Word Perfection

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Separation of words and self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the words are big and fat and free . . . and good

Disclaimer:  I was never able to get into the Outlander gush.  There is a specific reason for this, and it's immaterial to this blog post.  I think I read about the first 50 pages and gave up.  I've never read any of the sequels, and don't have any desire to.

At any of the RWA national conferences I attended, one of the most exciting parts was the "goodie bag" handed out at registration.  These tote bags, usually with the conference logo blazoned on the front (along with some bookseller's ad copy) were crammed full with lots of freebies, especially books.  This was a good place for publishers to unload several hundred copies of remaindered paperbacks or new releases they were hyping.  The 1991 conference in New Orleans brought us all a big surprise, and I do mean big.  Ed Sullivan type really big.  A gorgeous, fat hard cover novel by an author none of us had ever heard of:  Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon.

There was no hype with it.  As far as I know, Gabaldon was not even a member of RWA at the time.  She did not speak at the conference, and her publisher provided no other advertising information.  We wondered what the heck was going on, that the publisher would hand out 1500 or so free copies of what looked to be a very expensive book.

A year or so later, many of us received free copies of the first sequel, Dragonfly in Amber.  Again, that was it, the book and nothing more.  By then my daughter had read Outlander and loved it, so I gave her both books.  She still has them to this day.

No one was asked to review the books, like them on Facebook, upvote them on Amazon, retweet their praises or downvote any trolls who didn't love them.  Obviously not, because there was no Facebook or Twitter.  "The web" was still four years in the future.

So how did the Outlander phenomenon develope without the aid of cyber hype? 

Very simply:  Gabaldon wrote a book, told a story, created characters that readers cared enough about to tell their trusted friends.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, sells a book like the book itself. 

As I wrote elsewhere and can't repeat often enough:

To parody the credit card commercial:

Review swap from fellow author? Free

5-star review on Goodreads? $5

Review and "Verified purchase" on Amazon? $10

Honest review from a genuine reader who tells her friends how wonderful your book is?

Priceless

You can buy all the Goodreads reviews and Facebook likes and Amazon upvotes and retweets and pins you want; you can't "buy" readers.

They aren't for sale at any price.

Write a book they love, however, and they'll pay you.

I don't have to read a single word, and neither do you

You're probably thinking this post is going to be a defense of my oft-reviled tendency to rate or review books based on a reading of a single page or less.  Well, it's not.

Not exactly.

This is a simple challenge to all you self-publishing novelists whose digital sales are languishing and who have resorted to giving them away for free in attempt to boost sales without achieving the desired result.

Understand that I'm not addressing this to the writers whose books are selling to their satisfaction.  Nor am I addressing this to all writers who list their books for free.  No, I'm only addressing those who are dissatisfied with their sales and have chosen to give their books away as free samples but still haven't seen a significant rise in sales, whether of the same titles when not free, or other titles.  (Anyone else can try it, too, of course, but I'm specifically addressing that particular group.)

Part one of the challenge:  Take a look at any page of the digital text of your book.  First page, last page, third page of Chapter Twelve, it doesn't matter.  Bring it up on your Kindle or Kindle for PC or iPhone or any of the Kindle Direct Publishing emulators.  Not a PDF on your computer.  Not your original .doc file.  You need to be looking at the version that customers are going to be buying for their Kindles, iPads, smart phones, and so on.

Does your book have distinct paragraphs?  That means, is the beginning of each new paragraph clearly defined?  Yes, or no.  No other answer is possible.  Yes, the beginning is clearly defined, or no, it isn't.

Does it have block paragraphs?  That means, is the first line of each paragraph even with the left margin, and then has a blank line to separate it from the next paragraph?  Yes, or no.

Does it have indented block paragraphs?  That means, is the first line of each paragraph indented from the left margin and there is also a blank line to separate each paragraph from the next?  Yes, or no.

Does it have indented paragraphs?  That means, is the first line of each paragraph indented from the left margin and there is no extra line or space between one paragraph and the next?  Yes, or no.

You will have one Yes answer, and three No answers.  If you have four No answers, see me after class.  If you have more than one Yes answers, go back and review your answers.  If you can't figure out how to come up with one Yes and three No answers, see me after class.

Now, the second part of the challenge.  Look at random pages of several digital editions of books currently published by traditional print publishers.  If you can't afford to buy them, at least download some samples.  Go through the same four questions, and come up with the same single Yes answer.

Now, third part of the challenge.  Look at random pages of several digital editions of books currently published by successful self-publishing authors.  The easy way is to start with the front page of that listing on Amazon and just take the "Look Inside" preview.  By now you should be reasonably familiar with the four paragraphing style and be able to recognize very quickly which style is used in each book you examine.

If we number the four styles  -- none, block, block with indent, indent -- one through four, you should know what style yours is.  You should also have recognized that most, if not all, of the books you examined in parts two and three of the challenge use only the number four style: indented paragraphs without extra space between them.

Therefore, if you want to hope to compete with the established authors, with the authors who are selling their novels, you might to at least make your book look like theirs.  Nothing says, shouts, and screams SELF-PUBLISHING AUTHOR like no paragraphs, block paragraphs, and indented block paragraphs.  Figure out how to get your formatting to look professional.

(This challenge would also give you an opportunity to look at font styles and font sizes, if you're so inclined.)

Why is the type of paragraph such a big deal?  While it may not look to you like it should matter, it really does.

I'm going to assume you recognize the need for paragraphs on principle.  So that leaves out style number one.

While styles two and three clearly identify the separation of paragraphs, they also stop the reader's eyes from flowing to the next word/thought/action.  If you want your reader to keep reading, the very last thing you want her to do is . . . stop reading.  Not even for the tiny fraction of a second it takes her eyes to see that blank space, recognize it as just space, and then go on to the next line of text.  You want her to keep reading without a break, or at least until there's a break in the action, a change of scene, or whatever.  You'll indicate those with either a double break (the aforementioned blank line with or without a squiggly little design for emphasis) or a new chapter.

Block paragraphs work well for non-fiction if the author is presenting distinct information and wants the reader to take a tiny pause to think about what she's just read.  But fiction, when the author should want the reader to get into and stay in the story, any pause is just an opportunity for the reader to remember she has something else to do.  While you as the writer may allow her a convenient bathroom break between chapters, you don't want to be giving her those breaks every single paragraph.

More than one writer has excused the block paragraph format on the basis that it's easier on the reader's eyes.  While that's kind of the author to be so solicitous, it still means that the reader is given more and more and more chances to walk away, more and more chances not to be caught up in the story.  If you're so worried about the reader's eyes, make sure you don't use a tiny font, but don't make her blink and reread to maintain the flow of your narrative.

It's true, also, that in the old days of paper and ink books, extra lines meant extra paper, too, and we don't need to be that concerned about conserving paper when we're talking about digital books.  No, the only issue here is maintaining the reader's attention on the text.

Proper formatting of your paragraphs won't guarantee that you'll start selling 100 copies a week.  Proper formatting of paragraphs won't make up for poor grammar, ginormous plot holes, and TSTL characters.  But proper formatting of paragraphs may avoid some of the automatic turn-offs that come from readers who instantly recognize amateur presentation when they see it, before they've read a single word.

Selling words under the table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Words as a medium of exchange

In light of all the usual moaning and groaning and accusation-flinging about negative reviews -- on Amazon and elsewhere -- I thought this experience of mine was particularly telling.  It's not the negative reviews you should be suspicious of; it's the positive ones.



The transaction was, I thought, a simple and straightforward one.

A few weeks before Christmas, I ordered two items from an Amazon affiliated vendor, to be given as gifts to two different people.  The items were similar, but not identical, and the slight difference was important in determining which recipient received which item.

The order arrived in plenty of time for the holidays, in excellent condition and with a couple of bonus items that were a pleasant surprise.  Unfortunately, the two primary items were packed in identical, unmarked, sealed boxes, with no way to determine which was which.  This was annoying.

My only option was to wrap the gifts and hope that they went to the correct recipients.  If not, I would have to explain the problem and then the two individuals could either swap the gifts or, if the difference wasn't significant enough to them, they could keep them as is.   It turned out that I guessed correctly and there was no problem.   But I was still annoyed and planned to post a review to that effect after the holidays.  It would have been a simple matter, it seemed to me, for the vendor just to stamp the distinguishing feature on the otherwise unmarked boxes.

I was surprised, however, to discover a separate piece of paper included in the box with the merchandise and my Amazon invoice.

It read:

Thank you for your order.  We would like you to write a product review for our [insert product #1 name].  After you have written and submitted the review we will send you a second [insert product #1 name] for FREE to the address on your invoice.  Please allow 7-14 days for the package to arrive.

And then it is signed by the vendor.

After this text is an image of a typical Amazon order page, showing the buyer's account and orders, a description of the product, and the various feedback buttons:  Return or Replace Item; Leave Seller Feedback;  Leave Package/Delivery Feedback; Write a Product Review.  Then comes more text:

We would like you to write a product review!  Product reviews are fun and simple to complete.  Under your account select the "your orders" tab, find this order and then select the button that says "write a product review".

There is a big arrow pointing to the appropriate button on the image.

And then there's a big black line under all that, followed by more text:

If for any reason you are not satisfied with this order please let us know before you write your review.  We have a complete customer satisfaction policy and believe this is an excellent 5-star product!

The note closes with their email address and phone number.


When I went to the product's page and discovered it has well over 50 5-star ratings, I began to feel a niggle of suspicion.  Had all these 5-star ratings been purchased by the seller with a promise of a another free [insert product #1 name]?

I fired off a Seller Feedback note explaining only that I would love to leave a product review, but I couldn't follow their directions because the button wasn't active.  I wrote:

Packed in the box with my order was a note from you regarding product reviews.  I would like to leave a product review but can't because the "Write a Product Review" button doesn't show on the "My Order" page.

FYI -- I was very pleased with the products and with their prompt arrival, in plenty of time for the holidays.  I did have one minor complaint/suggestion, but you'll have to figure out how to allow me to leave a genuine product review.

Within a couple of hours -- on a Sunday afternoon! -- I received the following reply via email:

Linda:

What is your minor complaint/ suggestion?

Please advise.

Thanks,

 My scamdar was pinging wildly.  So I wrote back:

Excuse me, [vendor's name redacted], but my complaint/suggestion is intended for the review, not for private discussion. 

The note included with my order says: 

"Thank you for your order.  We would like you to write a product review for our [insert product #1 name].  After you have written and submitted the review we will send you a second [insert product #1 name] for FREE to the address on your invoice.  Please allow 7-14 days for the package to arrive."

It is then followed by a screen shot of a typical Amazon order page, with an arrow pointing to the "Write a Product Review" button. 

HOWEVER -- my order page does not have that button; instead it has "Contact Seller" and "Leave Seller Feedback" buttons, neither of which leads to the product review page.

Or am I required to submit my review to you for approval before it can be posted? 

Is it possible that this vendor is essentially buying 5-star reviews with a promise of free merchandise?  Is the vendor requiring that any product reviews be vetted by them in order to "qualify" for the free merchandise?  Is this practice potentially a violation of Federal Trade Commission regulations?  Did any of those reviewers state that they had received a free [insert product #1 name] in return for their review?

I wanted to leave an unbiased, honest review of this product.  Would my review -- which would probably have been at least a 4-star -- be buried under all those glowing 5-star reviews that no one will ever know might have been "bought" with free merchandise?

Recent events in the book review community have suggested that perhaps false positive reviews are much more readily ignored by those who have a vested interest in selling books (meaning, Amazon and now GoodReads as part of Amazon); and that sales-damaging negative reviews, even though they're scrupulously honest, may put the reviewer's account and reviewing career at risk.  Writers have inveighed against the negative reviews of their books even while establishing sock puppet accounts to 5-star their own or their friends' books.  (And, to be sure, they've often 1-starred their reviewers' books whenever possible.)

With the integration of Amazon and Goodreads, I think we really have to wonder which will win out:  The quest for sales, or the honest reviewer?  I'm afraid we probably all know the answer to that question already.


After I had written that, the issue continued to develop.  The latest update:

A few hours after I had sent my email to the vendor, I received a reply which stated:

Linda:

Thanks for ordering from us and bringing to our attention that you were not completely satisfied with your purchase. 

We have refunded you the full cost of this item with shipping. This should appear in your account in the next 24 hours.

Please continue to enjoy the [product] and we appreciate any honest and fair feedback you would like to provide.  We prefer that complaints/suggestions be discussed prior to leaving product feedback and reviews (as a reply to this message or by calling us).  In this way, we have a chance to correct or explain an issue or concern.  This will insure your feedback and/or review would include how we dealt with your complaint or suggestion. 

Links and buttons for feedback and reviews are only accessible to the buyer (you).  We do not review or edit feedback or reviews before you (the buyer) post.

Sincerely, 

At that point I didn't know if they were going to refund the purchase price of both items or only the one that was mentioned in the note requesting a review.  Either way, however, I felt very uncomfortable with this.  I felt as if my silence had been purchased.  How can you complain about something you got for free?  Ultimately, the refund was processed for just the one item, which was fine.  I guess.  I'm still not comfortable with it.

I'm even less comfortable because the issue should have been handled differently.  Apparently the reason I can't leave a product review directly from my order page is because the page is designed to give the vendor the chance to fix problems, and the vendor should have known that.  In looking at my ordering history, any order that is fulfilled by Amazon -- even if purchased from another vendor -- can be reviewed directly from the order page via the "Write a Product Review" button.  If the order is not fulfilled by Amazon, then there is only the "Leave Seller Feedback" option. 

Regardless how or why the process didn't work the way it was explained with my order, I'm left wondering how many of those reviews were left by people whose opinions might have been colored by the prospect of free merchandise they received in exchange for a review.  And I also have to wonder if the offer of free merchandise violates Federal Trade Commission Regulations.  Most customers know nothing about FTC rules, or believe that those rules don't apply to individuals.  But Amazon does, and GoodReads does, and the vendors ought to know, too.

And maybe the vendor shouldn't require reviews in order to get free merchandise.  Back in the 1950s we called it Payola, and it's illegal.

Are silent denials words of shame?

This is going to be a very short -- for me -- blog post.  I'll expand it later, but you'll have to come to the blog itself to see the rest.  And no, I'm not sure when it will be.

Here's my question:

If several self-publishing authors formally associate with each other, whether as an organized "group" on a readers-and-authors website or on their own collective blog or face to face or whatever, and if they proceed to rate and review each other's books without disclosing that they have agreed ahead of time to do so, are they engaging in deception for their own gain?  Why would they not identify themselves as friends or colleagues or associates or . . . whatever?  Are they ashamed of something?

Let me reiterate:  Are they ashamed of what they've done?

I have said all along that reviews by real people should be allowed.  Not reviews by 25 sock puppets of the author, 19 sock puppets of her mother, and 769 computer-generated sock puppets.  Authors are real people, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to post reviews of their friends' books if they want to.

But shouldn't they have enough integrity to identify themselves?  If not, what are they trying to hide?

Those of you who have been following me at all know that I generally include a disclaimer in my reviews.  Not only do I review under my own name, but I let the reader of the review know when and where and how I obtained the book; whether I've had any contact with the author and what kind of contact that is; and that I am an author of historical romances.  Personally, I feel that kind of honesty allows the reader to make an informed decision about the validity of my comments.

How is a reader to make that kind of decision when a book has five, or ten, or 20 5-star ratings but not one of the reviewers admits to being a member of an authors' review swapping group?

Again:  Are they ashamed of what they've done?  And if they're not ashamed of what they've done, why won't they admit it?

Letting go of the words. . . . again

So, it's done.

Legacy of Honor is live on Amazon.

I was never a shameless hussy of self promotion, and I doubt I'm ever going to be.  This blog and my comments on various books-and-authors websites like Booklikes and maybe a post on Facebook are as much promo as I've ever been comfortable doing.

But as I blogged earlier, something about this republication of my first print-published book has been very emotional for me.  I'm not totally sure why.

Back in March of this year, when I really began the process, I blogged some of my thoughts about to change or not to change a book that had been written over 30 years ago, whether I should bring it up to the, for lack of a better phrase, market sensibilities of 2013.  Back then I made the decision not to. 

In March I already knew some of the problems with the various versions of the book, and I knew I was going to have to make at least some revisions.  I had no idea then how extensive they would be or how much effort they would take, but I didn't really think the process would be too difficult or complex.

I was wrong.  Very wrong.

Part of that March blog post was intended to form the basis of an author's foreword to the digital edition, and I did paste it into the digital manuscript as I worked on the edits.  What started as a couple of paragraphs, however, quickly grew to several pages.  As usual, I was telling someone how to make a watch when all they'd asked for was the time.  Fortunately (I hope!) for my readers, I cut that foreword back to just a couple of paragraphs for the now-republished digital version.

While sitting at my desk today, working at my day-job and waiting for Legacy to go live on Amazon, I experienced a very unexpected emotional assault.  Like my heroine Alexandra, I cry easily, and so I wasn't particularly surprised that I found myself near tears several times this afternoon.  I know myself pretty well, and that's how I am.  But I also usually shake that stuff off pretty easily.

In the context of all the ruckus online regarding negative reviews and authors responding inappropriately and especially my own comments, I sat back to examine how I felt about all this.  In particular, how did my emotional reaction compare to the "my book is my baby!" nonsense I had criticized when other authors offered it as an excuse for their tirades against negative reviews.

Was I more sympathetic to them?  Did I have a clearer understanding of how they felt?  Did I accept their defense as valid?  In words of one syllable:  No, yes, and hell no.


What follows now is that much, much, much too long "Author's Foreword to the 2013 Edition" further expanded with some thoughts now that the book has in fact been republished.  Some of this text will be familiar to those of you who have read the earlier version in March, but much of it is new.

There is sometimes a temptation, when preparing a work for republication many years after its debut, to alter the story and make it more suitable for the present day's audience.  In essence, to write it the way it would have been written today.  After some considerable deliberation, I chose not to do that with Legacy of Honor, which was my first published novel.

I have, however, made some minor changes that I feel will improve the reading experience without changing the substance of the book, in either content or tone.

Written over a period of roughly two years between 1980 and 1982, Legacy endured rejections by several of the major paperback publishers.  During the submission process, one editor suggested the manuscript be trimmed from its original hefty 240,000 words (Version #1) and she'd take another look at it; I made substantial cuts and resubmitted the manuscript (Version #2), but that editor ultimately did not offer a contract.

At some point after that rejection, I decided on my own to make a major revision to the ending, for reasons detailed in one of the previous blog posts.  I also purchased a new typewriter.  Since the entire manuscript would have to be retyped to lead into the dramatically altered ending, I rewrote the synopsis to reflect that change, then typed the standard outline-and-sample-chapters submission to send to Leisure Books.  I anticipated at the very least the usual two to three months before receiving any response, which would be plenty of time to make all the revisions necessary to accommodate the new ending as well as type the rest of the approximately 650 manuscript pages.

I didn't count on a letter arriving just five days later -- via snail mail, which was all we had in 1984 -- requesting the complete manuscript.  Somehow or other, I managed to make the changes so the book matched the revised synopsis, to retype the whole thing, and to send it back within about a week.  That was the version (Version #3) Leisure purchased, of roughly 180,000 words.

Months later, the editor requested further cuts – about 15,000 words – to meet production costs; I made those in two or three days (Version #3a), with little time to make sure internal consistency was maintained and no glaring plot errors were created in the process.  I did the best I could, then trusted any details I missed would be caught and fixed by the editor.

Except that they weren't caught or fixed.  With the exception of typesetting and other errors, Legacy of Honor was published exactly as I had written it.  There were no revisions requested; there were no revisions made.  I never saw the page proofs prior to publication, so was quite stunned to discover the product that hit bookstore shelves in February of 1985 was riddled with typos and other minor errors that I probably would have caught if offered the opportunity to proofread.  But in those days, a published novel was essentially carved in stone.  My name was on the cover and I had to live with the errors.  I could always blame the editors for the errors; after all, they were the ones responsible for the errors -- including typos! -- on the back cover blurb.  I had nothing at all to do with that.

Fast-forward to 2013.  With the publishing rights reverted to me after the Dorchester bankruptcy, my first task in digitizing the text was to catch as many of those errors as possible, just as I would have done if I had proofread the print version.  I made an OCR scan of the print version to digitize it and thought it would simply be a matter of proofreading and fixing small errors.

In the process, however, I also discovered minor line-editing details – many of which were related to those cuts demanded by the editor at the last minute – that I had thought would be fixed but weren't, such as a character who entered a conversation before entering the room.  Most of these errors required little more than the restoration of a line or two from the original, untrimmed manuscript or other similar quick fixes.  I knew I had a copy of the original Version #2, and I located a copy of Version #3 to see where most of the cuts had been made and what could be restored.  I felt comfortable that I would be publishing a digital version that was 99.5% identical to what was printed in 1985, and that the 0.5% (or even less) would be virtually undetectable.

As I began what I thought was a final proofread of the digital edition, I discovered a much more significant error of exactly the type I had expected an editor to catch.  I'm not sure if I would have noticed it in 1985 when all I'd have been looking for was typos, but on revisiting the story almost 30 years later, the omission of some crucial text was glaring.  I went back to my original manuscripts and realized that, for various reasons, this problem could not be solved just by adding back in a paragraph or two from a previous manuscript version.  Several scenes needed substantial revisions, not so much to change the story but to make it make sense.

 

I recognized that the major change I'd made between Version #2 and Version #3 really required more revision than I'd been able to make in that ten day or two week period.  There were some rather large continuity errors, some of which had in fact been exacerbated by the later cuts that became #3a.  I realize this almost certainly makes much more sense to me than it does to you, dear reader, because I know how the novel evolved through those changes.

But that is what led to the dilemma.  Did I want to make the changes now, in 2013, that I felt an editor should have requested to correct what appeared to be, well, some rather significant plot holes?  Or did I want to preserve the original as much as possible?

I had to give the matter some thought.  Serious thought.

Because there were some other issues. 

Writing in the days before the Internet, before Google and Wikipedia and all the other wonderful research tools now available at our fingertips, I had to rely on much more limited resources for historical detail, and as a result there were some minor errors of fact – minor, that is, in terms of how the story was constructed.  I didn't want to leave those uncorrected, which meant at least some changes from the original text.

Given those changes and the fact that I had already made minor line editing corrections and restored other bits and pieces that had been cut from the original, I finally decided that if the book was worth republishing at all, it was worth republishing with its flaws fixed so it at least made internal sense.

 

I still work a day job, though I do work at home and have a certain amount of flexibility.  My day job, however, requires a great deal of intense mental focus, which precludes using that time to write or even think about writing.  I had to do all of my rewriting, all of my proofreading, all of my writing in short bits of time snatched here and there from other endeavors.  Because the revisions also required very tight focus -- I had to weave everything in as seamlessly as possible to the existing narrative and not change any more than absolutely necessary -- I was rarely able to do very much at a time.  And I had to keep going back and checking to make sure I didn't make more problems with each revision than I was fixing. 

 

Unlike the other previously published books I'd put into digital format, Legacy was demanding a lot of original creative effort.  In a way, this was good, very good.  I was enjoying that creative effort immensely and only wished I had more time to devote to it.  My frustration came not from the complexity and delicacy of the project but from the time I had to give to other activities. 

 

Slowly, slowly, page by chapter by revision, everything began to come together.  I found a cover design I really, really liked.  I made it through a second read, then a third to do an intense proofreading.  I found more small errors that had to be fixed, so I fixed them.  Then came the conversion for Kindle -- with no misspelled words on the first try!! -- and another proofreading.  Even on this fourth read, I found tiny, tiny mistakes that reminded me no matter how carefully I would go over it, undoubtedly there were still errors.  Nothing is ever perfect.

Then it was time to write the blurb (that's a blog post in itself!) and put it all together and actually publish it.  I did that about 11:00 this morning, and around 6:00 this evening, Legacy of Honor went live for the first time since 1985.

And for most of those seven hours, I was a basket case.

Do I have a better understanding now of how an author feels when her precious work receives a negative review?  No.  I always understood that.  I also understood, better than those who have never been through the process, what it's like to put your creative work in the hands of someone who will not have the intimate respect for it that the author does and who ultimately puts it out there in the public's hands with what amounts to a dirty face, mismatched socks, and holes in its underwear. 

I took that poor abused child back, washed its face, made sure its stockings were the same color, and put on brand new undies.

And then I let it go.

Because that's what you have to do.  It's what you have to do as a parent and as an author.  You have to let go.

So how does this saga end?

 

Cleaning up the typesetting and a few research errors, plus restoring some of the excised text (a total of approximately 25,000 words, including the original Prologue, thus bringing it to 194,000 or ~550 Kindle pages) and revising for clarity were the only changes I made.  The story line, the events and actions and the characters remain otherwise unchanged from what was printed in 1985.  And I've left my writing style alone, too, pretty much.

Did I write the book differently in 1983 than I would if I were writing it today?  Of course.  But the Legacy of Honor I wrote in the early 1980s was true to its time.  In releasing it again, I wanted to keep it true to itself, and to myself as the writer I was then.  So yes, there is rampant head-hopping.  Will it drive the reader crazy?  Oh, maybe.  And if I'd had an Internet to do research, I might have gone into more historical detail.  But I wrote with the tools and experience and style and editorial guidance that were available to me, and that's the way it will stay.

I hope you enjoy it.

Sticks and stones? How 'bout words and cookies instead

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur:  My mother told me she loved those cookies!

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

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

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

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

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


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

Kid #1:  I'll pass.

Arthur:  You didn't even taste it!

Kid #1:  No, and I ain't gonna. 

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

Kid #4:  Here let me try one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A word or twelve about bad books

Sometimes, my dear, it's not all about you.  Partly, maybe, but not all.  And sometimes it really and truly has nothing to do with you.

Someone just read your book, hated it, and left a scathing review.  And you immediately take it personally because -- gasp! -- it couldn't possibly be about the book!  No one reads books they hate!

Uh, sorry to tell you this, my dear, but sometimes people most certainly do read books they hate.

Sometimes it's really fun to read something horrible. Sometimes a reader is just in the kind of mood that she wants to read something so badly written that she feels like gouging her eyes out.  Maybe her personal life is in turmoil and she needs to take out some frustration.  Maybe she's a writer who's in the middle of self-doubts and she needs to read something just ghastly to remind her she's better than someone.   There are a lot of reasons why people actually enjoy reading books they hate.  The Eye of Argon is still out there because crap is sometimes fun.   And ripping the crap to shreds can be as cathartic as chopping wood or running a marathon or piecing a quilt or burning 25-year-old bank statements. Different strokes and all that.

Unfortunately, there are still people today who are uploading to Kindle and Smashwords books and stories and novellas that are every bit as craptastic as that 1970s sword and sorcery tale written by 16 year old Jim Theis.   These writers probably didn't intend their works to be craptastic, but some of their readers see them that way.  And they review accordingly.

Is there sometimes an element of personal animosity against the author, to the point that the shitty review seems to be a personal attack?  Perhaps sometimes there is, and sometimes perhaps it's even justified.

But that's a determination the author of the book receiving the bad review can't make.  She can't get into the mind and motives of the reviewer; she has no way of knowing what's going on in the reviewer's real life that prompted her to write the snarky review.  Maybe her favorite aunt died or she lost her job or she burned the chicken or her kid threw a tantrum because he wanted to wear his pajamas to school.  Who knows?  There could be any reason at all . . . including that she thought it was a shitty book.

Ultimately, those reviews, as mean-spirited as they may seem to be, are still of the writing. They may appear to suggest that the writer is a moron for writing such shit and thinking it's worthy of the time the reader gives to it, but it still goes back to the writing.  That's what the reviewer sees, that's what she reads, that's what she reviews.

When the writer can't separate herself from the writing, when she takes that negative review personally and lashes out at the reviewer and denies there can be any validity in the reviewer's mean comments about the writing, she cannot hope to improve her writing. She's locked herself into defending the indefensible. 

This same principle holds if the author does other things (sock puppet accounts, plagiarism, shill reviews) to counter that negative review.   She's not being honest, especially with herself, about the need to improve her product.  She has taken the mean words as being about her, rather than about her writing.  She knows she's not a bad person, therefore the mean words are meaningless.  Ergo, she doesn't have to fix her writing and she's really a great writer after all, just like Aunt Eleanor told her!  Everyone who tells her she isn't a good writer is just a mean person, a bad person, a troll, a liar, a jealous failed author, a psychopath, a rapist, a murderer.  (Yes, Virginia, reviewers have been called murderers for writing bad reviews.  I kid you not.)

Sometimes it is, however, at least partly about the author.  And sometimes the reviewer's anger is justified.

Was I being mean in 1990 when I called Romantic Times and told them Sylvie Sommerfield had stolen Jan Westcott's The Hepburn?   I suppose so.   Did I get a malicious thrill from sending photocopies of relevant pages of both books to RT?   Yes, I did.   I was furious at Sommerfield, and furious at Zebra (who had just become my publisher!!) for allowing that shit to happen.   Did I get a certain satisfaction when I posted the review to GR 20+ years later?   Yeah, I did, because it pissed me off that the Sommerfield book was still getting 5-star ratings from people who probably didn't know the truth.

It all goes back to "If you didn't want comments on it, you shouldn't have published it." Period. End of discussion. STFU.  Because you don't -- you can't -- know what motivates the reviewer.

And that's why reviews from real readers have to be untouchable. And by real readers -- no quotation marks -- I mean anyone other than the author, provided they disclose any relevant information regarding connections they may have to the author.   Paid shill reviews?  Sure, as long as they do so with full disclosure.  Let them post reviews so long as the world knows that review is essentially a commercial paid for by the author.  Let the readers see that the author is so desperate to be read that she's willing to pay people to read it and review it.  (If she weren't desperate, she wouldn't be doing it.)  Friends and family? Yeah, let them post reviews so long as the world knows there's a connection and they can't be unbiased.   Editors?   Illustrators?   Sure.   With full disclosure, so the readers know who's who and who to trust as unbiased.

Ultimately, the reviews have to be untouchable, regardless what the reviewer's intent may be. No one can determine that but the reviewer; the reader of the review might have an idea or an opinion, but the reviewer is the only one who really knows. If I review a self-published historical romance and shred it from page one to The End, people may think I'm just trying to hurt my competition. They should be allowed to think that.   But I should also be allowed to write the review.   Readers aren't stupid. They can figure out what's going on.

They can also read the book for themselves and make up their own minds.  Because that's who reviews are for:  They're for other readers.  A review is one reader's opinion, offered to other readers so they can make their own decisions whether to read the book or not.  A review -- which is not the same as a critique -- is not for the author.

An author who claims she doesn't mind negative reviews as long as they're constructive is missing the point entirely.  Reviewers don't owe the author anything.  Nothing.  And that includes the readers who are angry at being spammed on Goodreads, on Amazon, on Twitter, on Facebook, on personal blogs, via email.  That includes readers who are tired of seeing the exact same cover template used on book after book after crappy book.  That includes readers who feel misled about the content of the book.  That includes readers who feel they've been overcharged for the book.  That includes readers who have just had a really shitty day and need to vent their frustration on something, someone.  That includes readers who are nit-picky grammar dragons who go ballistic when there are sixteen tense changes, three POV flips, and twenty-seven misspelled words on the first page, and who go on to read the whole fucking book just because they want to rip the terrible writing to shreds.  They have the right to do that.

Not that it makes any difference to many people, but I will defend a reviewer, even if she (or he) is vicious in a review long before I will defend a writer who says the vicious review hurt her feelings.  Because maybe the reviewer had a reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with the author.  Nothing at all.

Sometimes, my dear, it just isn't about you at all. 

Where seldom is heard an encouraging word. . . . for reviewers

I tend to address more of my blog posts to my fellow writers than to any one else, and I'm frequently scolding them for bad writing or bad behavior.  Today I'm going to look in the other direction.

Except when we're writing just for ourselves, we writers depend on you, our readers, to make our stories come alive in your minds and your imaginations.  It's our job to provide you with the tools -- the words -- to do that, and then it's your job to tell other readers whether we succeeded or failed.

No, it's not your job to tell us we didn't do it.  We had our chances to get critiques before we published.  We had the responsibility make sure the research was right, the words were right, the spelling was checked, the plot was seamless, the characters fully fleshed.  Regardless how you acquired the book -- free, purchased, ARC, contest give-away, borrowed from a friend or the library, even illegally downloaded -- you invested your time in reading it.  You have a right to your opinion because you made that investment.

Did you quit after the first page because the writing was so poor?  You have a right to say so.  You have a right to write a review that's longer than the portion of the book you read. 

Were you so enchanted by the story that you never noticed how often the Regency heroine referred to the mysterious lights "left on" in the tower window?  You have a right to say so.

You're allowed to say you didn't like the cover, that you're tired of characters named after objects like Link and Star and Storm and Blade.  You're allowed to be snotty and snarky and mean.  By the same token, you can gush and give it five stars (or whatever the highest ranking is) just because it's set in Paris and there's a dog in it somewhere.

Readers and reviewers can write revenge reviews.  Is it kinda juvenile and silly to do so?  Yeah, I suppose so.  But we writers need to understand and accept that readers have all kinds of reasons for reading (or not reading) a book, for liking (or not liking) a book, and for liking (or not liking) an author.  When we put our books out there and ourselves with it, we are inviting you to read them and we should not think that we have any control whatsoever over the reasons that motivate a person to pick up a book and read it.  That includes anger or resentment or jealousy or spite.

Do you owe us anything?  Nope.  Nothing.

You don't owe us a review or a rating at all.  You don't owe us a critique.  You don't owe us a reading of the whole book.   You don't owe us perfect grammar or spelling.  First of all, you don't owe us anything because any review that you write isn't for us anyway.  Reviews are for other readers.  And it's okay to tell other readers that you couldn't get past page one.  There are some really crappy books out there, and you shouldn't be surprised if you encounter a few.  It's okay to tell other readers the author can't write her way out of a wet paper bag.  Your job as a reviewer is not to be kind to the writer who threw that garbage; it's to let other readers know you think it's garbage.  Reviews are for other readers.  It's okay to correct each and every grammar error.  It's okay to fill your online review with pictures and GIFs and videos and music and whatever else you want. 

You didn't hang over our shoulders and tell us how to write our books.  And we damn sure shouldn't be hanging over your shoulders telling you how to read them or how to review them. 

Dear readers and reviewers, please don't ever be intimidated, harassed, or threatened by an author (or her friends, fans, or sockpuppets) who tries to tell you what's wrong with your review.  Tell 'em to sod off.  And if they won't, then tell 'em I told you to tell 'em there's no such thing as a stupid question, and there's no such thing as a wrong review.  There is no "right" way to review and there is no "wrong" way to review.  There is only your way.

Not liking  a book, for whatever reason, does not make you a bully.  Telling the author not to quit his or her day job does not make you a bully.  Pointing out errors of fact does not make you a meanie or a troll.  Reviewing a book you couldn't get past page 3 does not make you a criminal.   You don't have to provide constructive criticism, and you don't have to be gentle with the tender sensibilities of the writer.  If she didn't think she could take criticism, she shouldn't have  published the thing. 

You, the reader/reviewer, do not have to have perfect grammar and spelling.  (Although if you correct someone else's and you're wrong, well, be prepared to have that pointed out!)

You don't even have to review.  Did the author give you a free copy in exchange for a review?  If there's no contract involved, if there's no exchange of benefits, you don't have to do it.  Can the author get mad and not give you any more free books?  Yeah, she can.  But she also needs to know that readers are not obligated to do . . .  anything. They don't even have to read it.

But by the same token, don't be afraid to say you really liked a book that others found fault with.  Some of us are really picky readers.  Maybe it's because some of us are also authors and we do tend to look for and see the technical problems more often and more easily than the casual reader.  Maybe some of us are just jealous meanies out to destroy some poor writer's career.  (I highly doubt that, but it's possible.)   But maybe readers just didn't like that book and you did.  If you liked the book everyone else hated, that's okay, too.  Something in that book touched you, and that's a good thing.  You don't know how many other readers out there might be just as touched by that element, that style, that setting, that. . . . whatever.

And yes, there are readers and reviewers who love everything they read, who never have a criticism, who dole out 5-star ratings like candy corn at Halloween.  Are they being dishonest?  I don't know.  Maybe they really do love everything they read in all genres and all styles.  Maybe they really do.  Maybe their mothers taught them if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all and they took it to heart.  Maybe they're just uncritical readers.  Maybe they want a lot of free books to sell on eBay.  Maybe they're greedy for fame as a top reviewer on Amazon or Goodreads.  Maybe they're frustrated writers who are living vicariously.  Maybe they just want to be loved.

But as far as I know, they have a right to do that, too.  Readers are savvy people, and they'll figure out which reviewers to pay attention to and which to ignore.  Remember that:  Readers are savvy people.  They'll quickly figure out if you're reviewing just for the sake of reviewing or if you're a good analyst whose judgment they're going to trust when making their own book buying decisions.

Oh, to be sure, there may be guidelines set up by the place you're posting your review, and those have to be adhered to because the guys who provide the space do get to set the rules.   But it's still your opinion and your review.

Go for it!

A fool and her words. . . .

. . . .are too soon published.

I'm trying very hard not to be that kind of fool.

As I blogged last month I'm in the process of preparing my first published novel, Legacy of Honor, for digital republication.  I knew it was going to be a rather difficult task, for a variety of reason, so I'm not really surprised that a month later, I'm still working on it.  I have a day job, after all, and other real-life obligations that take some of my time, too, and I still need to eat and sleep.

It's been a multi-step process, not always easy.  Although I'm changing nothing of the storyline, there are areas that cried out for better editing than the book got when Leisure published it.  If all I had to do were re-insert lines or paragraphs or even pages from the original manuscript, hey, no problem.  But there were two different edits involved, both of which did more than just remove text.  The intent of those edits was to improve the book, and for the most part, they did.  So my task is not only to fix errors that were made but also to avoid adding back any more. 

As I began work on one particularly delicate scene, I thought maybe it really didn't make any difference.  The changes I wanted to make were extremely fine-tuning in terms of clarity.  Would the reader notice the difference?  Would she care?  How many people, after all, had read the print version and never questioned anything?

Oh, wait a minute.  There was no Amazon in 1985, no Goodreads.  No forums for readers to complain, "WTF was that on page  XXX?  There are characters speaking who had already left the room!"  If I, as the writer who mentally knew how everything played out in the book, saw it and wondered about it, then I owed it to the reader to make sure those characters were put back on stage so they could speak.  And that the rest of the errors were fixed, too.

The writer is the book's first reader.  I know I would not want to read a book whose author knew about but didn't care about those details because all she really wanted was just to see her work in print -- even if it's only digital print. 

Even though some of these edits involve the careful massaging of three different versions of a scene to make sure all the crucial information is presented in the proper sequence so the reader can "see" exactly what's happening, and even though maybe no one ever would notice the errors if I hadn't fixed them, I  know they're there.

Legacy of Honor will have to wait a bit longer before its digital edition is published.  As impatient as I am to see it in "print" again after almost 30 years, I can wait.  And the readers?  All I can do is hope they're waiting, too.

As the words change. . . . and stay the same: Legacy of Honor

There is a temptation, when preparing a work for republication many years after its debut, to alter it and make it more suitable for the present day's audience. Some authors have done this as they've put their older print books into digital format, and the reviews seem to have been rather mixed.  Some readers preferred that the books stay the same as they remembered them from earlier editions.  But certainly authors have a right to try to reach newer readers who might not find those old 1970s and 1980s tropes quite as attractive.

When I republished Firefly, I did make some changes from the version that had been print published in 1988.  Most of those changes were along the lines of restoring elements that had been removed from the original.  My digital files predated most of the editorial changes that had been made for publication, and so the 2012 edition was actually closer to the 1980s original rather than "updated."

There wasn't anything about Firefly that would have been considered politically incorrect by today's standards anyway; if anything, the original contained material that was deleted as objectionable then which would not draw a comment today.

Secrets to Surrender (the digital version of Desire's Slave) and Shadows by Starlight (formerly Starlight Seduction) were virtually unchanged from their print editions except for minor clean-ups; story and content and style remained.  In both of those books, a reader would really have to sit down with the new and old versions side by side for a page by page comparison to find the changes.

With Legacy of Honor, which was my first published novel, the question I face going into a digital republication is a quite different, for a number of reasons.

Written over a period of roughly two years between 1980 and 1982, Legacy endured rejections by most of the major paperback publishers before finally being contracted by Leisure Books/Dorchester Publishing in 1984.  I trimmed the text from an unwieldy 250,000 words in the original version to approximately 200,000 for the complete version Leisure requested after seeing a sample, and that was the version contracted.  There were no editorial requests for revisions.  Editor Jane Thornton did require that I make additional reductions that brought the word count down to about 180,000 for publication, but after I made those cuts, she altered virtually nothing further in anything resembling an editorial process.

Editing was one thing; typesetting was another entirely.

I never saw page proofs of Legacy prior to its publication in February 1985, and I have to say I was appalled at the number of errors in the typesetting.  Sections of sentences were omitted, paragraphs were switched, and generic typos abounded.  As the author I was embarrassed, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.  (Again, one of the advantages of traditional publishing is that the author has lots of other people to lay the blame on!) 

So it stayed that way for almost 30 years.

Now, in 2013 and not having a digital manuscript of Legacy to upload for republication, I was faced with the task of transcribing the whole thing, either from the print edition with all its typesetting errors or from the original uncut, unedited 250,000 word and 888 typed page manuscript, which Leisure had never seen.  Neither of those alternatives was an attractive proposition.

I began with the print version, but after only a few pages decided to see if my printer-scanner's OCR software would do a halfway decent job generating a text file from the mass market version.  I was willing to sacrifice a copy if it meant saving myself the typing of 200,000+ words.  It worked, and in a few days' spare time I had the complete text file.  It's a mess of bizarre page breaks and weird formatting, but it can be fixed in far less time than it would take to retype the whole blasted thing.

The process of cleaning it up, however, exposed a lot of unexpected problems well beyond typos and missing lines.

When Jane Thornton requested those cuts to bring the book within reasonable production length, she gave me just two or three days at most in which to do them.  I had to go through 600+ pages line by line looking for words and sentences that could be trimmed without affecting the flow, the continuity, the plot.  There was no time for major rewriting.  And as a first-time author who had little knowledge of how the editorial function was carried out by a traditional publisher, I also trusted that if I made any egregious errors, Thornton or someone else in the editorial department would catch them and fix them.  Errors along the line of a character returning to a room she hadn't left -- because the line about her departure had been cut.  I expected any errors of that nature to be fixed.

Guess what.  They weren't.  And now, almost 30 years later, I didn't have a copy of the actual manuscript from which the book had been typeset.

Or did I?  Being an inveterate pack rat, I save everything, and I began a search in the hopes I did in fact have a copy of that intermediate typescript.  To my surprise and relief, it didn't take long to locate the old-fashioned carbon copy of that revised manuscript, complete with my hand-written edits.  I had over-nighted it to Thornton, and sometime after publication it was eventually returned to me.  And I kept it, neatly filed with a bunch of other pre-computer manuscripts.

My intention at that point was only to make sure I corrected, in the new digital edition, the worst of the typos and other typesetting errors exactly as I would have if given the opportunity to check the page proofs prior to the actual publication in 1985, so that the product that hits the ebook retailers isn't the kind of mess Leisure put out.  But what I was finding were exactly those errors that I trusted would have been fixed during the editorial process.  A character opens eyes that had never been closed, takes off clothes that had never been put on, re-enters a room that had never been left, dismounts a horse that had never been mounted.  That sort of thing, if not those exact examples.

And of course I now have the opportunity to fix those errors.

Do I also want to avail myself of the opportunity to update the book to the conventions of 2013 that might be very different from those of 1983?

Um, no, I don't.

There are elements in Legacy of Honor that might not be politically correct today.  I'm not even sure they were politically correct in the early 1980s when I wrote it.  As someone who has railed against some of what I've seen as misogyny in those early post-Woodiwiss historical romances, I'm probably going to take some heat for not making major changes to Legacy of Honor.  But in fact I think the book will stand the test of feminist times.

Whether it does or not, however, I feel it should remain in its own context.  As I've written so often before, books aren't written in vacuums.  They, and their authors, exist in contexts.  Legacy of Honor was written in that exciting, adventurous 1980s context when the historical romance as a literary type was going through revolutionary changes.  Authors, too, were changing and evolving.  If I were writing Legacy today, it would probably be a slightly different book.  But I'm not writing it today, and I have enough respect for it and for myself not to want to change it.

The version that will be digitally republished (soon, I hope!) will remain true to its original form and context.  Cleaned up, yes, with its typos and continuity corrected.  Some details from that original manuscript will be restored, and there will be an author's note added regarding research and . . . and another little bit of personal background to the story that I've often told in person but never had the opportunity to put into print.

Strong words, wrong words

Every once in a while I get an idea for a clever pun, then find out I had the wrong reference.  This is a bummer.

I was trying to think of an alternative to "grammar nazi," since that kind of hyperbole can be more than a little offensive.  One can be a stickler for good grammar without being a jackbooted thug capable of real atrocities against real people.  Hyperbole has its place, and it can be amusing as well as effective in making a point, but this particular one can be very offensive.

So I came up with the idea of "grammar ratchet."  There are lots and lots of tools around my house, including several ratchets -- those little gizmos that tighten (or loosen) nuts depending on which way they're set.  And I had thought to use that term as a play on the inflexible, by the book, mean as dirt Louise Fletcher character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, until I discovered her name was Nurse Ratched. 

I've only seen the film once, and I can't say I enjoyed it.  I'm not a big fan of that sort of film.  The problem with Nurse Ratched, as I saw her, was that she couldn't see beyond the rules.  They were there in and of themselves, not as tools or -- to pull a term from another popular film -- guidelines.  Reality had to be bent to the rules, in Nurse Ratched's world, no matter what.  She found her security, her rightness, in those rules, but she never found a soul.

Well, my pun on ratchet didn't work.  I'm still looking for one.

But I guess that's as good an opening as any into an examination of what I find is a disturbing trend to compare negative book reviews to physical violence, and for the authors of books that receive negative reviews to liken themselves to the victims of rape, murder, and genocide.

Yes, indeed, one self-published author has said in public that the existence of a group of readers on Goodreads.com who address issues of "Badly Behaving Authors" reminded him of 1942-1945 Europe.  The self-published author did not, of course, reference any of his own abusive posts on Goodreads, yet all anyone did to him was . . . . not like his book.

Words have meanings.  Nazism, genocide, murder, rape, bullying -- all these words have very distinct meanings.  "I didn't like your book" doesn't come close. 

Even if one reader rallied her friends to collectively bash someone else's book, how can that equate to the experience of having armed men invade your home in the middle of the night, take your family into an alley, and shoot them all in front of you right before they shoot you?  We're not talking apples and oranges; we're talking butterflies to B-52 bombers.

The same self-published authors who bitch and moan and whine and complain about the negative reviewers who gang up on their books never say a word about the rallying cries they send out to their own fans and supporters to flood the review sites with five-star fountains of praise.  And the truth is that very few of those fan-rallies are ever really called out.  Oh, some of the more egregious sock-puppet masters have been exposed, but for the most part your average self-published novel that gets five or ten or even 25 glowing reviews and a few one-star comments that are basically, "What the hell were they reading?  This is crap!" get a pass.  If customers on Amazon alert the system that there are obvious shill reviews, or the author's spouse is blatantly promoting the books, the reviews might be removed.  But most of the time, Amazon and the other retail booksellers are in the business of selling books and they really don't care. 

Needless to say, neither do the authors who are benefiting from the fandom.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, to lurkers, to readers, to my (so far) innocuous stalkers:  You are not your book, and your book is not you.  Criticism of it is not necessarily criticism of you, and very often even the most scathing criticism contains seeds of wisdom.  It is only your own fault if you don't pay attention.  Claiming that your critics are just meanies and trolls and bullies, Nazis and rapists and murderers is just childish exaggeration, and it will not change the quality of your writing.  Only you can do that, if you really want to.