven and didn't sell my first novel until I was 36, that was a lot of ridicule and discouragement. At one point, I was fired from a job because my boss didn't believe I was really writing a book and therefore I must be lying and untrustworthy.

Had there been any countering support or encouragement, the outcome might have been different, but there was very, very little.  The overwhelming majority  of reaction was negative, and especially after losing a job over it, I learned the very difficult lesson and kept my mouth shut.

Even after selling that first novel, I didn't always get positive reaction.  In the early 1980s, historical romances were routinely dismissed as "bodice-rippers" or soft porn, and anything described as a romance was often just dismissed as "a Harlequin."  So even though I had achieved publication, the nature of my work did not attract anything like acceptance of success.

Along with the routine dismissal of romance fiction as a genre, there was also an expectation that writers all made lots of money.  Few non-writers understood that royalty rates for the newly published were often just four percent of the retail cover price.  When Legacy of Honor was published in 1985, that meant I earned 16 cents for each copy sold at $3.95.

In a saturated market like romance, certain authors hit it big, but many others didn't.  And it took a combination of many factors to reach the level of sales that allowed a writer to make a career at the craft.  One had to be reasonably prolific; Janet Dailey made a name for herself by writing a new book every month.  As an example of "nothing succeeds like success," Dailey was able to devote herself full-time to her career and leave everything else to her husband.

What few writers understood back in the heyday of romance publishing in the 1980s and 1990s was that publishing was a business and writing was an art.  The overwhelming majority of the writers were women, and the overwhelming majority of them had no experience with or knowledge about the publishing business.  Kathryn Falk's magazine Romantic Times and the organization Romance Writers of America, Inc, both founded in the early 1980s, promoted romance writing as a desirable and lucrative career for women, with Publication(sic) as the brass ring.

RT and RWA also promoted promotion.  Authors were (strongly) encouraged to buy advertising in RT and accompany the ads with personal profiles or articles further promoting their latest titles.  Again, success bred success, as those who either already had sufficient income to afford paid advertising or those who had achieved sufficient sales levels with previous books could buy additional advertising, get their books in front of the reading public, and sell more.

This was a huge departure from traditional publishing promotion, which had been handled by the publishers.  Whether they took out ads in newspapers and magazines, sent their top listed authors on paid book tours, or booked them onto television shows -- Janet Dailey, for instance, appeared on The Phil Donohue Show in 1981 -- the publishers arranged for and in many cases paid for the promotion of their authors and their books.

What happened as a result of RT and RWA was that for romance writers in particular, these new venues for promotion allowed publishers to deftly slide some of the responsibility -- and cost -- for promotion onto the authors.  Did this in turn prompt higher royalty rates?  Of course not!  What are you, crazy?

Indeed, publishers found more and more ways to cut royalties to romance writers.  Bulk sales and direct-mail subscription clubs paying two percent or less became popular ways to add to publisher revenue; these options were less viable for other genres simply because science fiction, mystery, and other types of novels didn't have the market share that romance did.

Do you begin to see how this played out?  Over a period of less than twenty years, much of the burden of promotion had shifted from the publisher to the romance writer while more and more of the profit had shifted from the writer to the publisher.  It was a very convenient spiral, and many of the writers who couldn't afford to pay to play just quit the game or stayed in the lower ranks of midlist and never achieved stardom.

By the time digital self-publishing became a truly viable option for writers, the shift to self-promotion had been fully established in the romance writing community.  To a slightly lesser extent, it had also become a feature in science fiction and fantasy, though through a different route.  Fan conventions had long been a tradition in the science fiction and fantasy community of writers and readers, thus providing various venues for authors as well as publishers to market and promote directly to readers.  Fan fiction was another tradition in sf/f writing and publishing, and as the two top-selling genres began crossing over into each other's turf -- primarily from romance taking on more and more sf/f elements -- the commercial aspects of romance publishing were becoming established for sf/f writers.

Whether the extent of self-promotion that became de rigeur for romance would ever have achieved the same status in sf/f is almost moot.  Digital self-publishing forced it on every writer in every genre, with few exceptions.

Digital self-publishing -- let's call it DSP for convenience -- cut out the commercial publishers entirely.  Writers no longer had to go through the arduous and often discouraging process of sending their manuscripts to publishers and agents who all too often sent the works back with form letter rejections.  Writers now needed only to upload their MSWord document files and presto! they were published authors, often literally overnight.  Instead of four percent or even eight percent royalties, these new DSP authors could brag about collecting 35% to 70% of the digital cover price.

That 16-cents-per-copy that I earned for Legacy of Honor as a $3.95 paperback in 1985 could become (roughly) 30-cents-per-copy for a 99-cent Kindle edition in 2013.

Of course DSP also means the writer has to provide all the services that used to be done by the publisher: editing, formatting, proofreading, cover art, and promotion.

Back in those old days of traditional print publication, the typical reader walked into a bookstore -- new or used doesn't matter -- or library and chose their preferred reading material from a fairly limited supply.  Virtually all of the titles had gone through the same reasonably professional production process from manuscript to printed book, and the reader could be reasonably confident that whatever book she took from the shelf would be readable.  It may not be great by whatever her personal standards might be, and it may not be to her personal taste, but it would be competently produced in terms of a commercial product.

And while the acquiring editors at any given publishing house might screw up and pass on the next best-seller, there was also a pretty good chance that few commercially viable manuscripts fell completely through the cracks.  In other words, to put it simply, if the book was any good, it would find a publisher.

With DSP, virtually everything about publishing changed, though some things changed more than others.

One thing that changed was the profit motive for publishers.  Traditional publishers knew enough about their markets that they chose products they firmly believed would sell and bring a reasonable return on the investment in editing, printing, and promotion.  They had to pay for their staff and overhead, and they also had to show a profit to the stockholders.  They couldn't afford to publish garbage, at least not on a routine basis.

DSP allowed writers to publish garbage and not answer to anyone at all.

DSP erased all the distinctions that used to protect readers from garbage.

While writers might be expected, even in the age of DSP, to have a working knowledge of how publishing used to work, most readers had no interest back then and still don't.  Whether they are browsing the shelves in a big Barnes and Noble media store, digging through the offerings on the Friends of the Library two-for-a-dollar sale table, or scrolling through the Amazon Kindle listings in order low price to high, the readers still see "published" as "published."  And all they really want to do is read good books.

Let me give you an example.


The link is to a novel titled Surrender Ma'Lady by one Willow Fae von Wicken.  I will leave it to you whether you want to look at the text of the book itself, but be warned that the quality of the writing is, well, it's probably best described as below standard.

The story is described, per the listing on Amazon as:

Victoria Whittenberg was shipwrecked and bound by shackles, trapped in the clutches of Enrico Rodriguez, her captor, the man who she witnessed shoot her fiancé. She was left with little choice but to approach a lone rider who had witnessed her demise, and without a word, he rode away, leaving her to the mercy of killers.

Although a publisher is listed, Dymond Publishing appears to be a front for the author-as-publisher.  That prospective readers are unaware of the realities of publishing is evidenced by the following, a review posted on Amazon for this book:

"Worst case of editing that I have ever seen."

Except that the author was (more than likely) the only "editor" the book ever saw.

And this is not a rare phenomenon.  Over the past several years, there have been countless cases of writers whose books have been negatively reviewed who have complained that they can't afford an editor, and/or are waiting until they make enough sales that they can afford an editor, at which time they will re-publish the book and all the readers who slogged through the unedited version can now read it again, edited.  As if they wished to.

Willow Fae von Wicken's book is perma-free at Amazon.  (I don't know how that works, only that it does.)  There are lots and lots of freebies in all genres, and many of them are DSP works that would never have seen print in the old days.  That's what the publishing industry has evolved into.  I'm not passing judgment here, though my loathing for traditional print publishers is no secret.  DSP has given many people opportunities for writing careers that they might never have had in the old days.

However, DSP has thrown readers into an unexpected chaos, and this is why I have tried to champion readers and their rights ahead of writers and their rights, at least in the marketplace.

Promotion is now the name of the game, not publishing.  Anyone can be published, but now it takes promotion to make a career. 

Writing a book and publishing it via DSP costs pretty much nothing.  Of course a writer can pay for professional editing and proofreading and cover art, but none of those expenditures are mandatory, and many unsophisticated writers -- those who turn out works of the quality of Surrender Ma'Lady or just slightly better -- consider such services unnecessary in terms of establishing their careers as authors.  Promotion, however, is another thing entirely.  Promotion that generates visibility for the work is essential, many writers believe, to garnering sales.  Promotion becomes not only the motivating force behind everything the writer does, but also justification for anything she does.

This includes, but is certainly not limited to, traditional promotional tools such as paid ads, distributing free copies of the book for reviews, soliciting endorsements from established writers with recognized followings.

Digital Self Publishing, however, is part of the whole digital universe, and social media in all its forms has become the billboard -- in the original sense of the word -- for the self-publishing author.  Promotion through social media, then, includes but is not limited to:

Spamming her book, its cover, its blurb everywhere she can think of. Every Facebook post, Instagram and Twitter several times a day. joining every discussion group on Goodreads whether it allows promotion or not.  The irresistible urge to spam was what led to Amazon restricting promotional posts to certain forums, because readers and participants in the other forums got sick of the spam.

Purchasing 5-star reviews from "gig" sites such as fiverr.com, to be posted to the book's Amazon and Goodreads' listings in violation of those sites' Terms of Use.  Also purchasing upvotes of favorable reviews (and downvotes of negative reviews), adding the book to Listopias and other promotional tools.  

These paid-for "reviews" are, of course, violations of U.S. Federal Trade Commission regulations, but the feds aren't going to go after either the paid reviewers or the writers.  The FTC  might, however, crackdown on the commercial sites such as Amazon if the level of violation reaches too high.  Regardless, the pressure to achieve visibility is enormous, and many writers will succumb to the temptation.

Sometimes the violation is less odious than buying the reviews.  Having family and friends -- with "friends" encompassing fellow writers who agree to do "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" quid pro quo favorable reviews -- pose as strangers to leave favorable reviews is another way to gain visibility, even though it's just as much in violation of FTC regulations and certain sites' TOUs as the paid reviews.

And sometimes the desperate need for visibility prompts writers to set themselves up as arbiters of moral standards, declaring that only certain kinds of reviews should be allowed, that only certain kinds of readers should be allowed to review, that reviewers have an obligation to the writer rather than to their fellow readers.

These are the writers who have forgotten -- if they ever knew in the first place -- that reviews are for the readers, not for the writers.  Reviews are the observations and comments and opinions of unbiased, independent readers to readers.  Does the foremost book retailer, Amazon.com, violate this standard with their "Top Reviewer" status, often conferred on people who love every book sent to them because that's how they continue to get free books?  Yeah, they do.  Do readers know and understand and qualify or disqualify those reviews?  I'm sure some do, but I'm also sure many don't.

I took a long vacation from the book community because I was sick and tired of the blatant gaming of the system.  I felt I was losing my perspective not only as to what was good writing and what wasn't, but also as to what was legitimate criticism and what wasn't.  Did the books of writers like Willow Fae von Wicken and Raani York, Sharon Desruisseaux and Victor Bertolaccini deserve the scathing reviews I left for them?  Had I made my criticisms too personal, even though I knew nothing about the writers?

I still don't know for sure.

What I do know, however, is that this drive for visibility, and especially for favorable, 5-star visibility, may lie behind the sudden uptick in successful authors drifting onto the dark side of questionable behavior.  Why else would a writer with over 9,000 followers on her Facebook page put out a plea that readers treat her books like her babies, with only the utmost kindness and consideration and no criticism?  Why else would a writer with over 90,000 followers on her Facebook page urge those followers to manipulate one of her negative reviews so she didn't have to see it any more.  

As author Jenny Trout has written about readers, 

They already gave your book the time it took to read it. Why on earth should we be asking for more? And it feels as though the question devalues that reader who doesn’t leave a review. “You don’t count,” we’re saying. “You read the book, but you didn’t leave a review, so you’re not as appreciated as my other readers.”

Sadly, Amazon sends out requests for reviews that the writer has no control over; that's the way Amazon operates, and the writer has to put up with the fallout if the reader gets ticked off.  (And yes, writers also have to put up with the disgruntled readers who leave low rated reviews over issues the writer has no control over.)  And yes, it's a reality that reviews generate visibility and all of us writers want visibility.

But to what level do we need to stoop to get it?  Urging random readers, who may know nothing about effective reviewing, to leave a comment like, "Great book, I loved it.  You should read it"?  Is that what happens when a writer lists her book for free and 4,000 people download it because it's free but only seventeen actually read it?

I probably wouldn't have given all of this much thought except for the fact that I was reading a DSP title the other day in which the author's front material included this:

Please remember to leave a review which greatly helps everyone.

(Heath, Tim. Cherry Picking . Tim Heath Books. Kindle Edition.)

 My thought was, well, I'm not sure it would help Tim Heath if I left a negative review.  It might help other readers who don't want their time wasted on poorly written books.  It certainly, however, would not help me to leave a negative review.  As an author  I am not allowed to leave negative reviews on Amazon, as it could be considered a conflict of interest.  As an author I am allowed to leave positive reviews, because . . . well, because no one considers that it might be a tit-for-tat review, or the author might be a friend of mine.  So the bottom line is, I'm not going to leave a review on Amazon under any circumstances.

But then we go back to the business of reviewers leaving reviews that are "helpful" to the author, meaning the review is critical but offers suggestions that will help the author improve the book in subsequent revisions or improve the next book.  As I have argued time and again, it is never the reader's job to help the writer do anything.  No reader should ever feel obligated to donate her time and expertise to help a writer make more money.  (Many authors do not react kindly to "helpful" reviews anyway, so there is some risk involved in volunteering.  Been there, done that.)

This is especially true, in my never humble opinion, if the reader is also another writer.  Why should any professional writer, one who has taken the time and effort to learn her craft, be pressured into helping her competition?  (Tim Heath is probably not my competition; I don't think we write the same type of novel or target the same audience, but who knows?)

The other side of that  same coin is that many readers may not know enough to provide accurate advice. If a writer's writing skills are substandard and she is looking for readers to help her out, she probably doesn't know enough to tell the difference between good advice and bad advice.

Another comment Jenny Trout made resonated with me because I had just posted about this issue on my own Facebook timeline:

So many writers will tell you that the reason they write is because they enjoy it. It’s too difficult a job to do if your heart isn’t in it. So, if what you need to enjoy it is reviews, and you’re not getting them and your heart is not in it, then maybe it’s time to rethink some priorities. But it’s your job to decide whether or not to continue. Don’t put that responsibility on readers.

I can't not write.  Even when I wasn't writing, I was writing.  Even during that twenty years between Touchstone and The Looking-Glass Portrait, I was writing.  I just wasn't finishing novels.  But I can't not write.  Would I like to be making more money at it?  Sure!  But the money isn't what makes me write.

As a writer, I understand exactly what Jenny Trout is writing about when she continues:

I know that it’s frustrating when you see people racking up fantastic review after fantastic review. I know you want your book to reach the widest possible audience and have two full pages of positive quotes to sell it.

But what no one seems to be saying is, "What if those fantastic reviews are lies?"

It's one thing to risk alienating your readers by begging for a review; I think it's another thing entirely to risk everyone else's readers by encouraging, buying, or posting fake reviews.  We know it has happened; I've posted enough analyses myself of the purchased reviews from fiverr.com.  But what is a DSP writer to do?

I know you're tired of reading all my blathering, and yes, I guess I sort of did take your question of "What time is it?" as an excuse to tell you how to build a clock, but that's the way I am. 

I hate self promotion.  I'm very bad at it.  I don't know how to do it.  And I think the shenanigans of writers like the two who have gone off the rails this week and all the others before and after them have made it more and more difficult for the rest of us.  They're applying pressure to us, the mid-listers and below, to jump into that game of racking up the reviews by fair means or foul.

I make it a practice not to read any reviews of my work.  Even when someone else re-posts them, I avoid reading them.  Reviews are for readers.  Period.  End of discussion.

I'm reasonably accessible online.  If a reader has something they really think I need to know about something they've found in one of my books, such as an error of fact or an internal inconsistency or a TSTL character, I'm not that difficult to contact.  Here on the blog, for instance.  Or on Facebook.  Or on Booklikes.  The worst I'll probably do to a stalker/harasser/troll is block them, unless of course they get really threatening, in which case I'll go to the police.

But if you want to leave a scathing review, be my guest.  I'll even help you.

Ten free Kindle copies of The Looking-Glass Portrait to the first ten people who request them.  I'll know you've read to the end of this atrociously long screed, because this is the only place I'll mention it.  I have the DRM-free mobi file to send via email, which you can then transfer to your Kindle or Kindle app.

Is a review required?  No, of course not, and because I never look, I'll never know anyway.

And then we'll see what happens.  Maybe nothing.  But that's okay.  I can't not write.

Separation of words and self

The past several weeks have been rather, shall we say, challenging for me, which is why I haven't kept this blog up quite as regularly as I would have liked.  Two separate writing projects have demanded my time and concentration, as well as other aspects of real life.  Right now, however, I am facing the prospect of about a week tending a dog recuperating from surgery, so I'll probably have a lot of time at the desk and computer to catch up on some of the blogging.

One of the issues that's been brought home to me in some rather startling ways is this whole issue of writers wailing that their books are their babies.  They seem to use this claim as a justification for both outrage over negative book reviews and outright attacks (usually verbal rather than physical) on the reviewers. 

This is not a new phenomenon.  Writers have been dissing critics just about as long as there have been writers and critics.  My own experience goes back just around 30 years to my early days in Romance Writers of America and judging RWA contest entries.  In face-to-face critique groups and online groups, along with one-on-one evaluations, responses to criticism ranged from "You're right; I need to fix that" to "It's my book and I'll write it the way I want to!  Who are you to tell me how to write my book?"

After this more recent brouhaha over critical reviews which escalated to the point of reviewers receiving death threats, I wondered what is it that makes some writers react to criticism of their writing with such intensely personal outrage.  The reviewers don't know the writers; all they're doing is commenting on their reaction to the book.  And yet the writers take it so very personally.  Why?

I'm not sure why I happened to think of my old writing buddy EK last night, but I did, and I began to see a connection between her reaction to criticism 20 years ago and this current wave of battered egos.

EK was in her early 60s when I met her, a delightful, cheerful woman with an infectious laugh and a constant smile.  Nothing about her demeanor suggested she had been through some very, very hard times.  Her first husband had deserted her with two small children; she had at one point lived with the children in the basement of an abandoned church.  Her second husband was abusive, and in and out of jail for various not-so-petty crimes.  After two more children she divorced him, but he hounded her for years and years afterward.  He broke into her home, stole from her, made so much trouble that she was evicted from several apartments.  The problems with him only stopped when he beat her so badly -- because she didn't have any cash in her home for him to steal -- that she ended up in the hospital and he ended up in jail for a much longer stretch.

She had lived in or near poverty most of her life, unable to hold a job very long because of the issues in her personal life.  One child died of AIDS in the early days of the epidemic; another disappeared into the streets.  There had been other, serious problems, the kind none of us wants to have even one of but EK had several.

Two other writers and I had formed a critique group, and when EK asked to join we welcomed her.  At our first meeting she described her work-in-progress as a contemporary romance featuring a high school math teacher recovering from a bitter divorce and a firefighter who had just lost his young wife to cancer.  Given that this was the late 1980s, EK's characters were way ahead of their time in terms of the contemporary romance market.  The rest of us warned her about this, but she insisted this was the story she wanted to write, and these were the characters she wanted to write about.  Okay, fine.

The book began with a Prologue that provided almost all the backstory for both characters in a classic "Write Chapter 1, write Chapter 2, throw away Chapter 1" fashion.  EK politely accepted our suggestions that she weave backstory into the narrative, but continued to insist it was her story and she would tell it her way. 

At our next meeting, we critiqued her Chapter 1 (which was effectively her second chapter), which served to introduce the firefighter hero character. Though it was competently written for the most part, we three readers found some continuity and consistency flaws and a few other mistakes.  EK graciously and sometimes self-deprecatingly agreed with almost all of our assessments and said she would fix the errors.  My personal feeling was that she had a workable story in process, and if she continued to accept advice as well as she had, she would probably end up incorporating her prologue's info-dumpy contents into the story and ditching the Prologue to produce a viable book manuscript.

Our third meeting should have brought us to Chapter 2, but instead EK brought her revised Chapter 1.  She had reworked the sections where we had found problems, and she had made some other revisions and additions.  The new material revealed some other errors and weaknesses; she didn't argue with our comments and agreed these things needed to be fixed.  We specifically told her to let them go for the time being and bring us the next chapter.

She didn't.  She brought yet another revision of Chapter 1.  When we asked her why she hadn't brought the next chapter, she explained that she hadn't written it yet.  "I have to have this chapter absolutely perfect," she said, "before I go on.  This character is my hero, my hero, and to tell the truth I'm reluctant to share him even with the other main character in the story."

At the time, we all kind of laughed and teased her about falling in love with her own fictional creation, but as a few more meetings went by, she brought only the first few pages of Chapter 2 along with more revisions, more additions to Chapter 1.  It became clear that EK really had fallen in love with this fictional firefighter, and she wasn't about to share him.

For a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with EK and her book boyfriend, the critique group dissolved after about five months.  I stayed in contact with both EK and one of the other members for a long time afterward, long enough to learn that EK never did write any more on her book.  The other writer, who went on to be traditionally published, and I agreed that EK really wasn't writing for publication.  She was writing to create the kind of man and the kind of romance she had never had in real life. 

We further agreed that there was nothing wrong with this.  If EK had been pushed to finish her book, if she had found a publisher for it, she would have had to share her hero; and sharing him would have broken her heart.  She wasn't writing for readers, she was writing for herself. 

In at least one of the recent explosions of writer over-reaction to negative reviews, the writer had made it abundantly clear that she was writing the kind of story she loved.  As in EK's case, there's nothing wrong with that. 

What seems to be more and more apparent in each of these emotional outbursts in response to negative criticism of the writing is that the writers are equating that criticism to attacks upon themselves.  They claim, sometimes in explicit language, that their books are their babies and criticism of the book is therefore a personal affront. 

They claim that they don't mind low ratings (1- or 2-star ratings) or negative reviews, provided the review is constructive, is kind, is helpful.  Again, they want the review directed toward them, as the writers, not toward the readers for whom the review is intended.

Which all makes me wonder if in fact the writers were never writing for readers in the first place.  They were writing for themselves, with really no thought to the fact that other people would be reading, people who did not have the same passion for that particular book that the writer had.  Unable to separate themselves from their stories, the writers are unable to put themselves in the position of "mere" reader.

Very often there are other specific details about the writer's experience that raise some red caution flags. 

The writer who over-reacts to negative reviews often has a group of fellow writers for mutual support.  Most of them will have very little if any experience or knowledge of the writing/publishing business.  They are writing books based on personal experience or personal passion with the intent of sharing the writing as a direct extension of the self.  There is much less emphasis placed on how the resultant work will effect or impact or be received by the reader, and more emphasis placed on the personal expression of the experience or passion.  In other words, the writing is writer-centered rather than reader-centered.

The group is not, in fact, a critique group directing its attention to the writing, but a support group directing its effort toward the writer.  The writer is encouraged to write, but the writing itself is not critiqued.  Or if it is, the critique is more encouraging than critical.

Even after the writer has self-published the book, there is an entire community of writers who refuse to offer critical reviews because of their identification with the writer.  They admit they do not want to hurt the writer's feelings.  They refuse to leave a negative review or low rating because to do so would be to minimize the effort the writer put into the product.  They defend other writers, even when the writing is shown to be objectively sub-standard, and admit they fear retaliation if they even point out mistakes.  In some cases, these writers' works exhibit the same mistakes, suggesting they themselves are not qualified to provide the kind of writing-criticism the original writer needs if she wants to write for readers.

It's easy to make the leap from this to speculate that many of these hyper-sensitive writers have never been voracious readers.  They don't exhibit any kind of empathy with readers, but only with writers.  They seem unable to recognize the writing flaws that distinguish their writing from "good" writing, or at least writing that fits the standards generally accepted for successful popular fiction and non-fiction.  Even when they do admit, however reluctantly, that their writing mechanics may fall short, they offer a common set of excuses and/or justifications: They can't afford an editor, or the reader shouldn't complain about a free/inexpensive book, or the writer is a beginner and shouldn't be held to the same standard as professionals.  Again, the writer and her feelings always have priority over the quality of the product and the reader's expectations of it.

Anyone who disagrees with them is a bully, trying to kill their book and their writing career.  I'm not sure, at this point, that most of those writers ever really contemplated a writing career.  They have exhibited little to no professionalism in the production of their books that would indicate they've studied how to write and how to publish.  Instead, they have simply poured their "heart and soul" into words on electronic paper and uploaded them.  That's not a career any more than my buying a set of golf clubs would make me a professional golfer.

A common response to these meltdowns is that the writers need to develop thicker skins, and I've certainly expressed that feeling often enough myself.  After some of the most recent events, however, I'm beginning to think that's the wrong advice, simply because for these writers, growing a thicker skin is simply not possible.  Their books were really never intended to be shared with a wider audience than friends and family and supporters who would be encouraging and uncritical.  Their books really are their babies, part of themselves, created for themselves, even if the writers insist otherwise.  There's no indication that the writers did any kind of research to make sure they were producing a work that would be well-received by the reading public.  There are many more indications that they were simply writing for their own enjoyment.

And again, there's nothing wrong with this.  The problem arises when the writers forget -- and perhaps they never knew -- that when one writes for other people's enjoyment, one has to take their considerations and expectations first, not last.

Those of us who are avid readers long before we are compulsive writers know almost viscerally that books are not their writers.  Books are a creative product put into a public marketplace for consumption, discussion, comparison, and review, quite separate from their creators.  The conversations we readers have with each other about those books that fall short of our expectations as readers are not about the writers -- unless and until the writer inserts herself confrontationally into that conversation.

You have my word: As of 15 November 2014, I will not buy, read....

. . . rate, or review or in any other way promote any book published by HarperCollins.  Period.  I refuse to support a publisher that supports a stalker.

Will such a boycott harm innocent authors?  Well, if I'm the only one boycotting, then probably not. And as far as I know KH is the only HarperCollins author who has stalked and harassed a reviewer to the extent she did.  All the other HC authors, then, are innocent and by some reasoning don't deserve to be boycotted.

Let's be honest with ourselves.  Brutally honest.  Let's admit that we really just don't want to deprive ourselves of the pleasure of reading those other authors.  We're sympathetic to Blythe Harris's plight and we really think that author was totally 100% wrong, but doing without our favorite HC authors, well, that's more sacrifice than some of us want to make.  And so we're hiding behind the excuse that we don't want to hurt innocent authors.

Blythe Harris was stalked, harassed, and silenced.

The message being sent right now by HarperCollins is that they have no problem with that.  They really don't care about Blythe Harris or about any other reviewer.  The silence from the HC authors also says they have no problem with it.  They don't care that Blythe Harris was silenced for not liking a book.

Right now, HarperCollins is supporting, with their contract and with their silence, an author who proudly admitted stalking a reviewer who didn't like her book.  They are implicitly saying to all their authors, "Hey, if you want to stalk and harass and threaten people who find fault with your books, go right ahead."

How much solidarity are you, as readers and reviewers and maybe even as authors, willing to show with Blythe Harris?  Are you willing to do without a few books over the next few months?  Are you willing to say to your favorite HC authors, in effect, "Sorry, but I can't buy or promote your books.  I can't support a publisher -- who makes more off your books than you do anyway -- who supports stalking.  I just can't."

If you can't do that much, then I guess maybe you really don't have a problem with supporting a stalker either.

A full list of HarperCollins imprints is here and includes Avon, Harper, Harlequin, William Morrow, Thomas Nelson and Zondervan Christian, HarperCollins Children's, and Caedmon audio books.

If the HC authors aren't speaking out because they're constrained by the company, then that is another reason to boycott.  If the authors aren't speaking out because their afraid, then that is another reason.  And if they aren't speaking out because they agree with the stalking, then that is yet another reason.

HarperCollins, which is a part of the Rupert Murdoch News Corporation empire, is not going to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do.  Corporations don't operate that way.   Their sole motive is profit.  If their silence can be shown to harm their bottom line, then and only then will they do the right thing.

The only two words that matter, really matter . . .

. . . at least to certain people.

Two adjectives, each of four letters.  One is a "good" word, the other is a "bad" word in terms of how an individual, any individual, is perceived and treated.

The first is something you should be, the second is something you should not be if you are going to be accepted and respected.  Both apply much more to women than to men, in that gender almost always serves to mitigate the impact of both words when the subject is male, but there are other factors that can actually serve to aggravate the effects.

The words are "nice" and "poor."

As Leo Durocher famously stated, "Nice guys finish last," implying that a bit of ruthlessness perhaps is not necessarily an unwanted trait in someone who wants to succeed.  It's okay for guys to be a little less than "nice" if they want to win; in fact, it's almost imperative.

For women, however, niceness is the standard.  You must be nice, you must be nice . . . or else.

What you must not be, regardless of gender, is poor, but even so, the effect of poverty on perception is different for men than for women.  A poor man can use his poverty as both a motivator and an excuse.  Poverty can serve as an opportunity and a challenge, and the man who defeats poverty is generally acclaimed for his ability to rise above his beginnings, often regardless how he does it.  That ruthlessness referred to above can excuse some less-than-ethical means he might employ and even bring him praise for using them.

Women, on the other hand, are often not only defined by their poverty but limited by it in ways that men are not.  And of course these are sweeping generalizations, but bear with me.

If a woman dares to try to rise above her station, she can only do so at the sacrifice of her niceness.

In other words, there is no way for a poor woman to win.  She is condemned to poverty if she doesn't fight it, or she is condemned for fighting it and not being nice.

We see this played out in two of the 20th century's most popular historical novels, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber.  Neither heroine "wins" by the cultural standard:  Both Scarlett O'Hara and Amber St. Clare end up abandoned by the men they love the most.  Whatever other successes they achieved, and both of them achieved much through their determination and ruthlessness, they failed at being properly "nice" women.  Therefore they are -- they must be -- denied the ultimate prize of marriage to the man they love the most.

Some of this changed in the 1970s with the publication of the sexy paperback historicals of Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers, authors who were of the generation to have been most influenced by the two previously mentioned books.  Written in a different part of the century when feminism was evolving a different, more militant aspect, their novels took characters very similar to Scarlett and Amber, put them through the same types of adventures, vicissitudes, trials and tribulations, allowed them to be (slightly) more assertive and ruthless, and in the end granted them the prize of True Love, Marriage, and Happily Ever After.

Certain underlying concepts, however, did not change.  The female character still had to prove herself worthy of that happy ending; the reader took for granted that the male character, by virtue of his being desired by the female, was already worthy.  If he had to slay any dragons or villains, it was only because they were obstacles; defeating them was not necessary to earning his stripes as a worthy hero, since that was predetermined.  Many heroes, in fact, were far from "nice," but were deemed heroes simply because the heroine loved them.

Much more important, however, was that the real life counterparts to these fictional attitudes did not change.

In the U.S., white women entered the paid work force in unprecedented numbers in the middle decades of the 20th century, first out of personal necessity during the Great Depression, second out of political necessity during the Second World War, third out of personal choice during the social changes from the mid-1960s on.  Women of color had worked outside their own homes for generations, often in menial domestic capacities, and often because wage work for men of color was unobtainable.  The shift of white women working for wages had a huge impact on both the economy and the American cultural scene.

But cultural norms still treated women differently, and the basis for that different treatment lay in those two words:  nice, and poor.  Women were still expected to be nice:  If they chose to work as teachers or nurses, those were acceptably "nice" occupations suited to their gender.  They were expected to follow the norm and seek marriage and family as their first choice of "occupation," therefore they didn't need to make as much money as men who would be supporting families.  Even if they did the same work, women could be paid less.  And if they were poor, then they could be paid less as well, because they were expected to be nice and take what was so generously given to them . . . until their niceness won out and they landed a suitable husband to support them.  Working their own way out of poverty was not an acceptable trajectory.

It would be encouraging to think, as we are well into the second decade of the 21st century, that attitudes have changed.  They have not.

One has only to look at the way Hillary Clinton is demonized for her political aspirations, and Sarah Palin is not.  Palin is criticized, to be sure, but she is not demonized; and the criticisms she gets are not based on her ambition.  Her looks and blatant sexuality are conflated with "niceness," behavior suitable for a woman.  Clinton is demonized for having ambition and not being appropriately "nice," meaning sexy, about it.

As Janet, a reviewer and contributor to the Dear Author website, noted in July 2012, women who review books are still expected to be "nice" about it.  Those who aren't nice enough, who dare to be honestly critical, will be excoriated.  Because women read more than men and often have more opportunity in the digital age to "natter on the net," as Dale Spender put it, more women write more reviews online than men.  And women who write critical book reviews come under more fire for it than men.  Way more.

Those reviewers dubbed as "bullies" by a certain website are almost all women; they dared to write and post critical reviews.  Nearly all the reviews purged by Goodreads in September 2013 were written and posted by women.  The most notorious of those reviewers whose accounts have been terminated by Goodreads since September 2013 are women.

Women are not allowed to not be nice.

Especially if they are poor.

As we've seen in the recent unfolding of events involving a well-connected (meaning, connected to wealth) debut author and her harassment of a female reviewer, failure (or refusal) to be appropriately nice is permissible if the woman in question is rich.  Lacking similar economic resources, the reviewer is effectively silenced; her stalker is defended, commended, praised, and exonerated.  "She wasn't nice enough," is the judgment often passed on the reviewer.  "She got what she deserved."

Some other authors even went so far as to imply they approved of what the stalker did and wished they had had the gumption to do it themselves to their own critics.  They, of course, were too nice to do so.

The same is said of far too many victims of domestic violence:  If only she'd been nicer to him, he wouldn't have had to hit, smack, beat, bludgeon, or kill her.

All women must be nice, but poor women must be especially nice, or they run extra risks.

I am poor, and I am not nice.  I know the risks.  I have taken them with eyes wide open, sometimes even with the eyes in the back of my head that many women are expected to have.

I am a reader and a writer and a passionate lover of books, of all forms of the written word.  (I can be as critical of the lines a bad actor is forced to speak as of his bad acting.)  Because I am not nice, I do not hesitate to voice my criticism of bad writing, and I do not always couch my criticism in nice terms.  If the book is crap, I do not hesitate to say it is crap.

Sadly, because I am poor, I do not have the disposable income to buy well-written books.  Is it impossible to find free or inexpensive well-written books?  Actually, no, it is not.  But personal economics is a matter of time as well as cash.  I am poor, and so I must work, and the nature of my paid work is such that I do not have hours of leisure time for relaxing with a book or an electronic reading device.  (In my case, that device is primarily the Kindle for PC app on the computer from which I do my paid work.)  I read, when I have a few minutes, and I must be careful not to become too immersed in my reading lest I devote too much time to it and not enough to the paid work.  This means I frequently sample the free offerings on Amazon during breaks from my paid work.

Do you see where this leads?  It leads to my reading a lot of bad writing.  But am I supposed to read it and not comment on the poor quality, because it is all I can afford and beggars cannot be choosers?  Or am I supposed to read it and -- instead of complaining -- offer free proofreading and editorial services because I am a woman and I'm supposed to be nice?  Or am I supposed to say nothing at all?

When readers, individually or collectively, voice their complaints about the poor quality of free or very low priced digital books published by independent or self-publishing authors, they are often told they should not complain about free merchandise.  There is an implication that the self-publishing author has no obligation to present a quality product, under the rubric "you get what you pay for."  Since it's free, the consumer has no right to complain.

Since it's free, the producer has no obligation to provide a quality product.

Even when the book is not always free, if the reader obtained it free, the above conditions apply.  Obtaining the book without paying for it -- offered free on Amazon, borrowed from a library, advanced review copy from author/publisher -- is an admission of poverty; poor people, and especially poor women, are not allowed to complain.


I made the mistake of complaining, apparently too much, and for that I am no longer allowed on Goodreads.  Yes, I'm banned.  Yes, shitgrubbers (you know who you are), you may dance now, for a while. 

But this does not mean I am silenced.  I may not reach the same audience here with this little blog, but I will not be silent.  And because my blog will no longer feed directly to Goodreads, I am no longer prohibited from expressing my more direct thoughts.

Perhaps that's what Goodreads is afraid of.  Really, it's just plain silly to think that Goodreads and/or Amazon is afraid of me personally.  I have no power, no authority.  They had the power to erase me and everything I wrote from their sites, which is what they did.  So why should they be afraid of me?  I am no one.  I am, in the grand scheme of the Amazon megalithic empire, less than nothing.

And yet, if I were nothing, they would have no need to erase me.  Why erase nothing?  Why bother?

Let's face the reality of the situation.  I am not selling hundreds of thousands of copies of my books via Kindle Direct Publishing; many of my online writer friends are selling waaaaay more than I.  I do not have a popular book blog.  Thousands of fans are not following me on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and whatever other social media is out there.  What, then, made me so dangerous that Goodreads had to terminate my account?

Was it because my critical reviews had become too painful for some people?  Was I getting too close to some secret information that someone in power didn't want known?  Was I disrupting the sales of commodities that someone was handsomely profiting from?  Or hoped to profit from during the busiest shopping season of the year?

I did not commit any of the sins for which members are traditionally terminated. 

I did not spam.  Indeed, I almost never talk about my books, do not plug them or push them or hardly even mention them.  Even though I have a new little book available on KDP, I didn't advertise it even where I could have.  So it wasn't because of spamming.

I have no sock puppet accounts, and never did. 

I have never taken any money to post a review.  I've never even entered any of the giveaways on Goodreads, so I got no free books that needed to be disclosed.  I won one book on Booklikes, and fully disclosed it.  I don't have an account at fiverr.  I do disclose whether I purchased the book, obtained it free, or based the review only on a sample.

I've never responded to anyone who reviewed my books, not negatively, not positively.  I do not go around posting statuses thanking each and every person who shelved or rated my books; I really do believe that authors should not do that, and so I don't.  I've never flagged a review of any of my books even though I suspect there are some that are worthy of being flagged, only based on what I've been told by others.   I do not look at my reviews or ratings, period.

I've never attacked another reviewer in their review space.  I've participated in some discussions, even heated discussions, that arose in other reviewers' spaces, but even those have only been very rare, and generally I've done so to support the original reviewer.  If I don't agree with the reviewer, I just ignore them.

But I insisted on posting negative reviews, and I insisted on standing up and talking back to The Powers That Be on Goodreads.  I guess, like butthurt authors themselves, they couldn't handle the criticism.

I had plenty of criticism of Goodreads management, primarily for their failure to police the site regarding massive sock puppet account creation, paid reviews and "like" votes, and the various other schemes authors employed to boost visibility of their books and, they hoped, boost sales as well.

I suspect, however, that the real reasons for my banning are three specifics.  I don't expect anyone from Goodreads to confirm or deny; I know that I am essentially a non-person to them now.

First,  I did not mince words when it came to the recently instituted policy of Goodreads to add advertisements, in the form of "editorial content," to users' real-time update feeds.  Despite assurances from "Emily" that the insertions were not advertisements and that the editorial team was entirely separate from the advertising team, it seemed abundantly obvious to me that Goodreads users were being spammed by Goodreads.  Two books were advertised in my feed, and I promptly placed both of those books on a new shelf: Special Treat.  I already had a shelf titled "Treat," which was my code word for spammed books and spamming authors.  ("Treet" being the Armour version of Hormel's Spam.)  Did Goodreads decipher my sooper-seekrit code and decide that shelf was unacceptable?  It certainly didn't violate any rules about shelving based on author behavior since the authors weren't involved.  I had had the "treat" shelf for several months.

But I had also been very vocal(sic) about the ongoing problems Goodreads had with sock puppet accounts and other spammers.  Other users were fighting the good fight about the spammers in the Quotes and Quizzes departments of the site, which I never used.  The site's IT "developers" were supposedly working on ways to eliminate and/or block the literally thousands of non-U.S. spam posts, which was certainly a needed administrative function.  But there were other problems that vexed users and which seemed to get no attention at all.  One of those issues was the inability to flag so-called "naked" ratings posted by apparent sock puppet accounts. 

These accounts had come to my attention in late fall of 2013, shortly after the major purge in September.  They were posting 5-star ratings -- without reviews, thus "naked" -- to the books identified as being written by one Jennifer Smith.  The books had been originally published by Noble Romance Publishing, a defunct publisher, under the bylines of Rie McGaha and Reese Johnson.  At times there were more than 100 of these ratings posted to these books, first with bizarre screen names that were just numbers, then with other combinations.  Avatar pictures were lifted from the internet with no regard for copyright.  Eventually, whoever was behind the socks evolved the program to populate the accounts with fashion pictures, hence the moniker "socks in frocks."

The socks in frocks accounts also began posting 5-star ratings to some obscenely over priced ethics books for children with titles like I is for Integrity or some such.  The prices on Amazon were in the neighborhood of $16 for a 7-page "book."  They showed no actual sales rank, but the same socks that were rating the Jennifer Smith books were doing likewise for these books.  Anywhere from one to ten new accounts were added daily.

No matter how often they were reported and removed, more returned, almost like the apprentice's brooms.  At one point, "Emily" bragged in a Feedback thread that they had finally been removed and the problem was solved.  Within minutes, they were back.

I wasn't the only one to complain about them; LobsterGirl did, too, and in fact she was the one who started the entire thread about them.  But LG remained an active reviewer of many books, a top reviewer, a top librarian, and thus an asset to Goodreads.  I didn't have the time to do that; I was not an asset.

Second, I spent a lot of time -- which I really couldn't afford to spend -- on the ferreting out of information to identify Goodreads users who were actually members of fiverr.com who were selling review services.  For $5 per "gig," they would write a five-star review and post it on Goodreads, Amazon, or anywhere else the author wanted it posted.  Some would charge $5 just to post a review that the author herself had written!

Some of these fiverr shills had hundreds of reviews on Goodreads.  Virtually all were 5-star ratings.  Michael Beas, before his removal from Goodreads, had 388 ratings, 351 reviews, with a 4.90 average.  He was ranked #97 Top Reviewer.

Some of the fiverr shills were also Goodreads authors.  Beas was one.  Cheryl Persons was another.  Pat Hatt, author of many, many children's books, is a fiverr seller.   Hatt is also one of the very few fiverr sellers to actually remove his reviews from Amazon.  After much of the evidence documenting Hatt's career as a paid reviewer was posted on my Booklikes blog, he changed his name on his Amazon account, then proceeded to shut it down.

I carefully documented the accounts of the fiverr shills, took screen shots, compared dates and texts, and dutifully reported to Goodreads.  I reported a few to Amazon, too, but when nothing happened there, I quit.  I didn't have enough time.  But Goodreads really did seem to care, at least at the beginning.  Accounts were removed, and I received little email notes from "Emily" and "The Goodreads Team" thanking me for identifying them. 

A chance contact with another Goodreads user led to the development of a master list cross-referencing the buyers of fiverr services with their Goodreads accounts.  To date, that list containes over 500 accounts.  Does this mean all of them have purchased fake reviews for Amazon and Goodreads and other review sites?  No, it doesn't.  They may have purchased other legitimate services also offered by fiverr sellers, such as proofreading, blurb-writing, and so on.  There are, however, fiverr gigs for "likes" and other "votes" that will move a book up or down in the Amazon and Goodreads rating system.  An author can buy Listopia placements, for instance, or votes on Listopias. 

As this other person and I compared and combined notes, we uncovered a sock puppet "ring" that was responsible for over 2,550 5-star ratings on Goodreads, and uncounted "likes" of those ratings.  The leader of the group was a professional book promoter, as well as a Goodreads author.  Her account and all the sock puppet accounts were removed; when they tried to set up new accounts, those, too, were documented, reported to Goodreads, and removed.

Because I couldn't report on this activity publicly on Goodreads -- it would have been considered "calling out" an individual author and that's against the Terms of Use -- I turned to Booklikes, where I pretty much duplicated the evidence I'd presented to Goodreads.  I showed how it began with a chance discovery that a re-issued book by Parris Afton Bonds had some very suspicious reviews.  A Goodreads friend had pointed out that one of the reviewers stated in her Amazon profile that she was a fiverr reviewer . . . and that's how it all started.  But as I began to post this information on Booklikes, I attracted the wrath of some of the reviewers and authors.  Michael Beas showed up to defend himself -- but couldn't.  Author Ralph Smith showed up, too, and tried the same arguments.

No matter how many reviews and accounts were removed from Goodreads, nothing happened on Amazon, and I probably should have taken that as a warning.  I didn't.

I believed I had the support of Goodreads, that they truly cared about the integrity of the reviews and the value of them to readers.  I really should have known better.

Some of the shills tried to set up new accounts at Goodreads.  Many of those accounts were identified and removed, some literally within minutes of reporting.  The master accounts at Amazon, however, remained intact.  Names were changed, often more than once, but Top Reviewer rankings (a draw for selling fiverr reviews) remained.

I made mistakes in some of my research, and the accounts didn't get removed.  Sometimes I got notes from Goodreads about it, sometimes I didn't.  Even though I had documented Pat Hatt's identity as a fiverr seller and even though he removed his account from Amazon, Goodreads gave me an explanation as to why nothing had been done to his account there:  They had "back end admin" information that didn't match.  I thought this was suspicious, but there wasn't anything I could do.

Then came the issue of Kelsey McBride, owner of Book Publicity Services, Inc.  She was reviewing her clients' books, giving them 5-star ratings, on both Goodreads and Amazon.  Even though statements had been made in public forums on Goodreads that publicists' reviews were in violation of the no commercial reviews rule, McBride's reviews stayed.  She even came to Booklikes and posted on my blog there . . . and she did so while having two operating accounts at Goodreads and at least one suspected sock puppet account.

I tried and tried and tried to get a clear statement from Goodreads about the legitimacy of a publicist's account, but couldn't, and in the end McBride's account remained, along with all the 5-star ratings.

Through it all, I thought I was doing what both Goodreads and readers wanted:  To have honest reviews, good and bad, and get rid of the frauds.  I thought wrong.

Third, I wasn't nice enough to the other authors.  The negative reviews were one thing, but it was the comments in the various discussions that weren't nice enough.   I didn't call anyone names -- though I was called names by other Goodreads users often enough.  I didn't tell anyone they were stupid or untalented.  At worst I told them their books were poorly written.

Sometimes they insisted I  was wrong in my assessment, because they had after all paid for professional editing and/or proofreading.  In some cases they had paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars for these professional services.  And yet, eventually, when I and others on the forums pointed out the books' errors, the authors ultimately agreed.

Perhaps I should have been nicer.  Perhaps I should have let them persist in their delusions.  What do you do, though, when someone begs for reviews and the book is just poorly written?  What do you do when the book has a glaring typographical error on the cover?  On the dedication page?  In the first sentence?  And the second, and the third?

I suppose the "nice" thing to do is keep it all private and cozy and polite.  Send them an email or a private message and point out the error.  Don't embarrass them, but don't let anyone else know that there's a problem. 

At what point do reviews then become editorial services?  Are readers required, obligated to provide this for free to the authors?  Are authors more deserving of niceness and politeness than readers?  Do readers not deserve to be notified that a given book is loaded with factual inaccuracies, messed up punctuation, and syntax so shattered it's all but incomprehensible?

I had forgotten, forgotten, completely forgotten.  Oh, not really forgotten as in it was totally out of my mind, but forgotten in the sense of not allowing the concept to govern my actions.  I'd forgotten that Goodreads was an arm of Amazon, and that regardless any protestations to the contrary, Goodreads was intended to function as a selling tool for Amazon products.  Goodreads was no longer for readers; Goodreads was for Amazon.  Reviews were no longer for readers; reviews were for selling Amazon products.  Authors therefore were not to be discouraged from publishing, not to be discouraged from advertising, not to be discouraged from providing review content that would sell books.

All roads must lead to Amazon, and I had forgotten that.  "Nice" really means "nice to Amazon."

It did not make any difference -- to Amazon -- that these badly written books would probably not sell.  As long as the authors were allowed to believe that it only took more and better reviews, as long as authors were willing to pay fiver shills to buy their own books, Amazon came out ahead.  Amazon got free content.  Amazon made a few sales.  Authors were just mindless, soulless producers, and readers were just mindless, soulless consumers.  If a crappy book sold 10 copies, or 20 copies, Amazon made a cut and they were happy.

And it was okay to dumb down the readers, too, because then they wouldn't know the difference between gold and dross.  They'd buy the dross as readily as the gold.  And if the poor people who couldn't afford the gold got instead a steady diet of dross, well, who cares about them anyway?  They aren't buying anything, they aren't contributing to the Amazon coffers, so who cares?

I made the mistake of caring.  And not only of caring but of caring passionately.

Passion isn't one of those acceptable words.  It tends to shove "nice" to the side, especially if one is poor and passionate.

Scarlett O'Hara was a  bitch.  Some might say she was a selfish bitch, but in her selfishness she also sacrificed for those around her, and she lost much.  Amber St. Clare was ambitious, but she was reviled for it because she was poor.  Both of them, however, were victims of circumstances beyond their control and they were never able to escape.  I don't think they understood -- and yes, I'm granting them the autonomy and self-awareness of real human beings even though they are only fictional characters -- how manipulated they were by those circumstances and, by extension, by their creators to fit into the proper expectations.

Kathleen Winsor, author of Forever Amber, years later wrote a semi-autobiographical novel titled Star Money.  I read it long before I read Forever Amber, because my dad's membership in the Doubleday Book Club had put a copy in his collection.  But I read it before I was old enough to understand the implications, the connections to the earlier novel and to my own aspirations as a writer.  I've acquired replacements for most of the books in that collection -- Lord Johnnie and The Hepburn and Wine of Satan and Jubilee Trail and Caravan to Xanadu and The Walls of Jericho -- but I never went looking for Star Money.  It's now on my list of books to find.

One book I didn't have to replace was Edison Marshall's The Infinite Woman.  I took that one right from the shelf before my parents downsized and the books became yard sale merchandise.  (This was years before I stole a copy of Stand By for Mars! from a Phoenix restaurant.)  My copy still has the "From the Library of Don Wheeler" bookplate in the front.  Marshall based the character of his first-person narrator heroine Lola Montero on the life of 19th century dancer, courtesan, and eventually countess in her own right Lola Montez, who dared to be ambitious.  But Lola Montero's story of rebellion and self-awareness and ambition was written by a man, just as Ashton Pelham-Martyn's tale of a lifelong search for justice in a society that hardly knew the meaning of the word was written by a woman.  Ash got his happy ending, or at least the promise of one, in The Far Pavilions without being nice; Juli got to come along with him on that happily ever after because she had had her ambitions but remained nice.

There is much more of Scarlett and Lola Montero and Ashton Pelham-Martyn in me than even I am comfortable with.  But neither can I deny that it is there, that it is me.  Would Scarlett have been the character she is, the cultural icon that she became, if she had recognized at the start how worthless Ashley Wilkes was and how much more worthy Rhett Butler was?  Would Amber have been embraced as a true heroine if Bruce Carlton had respected her as a human being and married her instead of seeking just a fortune?  If Marilyn French had written Forever Amber, would she have had her heroine walk proudly away from the man who had abused her or, like Marshall's heroine, taken matters into her own hands at the end and never looked back?

There remains a part of me, therefore, that would like to be liked, that would like to have the approval an acceptance that others seem to enjoy without much or any effort on their parts.  It's not going to happen.  I am what I am, what you see is what you get, and all the other bullshit.  The Terms of Use are mine to determine now, and "nice" is not among them.

Selling words under the table

Since my earlier blog post here regarding how some sellers on Amazon and elsewhere seem to be buying positive reviews for their products, my cynicism has been growing.  More and more evidence emerges that honesty is a more and more rare commodity in the marketplace.

While I suppose it's somewhat understandable that sellers of products might be inclined to hype their  wares perhaps more than warranted, what I find most confounding is the negative attitude of buyers and potential buyers toward those who advocate honesty.

If you need to read that sentence again to make sure you understood it, feel free.  I'll wait.  ;-)

What it boils down to, though, is a pretty simple set of questions:  Do readers not want to read good books?  Do readers not know what a good book is?  Do they not care at all any more?  There is usually very little resistance or complaint when someone posts a positive review.  And as such, there are groups and organizations that purport to grant some kind of "seal of approval" to those books that pass some perhaps arbitrary criteria for professionalism.  That's all well and good, but how does the reader ever know what to avoid, if there are no negatives?

Ah, that's when it gets really dicey.  Because there's very little marketplace support for the person who dares to write a negative review, the kind that says loud and clear, "This book is utter crap."

When a book reviewer contemplates posting a negative review, she has to confront a series of Catch-22 situations, the first of which runs something like this:

Did you read the whole book, first page to last?

If yes, you read the whole book, you're permitted (!) to write a negative review, but you run the risk that you'll be accused of stupidity, because only a stupid person would keep reading a book they hated.  In other words, if you read the whole book and hated it, your negative review is invalid and a lie and you shouldn't post it.

If no, you didn't read the whole book, then you're not permitted to write a negative review because the book might get better toward the end and you'll find you really liked it.  In other words, if you didn't read the whole book, you can't be certain you really hated it, and your negative review is invalid and a lie and you shouldn't post it.

Negative reviews of anything less than the whole book aren't fair to the author.  Even if you clearly state you didn't finish the book because the characters were flat, the writing was flawed, and the story made no sense, it's not fair to the author if you review without finishing.  After all, the author wrote the whole book and somehow or other that seems to imply that the reader must read the whole book -- or shut up.


There's another Catch-22, too, related to that "fairness to the author" routine.

Are you an author?  Have you ever written a book?

If yes, you have written a book, then you are qualified to write a negative review but you shouldn't because you should understand how hard it is and should have an appreciation for what the author went through.  If you criticize her work, you're not being fair, you're not being kind, and you're not being supportive of your colleague.  If you criticize her work, you must be a jealous competitor, and you should not be allowed to review.  (By the same token, if you are an author and you post a positive review, you must be just boosting the ratings of a friend and your review is dishonest and you should not be allowed to review.)

If no, you have never written a book, then you are not qualified to write a negative review because you are unable to appreciate what the author went through to produce it.  Her effort, her dedication, her desire are far more important than your experience of 20, 30, 50 years as a reader.  If you criticize her work, you are just being mean and ignorant, because above all else, her feelings are important..


Is it a majority of readers who react this way?  Probably not.  And as for the authors of those badly-reviewed books who respond angrily to their critics, they, too, are in the minority.  Unfortunately, both groups are very vocal and, dare I say, aggressive in their behavior.  It truly takes a brave soul to go up against them.

It's even more difficult when the reviewer who dares to post a negative review is assaulted by the fangurlz and the friendsandfamily and the shills and the sockpuppets and the tit-for-tat review swapping circles.  Having been there more than once, I can tell you it's not a fun experience.

And for an author who truly does care about the marketplace and the quality of the material being published because of the effect it all has on the ability of self-publishing authors to have any hope of breaking the stranglehold of the traditional publishers, it's particularly daunting.  Is there a sense of mission?  Oh, absolutely.  Can that mission become an obsession?  Oh, absolutely.

What's the alternative?  To just let it go on?  To let the spammers and scammers and purveyors of crap to ruin the marketplace?  Maybe it is.

Or maybe we just have to be more aware of what kind of insidious disease we're up against and adopt some kind of resolution not to let it win.  Maybe we owe it to our readers, both the ones we already have and the ones we hope to have.

Because if we aren't writing for our readers, why in the ever loving hell did we ever publish it?

Tracking the words to their source

Okay.  So most of you are aware of The Big Kerfluffle over on Goodreads regarding the matter of negative reviews, offensive shelf names, and so on.  At the moment there are over 1,000 responses and I'm sure more will be coming in as the week-end progresses.  (And now, as of Monday morning, over 2100.)

It ought to be interesting, to say the least.

Since I came to this space and staunchly defended Goodreads just a few weeks ago, I feel I'm entitled to spew a few more words on why I think the new policy is all wrong.

Remember, I'm old.  I remember very well the days before the Internet, the World Wide Web, Amazon, digital publishing, and especially digital self-publishing.  I'm not alone, and I'd love to hear from other people who have lived through The Great Leap Forward.

But in those old days before KDP and Smashwords, readers went to a bookstore and bought a book, read it, and then maybe chatted about it with their friends.  Maybe they had a local book club, or they were just a couple of neighbors who got together over a cup of coffee to talk books and swap a few.  They'd put codes or comments inside the front cover -- "Hot!"  "Elaine loved it."  "♥♥♥." -- to mark the books they've read and their opinions when they took the book to a used bookstore or swapped with friends.  If they were readers of serious literature, they might check out the reviews in the newspaper or major magazines, but if they were readers of genre fiction, they'd have to rely on genre-specific magazines for any reviews at all.  Publishers Weekly and other trade magazines did not review genre fiction. 

Readers rarely met the authors of the books they read unless there was a booksigning, usually for only one author, or maybe a few.  Conventions -- or "cons" -- organized by and/or for the fans of a specific genre might bring a bunch of authors together for an event.  Readers brought their treasured "keeper" copies to have them autographed, and they got to visit with the author for a few minutes or listen to her speak at a seminar, but other than that, there was little direct interaction between writers and readers.

Also, there was an entire publishing apparatus between the writer and the reader:  Publisher, editor, graphic designer, bookseller, publicist, etc., etc., etc.  That apparatus not only provided a physical moat, if you will, between the book as it emerged from the writer's writing instrument of choice, but it provided gatekeeping for the quality of the work into the marketplace.  The reader knew that if she bought a book published by Crown or Baen or Avon or Signet or any of the other established publishers, it would be readable.  It might not be to her liking, but it would be written in mostly recognizable English, have reasonably competent printing and binding, and so on.

The only people who might get hit with promotional materials for a forthcoming book would be the booksellers, who might be showered with flyers and posters and bookmarks, which they could distribute to excited fans or dump in the wastebasket.  Then the books were distributed and they either sold or they didn't. 

Authors collected their royalty checks, if there were any, and stayed home to write their books.

Science fiction cons started the engaging of writers and readers, and that revolution was further incited by Kathryn Falk and Romantic Times magazine with her booklovers' conventions, and by Romance Writers of America.   Because RWA did not have any qualifications for membership, anyone could join and many fans did just that.  More than 80 percent of the membership was (and probably still is) unpublished; they were essentially fans who got to hobnob with their favorite authors and pretend to be on a par with them.

I was a member of RWA for over 10 years.  I attended enough RWA conferences to know how this worked, and it didn't always work to the benefit of the authors.  In fact, so many of the authors were unhappy with this arrangement -- as one said, "We always have to be 'on' for the fans, and they don't like it when they find out we're only human." -- that I started a separate group within RWA just for published authors so we could have our own conference without all the fans around.  It did not make me particularly popular with some factions of the organization.  But the Published Authors' Special Interest Chapter, born from an idea that popped into my head on the evening of Sunday, 13 October 1994, is still going strong.

This is a big picture issue, which is why I've brought all this history into it.  The background is essential to understanding why this recent decision of Goodreads' is wrong.

The self-publishing revolution changed all of the above.  The publishing apparatus was no longer necessary, so anyone could become "an author."  And any scribbling could become "a book."  The machinery for ensuring quality of the product had been removed as a necessity.  Of course there were still books being bought and published by traditional publishers, with all the gatekeeping and quality assurance systems in place.  But there was also another industry coming into vocal being.

Not only did the newly self-publishing authors have little to no experience with how the marketplace worked, they often didn't know how reading and readers work.  And that set the stage for confrontation.

Goodreads was originally established as a site for readers to list, catalogue, review, and discuss books.  Having a customer base of thousands and eventually millions of readers, the site attracted advertisers who pitched their books to potential readers.  Most readers don't want to chat with copy editors and proofreaders, and the site wasn't built for authors to interact with readers, so reviews and discussions remained pretty much focused on the content of the books.  There really wasn't much else to talk about.

Let me emphasize that again:  Reviews and discussions remained pretty much focused on the content of the books.  There really wasn't much else to talk about.

What changed, however, was the whole social media aspect that took over not only publishing but self-publishing. 

The author who self-publishes is often not only the writer of the words but the editor and proofreader, the formatter of the digital edition, the art director who chooses or commissions or even creates the cover art, the creator of the cover copy that accompanies the online listing, the publicist who hawks the book on Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr and ..... Goodreads.

The author is required, by her choice to self-publish, to fill all these roles.  She has to interact with readers in ways authors never did before.  Even if she doesn't plunge into social media with 100 tweets a day, the product she presents is much more hers than just the words.

If she does utilize social media -- including Goodreads -- to interact with her readers and/or potential readers, that action both is and is not the action of the author.  If she spams Twitter and Facebook with notices about her book, she as writer and as publisher is in control of that.  All of that is part of the book's production and distribution process.

In most cases this is a good thing.  But occasionally it's not.  And when it isn't good, it sometimes becomes horrible.

A new writer who has little writing skill, who knows nothing about the legalities of copyright and publishing and distribution, who has no agent or editor or PR assistant to manage her public behavior, who has filled her head with nonsense about how many millions of copies of her book are going to be sold, may be simply, completely, and totally unprepared for negative comments on her books.  She lashes out, creates a shitstorm, accuses people of things they never did, makes a lot of people angry, gets people to defend her based on the untruths she's told . . . . .

And then those untruths are taken as gospel, perpetuated through the social media over which she has no control, and yet readers aren't allowed to set forth the truth? 

That's what has happened with the announcement on Goodreads that reviewers may not review author behavior.

I have so far had one review removed by Goodreads.  Although I don't have a copy of that review, I know pretty much what it consisted of.

The book had received a lot of negative comments because of bad writing:  poor grammar, spelling, punctuation, and so on.  The author -- digitally self-published -- became incensed and wrote a blog post declaring she didn't care that she wasn't a good writer, had no intentions of learning how to write well, and the reviewers who called her on it could pretty much go screw themselves.  When she then got flak about that -- including my review, which cited the blogpost as my reason for even looking at the book and then reviewing it -- she deleted the blogpost.  She then flagged the review and it was hidden by Goodreads.  Friday, that review was removed.

Another of my reviews has been flagged.  That one I've copied and saved off the Goodreads site.  Again, the book was poorly written and any original review I might have written was solely based on the content and quality of the book as a product.  But the author had taken heat for the book's obvious lack of professional editing and proofreading, so she listed herself under another name as the editor.  She assumed a third name as co-author, and a fourth as illustrator.  A 10-minute search identified all these frauds.

The book did have several five-star reviews, but they all came from persons readily identifiable as either out-and-out sock puppets of the author, members of her family, or close friends who were named in the book.  When the accounts were identified and reported to Goodreads and subsequently removed, the author lashed out at reviewers.  How can this behavior, all directly connected to her writing, publishing, and promotion of the book, not be a legitimate subject for criticism?

Another of my reviews may have been flagged; I'm not sure yet, but it, too, has been saved off the site just in case.  Again, it's an instance where the author has engaged in mildly deceptive practices, has enlisted friends and family to denounce and verbally attack anyone who dares to criticize her book,  has created sock puppet accounts for herself to boost her own ratings.

A book, even a self-published book, is a product being sold in a marketplace.  Every aspect of that product should be material for possible criticism.  Is the cover art offensive?  Is the digital formatting impossible to read?  Is the book over-priced?  Is the author issuing revised editions every week, resulting in reviewers actually reviewing different material without even knowing it?

The Goodreads (partial) ban on addressing author issues related to books is very short-sighted, but it is also consistent with an entity that is only concerned with pushing product, not with guaranteeing the quality of the product.  By protecting the feelings of authors who really can't write anyway, Goodreads actively promotes bad writing and whiny authors.  By punishing the reviewers who dare to tell the truth, Goodreads is actively silencing ... everyone.

Does Goodreads allow trolling and bullying?  Yes, unfortunately, they do now.  But the trolls aren't even members of the site, and they are bullying the readers. 

They know who they are.

Sticks and stones? How 'bout words and cookies instead

Remember the old taunt from those long ago playground days?  "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me!"

Apparently there are some people (and they know who they are) who never learned the truth in that old saying.

So let's go back to that playground again and see what happens. . . . . .


Little Arthur goes to the playground with a bag full of cookies he baked.  He hands free ones out to the kids he sees at the playground.

Kid #1:  Gee, thanks!  (takes a bite)  Gawd, this is terrible!  It's so dry and hard and overbaked I can hardly chew it!

Kid #2:  (struggles to swallow)  I know!  It's like his mother didn't teach him how to test the oven setting or something.

Arthur:  But you didn't eat the whole thing!  You only ate one bite! 

Kid #1:  I don't need to eat the whole thing.  It's awful, and it isn't going to get any better.  It's a lousy cookie, for fuck's sake.  Did you even try one yourself?

Arthur:  I don't have to!  I know they're good!  I made 'em!

Kid #3:  (spits his out on the ground)  Ugh!  It's got coconut in it!  I hate coconut!  You shoulda warned me it had coconut in it!  I think I'm gonna throw up!

Arthur:  You guys are mean!  Those cookies took me all morning to bake!  and I gave 'em to you for free!  How dare you say you don't like them!

Kid #1:  They're still terrible!  I don't care if you took two weeks to bake 'em.  They suck!  Look, mine's all burnt on the bottom.

Arthur:  My mother told me she loved those cookies!

Kid #3:  Well, duh, that's what mothers are supposed to do. 

Arthur:  Why are you being so mean to me?  You're a bunch of bullies!  I'm going to sue you!

Kid #2:  Sue us?  For what?  'Cuz you made some overbaked coconut cookies that we didn't like?

Arthur:  You're ruining my career as a baker!  I'll have you all arrested and thrown in jail for a hundred billion years!

Kid #3:  Are you crazy or somethin'?  You wanta be a baker, then go home and learn how to bake good cookies.  Quit bein' a whiny little fuckwad and wasting our time.  It's not like these are the only cookies in town.


A week later Arthur comes back to the playground with another bag of cookies, which he hands out free.

Kid #1:  I'll pass.

Arthur:  You didn't even taste it!

Kid #1:  No, and I ain't gonna. 

Kid #2:  (takes a bite and spits it out) Holy shit, it's hard as a fuckin' rock!  This is even more overbaked than the last batch!  Christ on a crutch, Arthur, didn't you pay any attention to what we told you the last time?

Kid #4:  Here let me try one.

Kid #2:  Don't say we didn't warn you.  Arthur's cookies are shit.

Kid #4:  (takes a bite)  What the fuck?  I think I broke a tooth!

Arthur:  You're lying!  You didn't really break a tooth!  You didn't even take a bite!

Kid #4:  I couldn't!  The damn cookie's too damn hard!

Arthur:  (offering cookie to another kid)  Here, it's free.

Kid #5:  No way!  If all my friends think your cookies are this bad, I'm not touchin' 'em with a 10 foot pole.

Arthur:  (lies down in the dirt, screaming and kicking)

Moral of the story:  Books are like cookies, and authors are like bakers. 

No one laid a hand on Arthur; no one told him to put his hand in a blender or go hang himself.  They just didn't like his cookies. 

Arthur can pick himself up, dust himself off, and go home to learn how to make cookies people will like and eat and tell their friends about and pay real money for.  No one is stopping him.  Of course, in order to do that, he will have to admit that his cookies need improvement and maybe he needs some help.   Or, if he chooses to be a martyr, he can continue to writhe in the dust until the ants that are drawn to the cookies decide they're inedible and eat Arthur's eyes out instead.