The worst word of all

Of course it's a four letter word, at least in English. 

Fear.

We human beings do terrible things out of fear.  Fear begets loathing, fear begets hatred, fear begets violence.

We're afraid of all kinds of things.  Some of our fears are justified, many are not.

We're afraid of flying, of snakes.  We're afraid of caves, of disease.  We're afraid of being poor, we're afraid of being alone.  We're afraid of failure, of rejection.

We're afraid of difference, and we're afraid of the unknown.

We have a difficult time facing up to some of our fears, usually because we're afraid of something else.  We're afraid to admit we've been wrong about something or other, because we're afraid that if we admit to being wrong, other people will laugh at us or shun us or lose respect for us.

When we live surrounded by fears, many of them manufactured by outside interests, we can very easily lose sight of how foolish our fears are, and how destructive -- even self-destructive -- they can become.

Here's an example:

In recent years, in the U.S. at least, there's been a quiet build up of fear about germs on grocery store shopping carts.  For probably a century or so, no one gave this a single thought.  Then suddenly we began to notice people bringing little disposable wipes with them to swab off the handles of the carts before using them.  Next thing you know, there were dispensers of little disposable wipes at the entrance to every supermarket.  For a while a few years ago, one of the supermarkets where I shop had a huge machine sitting outside that was used to disinfect (using ultraviolet light???) the whole fleet of shopping carts every evening.  Of course, the germs came back right away.

Few people ever do more than wipe off the handle.  I've watched customers carefully extract one of the disinfecting wipes from the dispenser, rub it along the handle before they even touch the cart, and then go merrily on their way.  They put their groceries in the main basket of the cart, which hasn't been disinfected.  Women put their purses in the child seat, which hasn't been disinfected.  Just a few days ago, I waited patiently while an elderly woman went through the ritual, taking care not to touch the cart's handle until it had been safely cleansed, and then she settled her cane, which had been in direct contact with the unsanitized parking lot pavement, in the main basket where she was going to put her groceries.

It seems like a harmless fear, and I know there will be plenty of people who think there's nothing wrong with eliminating even a few of those flu germs from the shopping cart handle.  After all, we don't know what kind of illness the previous user had.  Might have been a child with a runny nose, or someone who didn't cover up when they coughed or sneezed.  Many of us are afraid to admit we're afraid of something someone else told us to be afraid of that we weren't afraid of until we were told to be.

You've got to be carefully taught, as Richard Rodgers told us in South Pacific.

So how do we fight the fear?  Any fear? 

The greatest enemy of fear is knowledge. 

How often have we seen this scenario?  The child, cringing in fear, clinging to its mother, terrified of the friendly looking dog.  The mother, smiling and confident, urging the child, "Come on, pet him.  He won't hurt you.  He's a nice dog."  And then the child, taking confidence from the mother, reaches out tentatively until the dog wags its tail and licks the child's hand.  Lifelong friends have been made, because now the child knows the dog is not something to be afraid of.

Caution is not the same as fear.  We are cautious around dogs we don't know, because we know that some are dangerous.  We are cautious when driving in unfamiliar cities because we don't want to get lost.  We are cautious using power tools because we know they can cause serious physical injury.

We justify irrational actions based on irrational fears, and sometimes we take that irrationality to extremely violent ends.  Does one nation become so terrified of running out of a vital natural resource that it invades another nation, killing thousands, to take possession of their natural resources?  Does that kind of national fear blind an entire population to the possibility of finding alternatives?  Does it lead to an irrational fear of anyone who might pose an obstacle to obtaining that resource, including anyone who might look like someone who might post such an obstacle?  How elaborate can we build that chain of fear?  How strong are the bonds that secure us to our fears?  What, if anything, can we do as individuals to break those chains?

And what in the hell does any of this have to do with writing?

Okay, let me bring this all back down to a more personal and manageable focus.


The following is a quote from one of the comments made by Courtney Milan on the July 2012 Dear Author opinion piece on bullying:

The power dynamic explanation cannot explain the entirety of my loathing for the kind of attack the goodreads bullies are using, because I can think of extremely powerful woman(sic) who have been subjected to threats of physical violence precisely because they are powerful. In that case, those threats exist to weaken the women themselves, and also to threaten those who watch. It sends a clear message: Don’t you dare reach for power, because if you do, you too will get this. 

There is something particularly loathsome about the people who posted Sandra Day O’Connor’s address in DC and suggested that she should get raped, or people who talk about lynching Barack Obama, or people who threaten to hang out outside Oprah’s studio and shoot her. Regardless of what you think about those people, I hope everyone agrees that this is wrong. Those people are very powerful–no doubt about it. There’s no doubt in my mind that they have more power than their attackers. But those attacks are designed not just to attack, but to disenfranchise. 

You do have power, Jane [Litte, of Dear Author]. So do many other reviewers. I’m not saying that the power is equal. I am saying that your stalker targeted you–and the STGB targeted the reviewers they did–because you have power. It’s intended as an object lesson to others who are less powerful: that if readers stick their necks out, they will be chopped off. Sending the message that powerful women need to be cut down to size by any means necessary is, to me, the more despicable aspect of this issue than the the power dynamic.

Since the publication of that opinion piece and the subsequent discussion, Jane Litte herself has come under recent personal attack in the form of a lawsuit.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book has been stalked to her home, with the stalking publicized by the author.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book has been harassed on the telephone by an author who admitted to tracking down the reviewer's personal information, and who then bragged about it online and dismissed her actions as not harmful, not stalking, not threatening, even though they were.  Another reviewer who dared to be critical of a book was stalked to her workplace and physically attacked by the author.

These are the cases we know about.  How many more are unknown?  How many more reviewers and bloggers have just quietly stopped reviewing because they're afraid?    How many readers have taken reasonable caution to a fearful extreme and allowed themselves to be more or less voluntarily silenced?

When I came back to the writing game a few years ago, the game had changed.  There was now instantaneous digital publishing available to just about anyone with a computer.  There were countless blogs and websites offering readers a wide variety of reviews and opinions.  There were discussion groups and paid reviewers and circle jerk review swaps.  As both a reader and a writer, I had to learn the new rules, familiarize myself with the playing fields, and even buy a program to identify the players.  And like any rookie, I made some mistakes.  Some of them were rather embarrassing.

In my early explorations of the Amazon/Kindle universe sometime in  2010, before I knew how to sort the offerings for the low-cost and free books that fit my budget, I stumbled across a free book that looked interesting.  I downloaded it, read the first couple of pages, and was astonished at how terrible the writing was.  In all my years of judging RWA contest material, in all my years in various critique groups, I had rarely come across something so bad.  And yet, as I had noticed on the Amazon listing, this book had several five-star reviews.

I couldn't believe what the reviewers had said about this book.  That the descriptions were vivid and made the reader feel as if she were "right there."  That the characters were well drawn, and that the writing was grammatically flawless.  That the book was wonderful, they couldn't put it down, they couldn't wait for the author's next book, that they couldn't wait for this book to be made into a movie.

Had they read the same book I did?  If they had and they couldn't see the errors I had seen, was there something wrong with them?  Or was there something wrong with me that these things mattered?

When Amazon sent me a little email some time later asking "How many stars would you give to __________?" and provided a handy link to the book's page, I took them at their word.  I left a very brief "review" in which I wrote that I had purchased the book but was unable to read more than the first chapter or so because it was so badly written.  I gave it one star. 

Within a day or so, I received notice in my email that people were commenting on my review.  In my naiveté, I anticipated notes from grateful readers thanking me for pointing out how terrible the book was, or even from the author thanking me for giving her tips on how to improve her writing.  Therefore the anger in the responses shocked me.  How dare I, they fairly spat, criticize this wonderful book if I hadn't read the whole thing.  If I remember correctly -- this was in the days before I knew how to take screen shots or had any clue they'd be necessary -- there were three such responses, all in the same vein, and two of them were from other reviewers of the same book.

My first reaction was simple shock.  I had never expected such venom toward a simple review that simply stated facts.

My second reaction was anger.  I had not been rude in my assessment, and I had not attacked the author in any way.  I only wrote that I had found numerous errors of spelling, punctuation, and syntax and that I quit reading after the first chapter or so.  Yet these people whom I didn't know had turned on me with obvious anger.

My third reaction was fear.  How many more people like this were there out there?  Had I in fact done something wrong in posting that I couldn't read the rest of the book?  Had I broken some rules?  (Actually I had, sort of, but I didn't know it at the time.)  Because I didn't know the rules of the game and therefore didn't know how to defend myself in that situation, I immediately figured out a way to delete the review.

I silenced myself.  Out of fear.  I'd been bullied into silence.  I'd been bullied into questioning my own judgment.

As a result, I did some research.  I learned the rules of the game.  I learned who the players were and which side they played for.  I vowed not to be bullied into silence again.

Since then, I've been the target of other intimidation tactics in efforts to silence me.  I've been called names.  I've been cyberstalked by more than one author with a bruised ego.  (If any of them have tried calling me at home, I don't know about it.  I do not answer calls from people I don't know, and I often don't even listen to voice mails that come from unfamiliar numbers.)  My books have been revenge rated, poor things, and I've been featured prominently on a website that shall remain nameless.  Most recently, I've been banned from another website, without explanation but probably for the cardinal sin of not being nice enough (although there may be other reasons).

I will not give in to fear.  Being banned from that site didn't shock me or even really surprise me.  It certainly hasn't silenced me, and it won't stop me from reviewing books, including books I think are badly written.

By the same token, writers should not be afraid of negative reviews.  Again, knowledge is the greatest enemy of fear, and the more you as a writer know about negative reviews, the less you'll have to fear from them.  If your book is good, a bad review can't hurt it.  Not just won't hurt it, but can't.  If your book is bad, you can either learn from the reviews or not and either improve that book or the next, but you should also learn that if your book is bad, no quantity of good reviews will save it. 

If we have to be carefully taught to hate and fear, then we can also learn not to.

If you let your fear of a negative review blind you to the opportunities presented, then you probably have no business being a writer in the first place.  Writing for publication requires both a certain amount of rational caution and a certain amount of fearlessness.  What it doesn't have room for is the worst word of all:  Fear.

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.

The meaning of the mean words

For something close to 30 years, I've been an admittedly harsh critic when it comes to writing.  I don't deny this, and I've never attempted to moderate my comments when asked for them.  And yes, I've received criticism for my harshness.  From my earliest experiences as a judge in RWA contests, reaction to my analyses has ranged from gratitude for an honest if painful review to outrage and accusations of bias and crimes against humanity.  It's all okay; I live with it.

Several months ago, an author whose work had elicited a one-star rating from me on Goodreads contacted me and asked for an explanation.  I had "shelved" the book in a variety of descriptive groups that indicated I thought it was poorly written.  Because I had not posted a review, she wanted to know why I had only given the book one star -- "I didn't like it" -- and whether or not my "poorly written" designation came from actually reading the book.

There is, of course, no requirement on the Goodreads site that readers post reviews along with their ratings.  Readers don't even have to rate the books, and they can "shelve" books however they wish.  Nor is it required that readers have read the book prior to rating, shelving, or reviewing it.  (How would they prove that they had?  Take a test?)

Now, I have frequently stated here and elsewhere that I don't believe authors should ever, ever, ever contact anyone who has reviewed, rated, shelved, or commented on their book unless they are specifically and explicitly invited to do so.  Therefore I politely but firmly told this author that I was not going to provide her with an explanation then, but that if I ever did so, it would be in a publicly available review. 

Her action was understandable.  The book was her first, and she had self-published it via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and via Smashwords.  This information was readily available from the book's front matter.  She was not rude in her request to me, nor did she post anything public about the exchange.  (If she posted one-star ratings to my books, I honestly don't know.  I pretty much pay no attention to those.)

The Amazon listing for her book had received half a dozen or so five-star reviews, several of which read like they'd been written by friends or family members.  The couple of one- and two-star reviews cited poor grammar and clichéd characters; one of those reviews was a variation on the "don't waste your time; even free this book isn't worth it."  That's not an uncommon remark made on self-published novels. 

I generally glance at the reviews, especially the negative ones, when I'm contemplating a digital purchase, but since the book had been offered for free, I wasn't too concerned.  I downloaded it, then glanced at the contents.

I was not favorably impressed with the writing, but at the time of posting the book to my Goodreads collection, I didn't have time to do a complete analysis, so I shelved it as poorly written, gave it one star, and moved on.  I heard no more from the author and I thought that was the end of it.

A few weeks ago, I learned that she had posted a comment on another books-and-readers-and-authors site in which she lambasted the refusal of a reviewer to justify their negative opinion of her book.  She described this person as what amounted to a serial review bully; I won't post the exact phrase because I don't want to give anyone the ability to locate the author via a search on the phrase.  Was she referring to me?  I don't know for sure.  I had never reviewed her book, only shelved and rated it. 

I've written a lot of words on this subject, and I really get upset that I find myself doing it again.  More than likely, the message is completely lost on those who need it most:  the authors who have somehow come into the belief that their work can never ever receive a negative review and that anyone who dares criticize it must be a mean bully, a sociopath, a jealous competitor, or something.

More and more and more of these authors are taking to the blogosphere, to Goodreads and Amazon's forums, to their own websites, and slamming any and all reviewers who are cruel and mean and malicious enough to leave hurtful comments.

There are still comments being posted to Dear Author's thread from July 2012 regarding the efforts of some authors and fans and readers to silence negative reviews. 

I can understand authors having hurt feelings.  I can understand the disappointment of a bad review.  I've been there.  I've suffered through the rejection letters.  I've had publishers hold a manuscript for a year, sending me occasional encouraging updates, only to receive the material back with no explanation beyond a form letter rejection.  I've had bad reviews.  I've had malicious reviews and retaliatory shelving and one-star ratings from trolls.  I've been there, kids.  And I survived.

So what's different now from 20 or 30 years ago?  Is it, as I've blogged before, that some of these authors have never experienced any kind of criticism of their writing and just don't know how to handle it?  Personally, I think that's far more likely than another explanation, which is that they are the sociopaths and just have it in for anyone who dares criticize anything.

Reviews are for readers.  Not just for the people who have already read the book -- actually, that's a pretty stupid definition of "reader" -- but for readers who might buy the book, potential readers.  Any reader who has any experience with the book in question or with its author has the right to leave a comment.  On Amazon, on Smashwords, on Barnes & Noble, on Goodreads, on any other site where books are discussed.

Reviews are not for the authors.  I'm not sure how many times or how many ways I can write that.  Reviews are of material that's already been published.  The author has said she's done with it, it's ready to be read, and now she's moving on.

If she's not finished with it, if she's still looking for feedback, she shouldn't publish it. 

How difficult is this to understand?  Amazon and B&N and Kobo and Smashwords are all retail stores just like Target or Kroger's or FootLocker or Lowe's.  Customers go to them to buy products ready to be used.  And if the products don't perform as the customer expected them to, the customer has a right to complain, to demand a refund, to tell her friends and family about it.

Authors, your books are no different from tires or flashlights, sneakers or toasters, pillows or two-by-fours, ground beef or asparagus.  No one cares how much time you put into writing your stories.  If people cared about the labor involved in producing consumer goods, they wouldn't buy sneakers made in Chinese sweatshops.

And here's the thing:  I do care about the labor that's involved, in both the sneakers and the books.  I do my best to avoid buying goods made by companies that I know employ what amounts to slave labor.

But I also make an effort to instruct readers -- some of whom might also be writers -- what makes a good book.

When I read a book, regardless of genre, regardless whether it's fiction or non-fiction, I expect it to meet certain minimum standards.  I don't expect every book I read to be a five-star, and I have enjoyed many books that weren't, in the Goodreads rating system, "amazing!".   I also recognize that not all readers will like the same things I do, nor will they have the same standards.  I don't have any problem with that, either as a reader or as a writer.

I also know that the skills necessary to achieve those minimum standards are not beyond the capability of most people of average intelligence.  Basic English grammar and spelling and usage, basic story construction, basic factual research, and basic digital publication formatting are not difficult skills to learn.  They take some time and some effort to learn, and more time to master, but all of them are essential to the creation of an end product that will appeal to and satisfy the reading preferences of most reasonably educated potential readers.

When a writer chooses not to learn these skills, when a writer chooses to publish a product that fails to meet the reader's minimum standards, then that writer must accept the criticism the product receives.

I have tried, because I honestly do care about writers and helping them to write well-crafted, interesting, entertaining books, to put at least some information into many of my blogposts directly addressing issues such as punctuating dialogue or preparing an MS Word .doc file for Kindle Direct Publishing.  I've written some very very detailed critiques of samples of writing chosen specifically to illustrate concepts of what I consider good writing.

I have never, at least not intentionally, criticized any individual author as a person.  And I have advised and encouraged authors to separate themselves from their books.  Books are not children, not "babies."  Books cannot be killed or raped -- except by their own authors, of course.  A review is, for better or worse, the reader's opinion, and the author is always free to take any advice or ignore it.

Writers do not even have to read reviews, because reviews aren't written for them.  But if writers do read reviews, and especially if they read reviews of their own work, then they need to be prepared for the negative.

When I rip a novel to shreds -- and yes, I admit that I have done that -- it's because I believe the book deserves it.  Does the author deserve it?  Um, I don't really care.  She put the book out there as a finished product, and now it has to stand or fall on its own.  Can the author learn from it?  Yes, of course she can.  Will she be hurt by it?  Oh, probably, but she should have thought about that possibility before she published it.

There are ways to avoid bad reviews.  The two most obvious ones are:  Learn to write well, and don't publish until you learn to write well.

I am not going to stop writing "bad" reviews.  If your book is poorly written and it comes to my attention, there's a chance I will shred it.  It may be an object lesson for other writers as well as a warning to readers.  I don't care.  It may be the only negative review in a stack of five-star raves.  I don't care.  It may hurt your feelings and drive you to call me names.  I don't care.  It may enrage you and you'll rally your fans and friends and family to give my books one-star reviews.  I don't care.

What I do care about is my integrity.  I believe that anything I publish will be well-written, and if there are mistakes, I will own up to them.  I will never bash a reviewer, never threaten, never whine.  But by the same token, when I come across writing that I consider fails to meet my standards, I will reserve the right to shred it, to point out its flaws and weaknesses. 

Maybe other writers will learn from that.  Maybe other readers will see my reviews as helpful and honest and will "follow" my reviews on Goodreads.  Or maybe not.

But I will not lower my standards to spare the feelings of authors who cannot or will not take the time and expend the effort to at least learn how to construct a coherent sentence, compose a fluid paragraph, create an internally consistent plot.

If the author sees that as mean, then she is failing to put herself in the perspective of all the other potential readers she's trying to reach.  If the author sees that as potentially diminishing her sales, then she should have written a book that couldn't be shredded.  No one, absolutely no one, owes an author a living.  No one, absolutely no one, owes an author an apology for an honest review.

So to the little snowflakes whose feelings I have hurt and who are following me around the Internet, I don't know what you hope to accomplish.  Do you think I'm going to be nicer to you because you've done me some big honor?  Do you think I'm going to refrain from talking about your books because it might get back to you?  It's not going to happen.

Yes, I'm mean. Yes, I'm harsh.  But yes, I'm honest.  Deal with it.

My words are mine, but they are not me

Sometime after my first book, Legacy of Honor, was published, someone remarked to me how vividly I had described the heroine's experience of being so cold during the Russian winter after Napoleon's disastrous invasion.  I said I remembered very well writing that scene, and that to get all the sensations, I merely stepped out the door into the dark night of a sub-zero northern Indiana midwinter.  I knew what that cold felt like.

My experience.  My words.  My book.

But not me.

When Firefly was going through the editing process at Pageant Books, my editor wanted to change a scene in which the heroine Julie looks out her window to watch the rising sun light the mountains to the west.  The editor wanted the sun to light mountains to the east, and I literally had to draw her a picture to show how the rising sun casts its light from the east to the west.  You know what I mean, don't you?  Well, so did I, from having spent many an early morning watching the sun come up and light Saddle Mountain in Tonopah, Arizona to the west.

My experience.  My words.  My book.

But not me.

There's a scene in the book now titled Secrets to Surrender in which Viva protests Rio's intentions to sell a mule.  Although his arguments made perfect sense, she is emotionally attached to the animal and resists selling her.  I bond to animals -- and sometimes to possessions -- instantly and I felt her sense of loss even though I, as a human being and as an author, knew it's only a story.

My experience.  My words.  My book.

BUT NOT ME.

I make jewelry from rocks.  Remember my saying that I watched the rising sun light Saddle Mountain?  My husband and I used to go out to far western Maricopa County, in the area dominated by Saddle Mountain, early in the morning and spend all day collecting rocks that were then sliced and polished and wrapped in precious metal wire to make jewelry.

In order to sell my jewelry -- which I do -- I have to let it go.  I have to stop owning it.  And when someone buys it, it becomes theirs.  It's not mine any more.  It's not me.

At an art show many years ago, a potential customer was looking at one of the small ironwood bowls my husband had made.  The customer asked if it would make a good ashtray.  We were honest and told him it would probably burn, since it was, after all, wood.  Duh. 

And so he didn't buy it.  But what if he had?  What if he had used it as an ashtray and burned the hell out of it?  What if he put salad in it and ruined the finish?  What if he got pissed off and burned it?

Well, I wouldn't want to know about it, but once he bought it, it was his to do with as he wanted. 

If an author can't separate herself enough from her work that she takes criticisms of it personally, then she really needs to get out of the business.  I just can't stress this enough.

You are going to get bad reviews.  It will happen.  I can guarantee it.  Somewhere along the line someone will not like your book.  Maybe a lot of people will not like your book.  It's even possible that no one will like it.  You may have written a really terrible, really bad, really shitty book.  It's possible.  And you are too close to it to know for sure. The only people who can tell you that are people who aren't you.

No one can guarantee your success.  It will happen, or it won't.  No one owes it to you, and no matter how hard you try, you can't make it happen.

You are not your book.  You are not the sum of all your books.  You are you.

Let the book go.  Let it live on its own, or die on its own.  If you didn't do the best you could, then you should have, and it's not the reviewers' fault that they didn't like it.  It's your fault.  If you did the best you could and they still don't like it, then there's nothing you can do about it.

The only thing you can do is walk away from it.  Go on to the next book.  Make it better.

But you cannot make it you.  You cannot make you it.

And if you can't understand that, if you don't want to understand that, if you refuse to believe it, then you are probably in need of more help than I can give you.

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?

Getting the word(s) out, or "But I'm so not a shameless hussy!"

Self-promotion is not my strong point.  I could no more build a blog or a website with half a dozen copies of my book cover shoved in the reader's face than I could audition for American Idol.  It's just not me.  I even had doubts about posting the cover for Firefly at the opening to this post.  But I did it.

What prodded me into today's brief and mild shameless hussiness was discovering that I and my blog had been mentioned on author Courtney Milan's blog a couple of months ago wherein she asks about the ethics behind authors' requesting reviews:

What do you think of authors asking for reviews? I don’t mean asking for reviews in exchange for money or a prize.  I don’t mean asking friends and family for reviews. But I have seen a handful of self-published books, where at the end of the book, there is a brief note that says something like this:

If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.com

Disclaimer:  I don't know Courtney and to the best of my knowledge she doesn't know me.  We post independently and occasionally at DearAuthor.com and maybe a few other places as well, but there's nothing orchestrated or coordinated about that.  So when I saw she had linked to this blog, I was both surprised and flattered.

I had an initial response to her query, but as I read through the other comments, I began to modify my opinion.

When I originally blogged about negative reviews and later linked to the Amazon Kindle forum thread on "Badly Behaving Authors" the main concern was authors and their friends and their sock puppets posting scads of favorable reviews of their own books or paying strangers to write favorable reviews regardless whether they had liked or even read the book.

But Courtney Milan was asking about another issue entirely, which was the soliciting of reviews in general, either by the author or by Amazon -- or, one would suppose, by the publisher.

I worked through the issue this way:

1.  Most businesses will ask for feedback, and they often couch their request in terms that encourage positive feedback.  Today, for example, I bought a new phone.  I knew what I wanted when I went into the store, I expressed my preference to the salesperson, and I walked out 45 minutes later with exactly the kind of device I wanted.  There was no pressure to buy more phone than I wanted, though he did just kind of assume I wanted a charger for in the car.  I rarely use the one I have, but figured it would be nice to have just in case.  When the whole operation was completed, I was asked for my feedback.  No one said, "If everything is okay, how did we do?" 

2.  Sometimes the solicitation for a review, such as the Amazon request, is to leave a comment if the reader enjoyed the book, with the implication being that only favorable reviews are requested.  Well, is that necessarily in and of itself a bad thing?  Some businesses will post a cute little sign that says something along the lines of "If you're pleased with our service, tell your friends; if you're not pleased, tell us so we can make it right."  Of course, this also implies that they don't want you spreading negative comments that will hurt their business, but there's also the sense that sometimes a bit of communication may be all that's needed to turn a no-stars review to a five-star.  In other words, give the business a second chance.

But that's a one-on-one situation, and that's not what a book review is all about.  There's no suggestion that if you didn't like the book, the author will rewrite it to your satisfaction.  You're not, after all, buying a personal service but a finished product that someone has put out there for you to buy, or not. 

Points #1 and #2 pretty much contradicted each other, in the sense that #1 makes a solicitation for feedback good or ill, but #2 rejects a negative comment made publicly but does not offer any kind of satisfaction in exchange for no negative comment.  If that makes sense.

However,

3.  Books have always been sent out for review.  In the old days of print only, copies were sent to the major review magazines like Romantic Times and Affaire de Coeur.  Each of them had their stable of reviewers, and even though there were always rumors that buying advertising would help an author's review be more positive, there was at least a sense that the reviewers themselves had some integrity when it came to their opinions.

Again, however, I have to add a bit of personal observation.  I was absolutely flabbergasted when Firefly received Affaire de Coeur's award for Best Historical Romance of 1988.  (I should scan the certificate and post it here.  Maybe tomorrow?)  I had heard rumors that sometimes those awards were withdrawn if the winning author couldn't attend the banquet, but my award came with a letter that said I didn't need to attend.  I had an out, however, because my daughter was competing in the Arizona State Spelling Bee that same week-end.  (She hates to be reminded of it, so I'm taking yet another opportunity to embarrass her.)  But I had never taken out an ad in Affaire de Coeur and as far as I knew, neither had the publisher, Pageant Books.  Firefly won on its own merits, as far as I knew.  I certainly had nothing to do with it.

Several years later, when Moonsilver was published by Pocket Books, it was sent to Affaire de Coeur for review.  Again, this was at the direction of Pocket Books, not me.  It was given a very, very nice review, which I have a copy of somewhere or other.  And what I'm going to write next is something virtually no one by myself knows.

That glowing review in Affaire de Coeur was not unbiased.  Although I had nothing to do with choosing the reviewer and knew nothing about it at all until my editor sent me a copy after the review was written and the magazine published, I was disappointed not to have had an unbiased reviewer say all those nice things about the story -- and about me.  But the reviewer, Ann Douglas, was also a writer, and my local RWA chapter had selected her as one of the winners of our inaugural "Hot Prospects" writing contest just a couple years before.  Her book, a Regency romance, was ultimately published along with one or two more, before Ann passed away.  I had the delightful task of calling her to inform her she had won, and I also got to meet her at that year's RWA national conference.    Is it possible she really liked Moonsilver as much as she let on in her review?  Well, I'd like to think so.  But I'll never know for sure.

Considering that points #1 and #2 had pretty much cancelled each other out, #3 was the deciding factor.  I was firmly in the "no solicitation whatsoever" camp.  And that means authors should not even send advance copies to review sites.  Publishers, yes, and I say that even knowing that gives the traditional publishers (whom I hate with a passion) an advantage.  But publishers, publicists, and even agents act as buffers between the reviewer and the author.  Reviews need to be honest and unbiased.

Reviewers need to be unbiased.  Certainly that's not going to be an absolute, and in this age of social media, many reviewers are going to have some personal acquaintance with many authors.  I've had some email exchanges with Jane Litte over on Dear Author, and some of our exchanges have even been a bit contentious!  Do I think that would make her biased either for or against me and my books?  I don't know.  I think she would be able to be reasonably honest, but how would readers perceive it?  And that's the big issue.

Readers no doubt believed Ann Douglas' review of Moonsilver was her honest and unbiased opinion.  I alone knew otherwise.  Honest, perhaps, but if anyone knew the full story behind it, how could anyone have believed there was absolutely no bias?  Who could have completely trusted that review?

Certainly I have no solicited reviews -- good or bad -- on the items I've put on Amazon or Smashwords.  I don't solicit reviews on the jewelry and other items I sell at art shows, so why should I do so with my books?  You buy it, or you don't, and if you want to tell your friends about it, that's fine. I hope you'll say something nice, but if you don't, well, you don't. 

You know you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself.

I'm not a very good self-promoter.  I'm embarrassed often to even tell people I write, and it was okay for a long time because I actually didn't write.  The books that had been published were my own personal little triumphs, with or without best-seller status, with or without five-star reviews from anyone.  I was the socially-inept geek in high school who said she was writing a book, so seeing seven novels in print was my vindication to all the much more popular kids who acted as if they didn't know I even existed.  (Some of them did know, and that's a story for another sleepless night.)

I never expected to be a best-seller.  Oh, sure, there was the faint hope in the back of my mind, but realistically, no, I didn't see that in my future at any point.  I had written the books, I had been published.  My name was on the cover in raised foil letters.  I was vindicated.

But in some ways, I remained that geeky little nerd, because I had neither the hustler mentality nor the money to go along with it that was needed to promote my books.  When other authors were sending out fancy bookmarks and taking out ads in Romantic Times, I was working a full-time job to help pay the household bills.  I went to the RWA National Conference and a few small local conferences, but I couldn't afford to do any kind of tour.  I won't even tell you about some of the disastrous book-signings I was involved in; the memories are too painful even now.

I had thought, or perhaps just hoped, it would be different with digital publishing. 

It's not.

Oh, I'm slightly envious of those who have the time and the money and the chutzpah to self promote, but certainly not to the point of being vindictive.  Would I like to take out an ad on Dear Author or Smart Bitches Trashy Books or All About Romance?  Sure, if I could afford it.  But I can't.  Would I like to hear the cyber-squees of fans who see a post from me on a website and just have to let me know how much they loved my latest book?  Sure.  But it's not going to happen, and I'm okay with that.

What I'm not okay with are the authors whose digitally self-published books I've been watching on Amazon, authors who have gamed the system to promote their books not with paid ads but with phony reviews.  And the reason I'm not okay with it is because I have no defense against it.  No author with any integrity does. 

I had no idea when I selected five titles for my original little study two months ago that I would uncover the most discouraging thing I've seen since the form-letter rejection slip.  Over the past eight weeks, I expanded my sample of five titles to more than 30.  I watched the daily listings of free Kindle books at ereaderIQ.com and selected a mix of original digital works and republished print titles.  I did not leave any reviews -- that's in violation of Amazon's terms anyway -- and I will not list the titles, authors, or any identifying details, in part because I don't want to give them any free publicity.

Again, they are all historical romances, since that's my area of expertise.  They all have at least one five-star and one one-star review.  Most of the digital originals had way more five-star reviews than one-star, and far too many of the five-star reviewers had few or no other reviews on file.  Many of the negative reviews -- what few there were -- were challenged by either the author herself or other persons who I could only assume were the author in sock puppet mode or her friends.  I realized then that the authors were gaming the system in a way I couldn't. 

My only selling tool is my writing.  In my books, of course, but also this little blog and my posts on various discussion boards.  I believe in my writing as much as any author, but I know it's not perfect.  And even if it were without flaw, I know my story lines and my characters and my settings and time periods aren't going to appeal to every reader.  But I still think my writing is solid.  It was, after all, good enough to be published by New York publishers.  That counts for something, doesn't it?

But good writing isn't enough.  Coherent stories and likable characters aren't enough.  In fact, none of that is even important any more.  Now the only thing that matters is having the nerve to go out there and get people to brag about you.  Friends, relatives, strangers, it doesn't make any difference.  Buy them if you have to.  Set up fake Amazon accounts, if you have enough credit cards.  The reviewers don't have to be telling the truth, they just have to do it.  And then you have to have the nerve to deny anyone else a critical voice.  You have to be willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to push your product. 

I wrote in my follow-up to the first long post about suspect reviews that I had acquired the original five titles.  And as I wrote above, I've acquired a whole lot more.  By Amazon's guidelines for reviewing, I can't review my own work, nor can I review works that directly compete with me.  So I can't post my comments on Amazon, where readers might actually see them.

Nor will I post reviews here, since that was never my intention with this blog.  This was to be about my journey as a writer -- yes, it's all about me here! -- and not an examination of other writing.

But so much of the stuff is bad, really bad, and that's what's so discouraging.  The works that are adamantly defended by the authors (in violation of Amazon's Terms of Service, no less) and their friends are among the worst.  The writing is bad.  The characters are unlikable and inconsistent.  The plots have more holes than Swiss cheese.  (I couldn't think of an original simile that wasn't either obscene or too graphic, so you'll have to live with the cheesy one.)  Some of them are very badly formatted for the Kindle.  Spelling and grammar are atrocious; historical accuracy is virtually non-existent.  It's as if the ease of research with the Internet means it's no longer necessary.  No one cares.

(And if my lone reviewer ever finds her way to this blog, or anyone who has read her review finds this, the courier font was corrected as soon as it was discovered, which was before her review was posted, even though the "ugly" font didn't show up on any of the test runs before uploading.  And yes, ice cream was certainly available in Arizona in the 1880s.  Tombstone had an ice house in 1881 and even telephones!  Ice cream wasn't the error that I let stay in place; in fact that was one item I had verified for the 1988 print edition!)

Clearly, however, none of this matters.  All that matters, as it always has, is how many people can say something and make other people believe it.  The truth is no longer a provable fact; it's only an opinion, and the more people who hold that opinion, the more truthful a fact becomes.

I can't compete with that.  And I won't even try.  I may not sell 100,000 copies, or even 10,000, or even 1,000.  But however many I sell, they will be sold on the basis of what the books themselves are, not on the basis of any phony reviews I've had put on Amazon to pump up sales.

As a Chicago native and White Sox fan, I grew up with Chicago Daily News sports reporter Bill Furlong.  For years and years and years I've attributed this quote to him, and maybe I've got it wrong considering that I only saw it once and I was maybe 12 years old at the most at the time.  But I like to think Bill Furlong said it, and it's one of those little lines stuck with me and I've tried to live by:

'Tis better to be honest and hated than corrupt and despised

In this age of millionaires and billionaires as the moral standard, I guess it's understandable that writers will do anything to sell, anything short of producing a worthwhile product.  Maybe that's all they care about.  Maybe that's all that means anything to them.

And maybe, in true Dunning-Kruger fashion, these writers sincerely believe they have written well.  Perhaps they are simply incapable of seeing the flaws in their books, flaws that are the result of their own incompetence.  Or perhaps they are psychologically incapable of accepting criticism.  I don't know.  I don't know any of these people (and I really don't want to know any of them!); I have only read their books.  I know bad writing when I see it. 

I think my books and my writing and even my proofreading can successfully compete against them, but I don't have the shameless PR hussiness to compete with the sock puppet reviews and the nasty responses to negative reviews.  I won't even try.

The other little aphorism I learned in high school and which has stuck with me as determinedly as Bill Furlong's is from Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

El ojo que ves no es ojo porque tú lo veas; es ojo porque te ve.