IWSG: Juiced Book Reviews

It's the first Wednesday of the month,

time for Alex J. Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group

As writers, there’s probably nothing that makes us more insecure than bad reviews.  After all, public humiliation is torture when you’re working hard to cull a following and fan base.  As an author whose book is primed for release in a few short weeks, I worry endlessly, but I also know this business is hyper-subjective. 

As a reader, I’m exceptionally particular and put down far more books than I keep reading.  I know the same thing will happen to my book, that there will likely be many who dislike it for whatever reason.  I can’t exactly say I’m okay with that, yet, when I received my first 3-star rating this week on Goodreads, I was surprised by how little it stung.

Sure, part of it was because it was my first and all the others are 5 stars.  And part of it was because she only rated it.  I would have invested far more stock in her opinion if she, as a Goodreads librarian, had reviewed it, as well.  And although she does read widely, she still reads and rates primarily romance, which my book is not.  But still, I thought it would hurt a lot more than it did.

I’m not one of those authors who will rate my own work.  I find that a little…I don't know...narcissistic perhaps.  I was recently warned by a blogger friend that one of my Goodreads followers was a fellow writer who often slams other authors and their books on Goodreads and Amazon.  When I checked him out though, I deduced that he was probably just a disgruntled writer, jealous of others’ success.  So yeah, the source of the review matters to me.

Now we have this whole controversy of authors juicing their Amazon rankings with less-than-legitimate reviews.  The first I’d ever heard of anything along these lines was just a few weeks ago.  My friend and fellow author, Lisa Regan, asked my advice about an interview she was going to post on August 16^th with best-selling British thriller author, David Kessler.  While she was excited to go one-on-one with an author she admires and whose books she enjoys, she was also a bit concerned by the advice he was advocating to other authors: 

“Do not let anyone lecture you about ‘ethics’ and the integrity of reviews.  Get all your friends to review your books and if they are too lazy, write the reviews for them and get them to use their ID's to publish them. (Throw in a few four star reviews as well and maybe even a single three star review that is only mildly critical - and get all of them to vote that each others reviews are helpful).”

But this was not the last I heard on this topic. On August 25^th, NY Times columnist David Streitfeld published this article about Todd Rutherford and how he'd been contracted to write and publish over 4,500 counterfeit book reviews on his GettingBookReviews.com website, now defunct.  Then on the 28^th, Porter Anderson covered the controversy, as well, on agent Jane Friedman’s blog, exposing the fact that self-pub phenom, John Locke, had actually paid people to buy his books and write reviews.  And then again on Sunday morning, September 2^nd, author James Scott Bell posted about what the “Paid For Reviews Scandal Means for the Future” on The Kill Zone website and how “Andrew Shaffer compares these paid-for reviews to the doping scandal in sports.”

This whole debacle has left a bitter taste in my mouth.  While we authors dearly want success and for everyone who reads our books to love them and write glowing reviews, those desperate enough to commission spurious analyses serve only to contaminate and impair the very resource designed to assist them.  It creates mistrustful readers who will be much less likely to purchase based on posted reviews. 

Perhaps this behavior is in reaction to those folks who post equally-illegitimate bad reviews on books they’ve not even read.  But I think those reviews are transparent and that the average reader can see through the malicious nature in which it was composed. 

I, for one, believe my work should stand on its own merits and face whatever valid criticism arises, good or bad.  But even saying this, I can tell you, I rarely buy books based on reviews.  I read the jacket copy and perhaps the first page or chapter and decide from there whether it’s a good fit for me.

What about you…do you buy books based on customer ratings and reviews, and will this baring of the truth affect how you make your future book purchases?  

(Sorry for the atrocious length of this post, but I felt it was an important subject for the IWSG.)

A to Z Challenge: L is for L.O.C.K.

Welcome to Day 12 of the A to Z Challenge

Many bloggers have chosen a theme for the A to Z.  My pledge since becoming a blogger is to post about writing, so for this event, I will being posting about what I've learned about writing a novel.

________

L is for LOCK:  to join or unite firmly by interlinking or intertwining. (Dictionary.com)

Today, I’m using an acronym that spells out the word LOCK.  This is a device established by James Scott Bell in his book on craft, Plot & Structure, a must read for all fiction writers.  I will paraphrase his well-developed L.O.C.K. theory:

L is for Lead:  If you go back to my April 9^th post on heroes, you’ll see a complete list of what makes a good lead.  As the author, it is your job to make him interesting, to dig deep inside his head and make him compelling.  No story is good or complete without a single lead.

O is for Objective:  Likewise, if you go back to my April 7^th post on goal, you’ll see that an objective is the driving force that generates forward momentum.  It could be that the protagonist wants to get something or to get away from something.  Whatever it is, according to Bell, it should be one dominant objective and should be essential to his well-being.

C is for Confrontation:  This is the oppositional forces at work from other characters and outside organizations.  It is an element that is used throughout the story, but most especially at the climax.

K is for Knockout:  The knockout is the big climax, the highest point of drama at the very end.  It’s the final clash where it appears the opposition might actually win.  It should have the greatest amount of tension, stakes, and conflict, and display how the protagonist has changed, both within his inner and his outer conflicts in order to most satisfy the reader.  It should be unpredictable and last minute, meaning it should be organized so all the plot points peak in a single moment.  Lastly, it gives resolution, ties up loose ends, and gives the reader a feeling of resonance.                    

Do you have a recipe for a successfully plotted story?  

Why I support My Local Library

            I’m finding it kind of ironic these days that I am trying to so hard to get published when I can no longer afford the small luxury of buying books.  I should say that’s primarily because I read probably forty books a year or so.  At twenty-four bucks a pop for a hard cover, that’s $1000 and since the decimation of my industry and business, that’s a lot of money that should be going to better uses, especially since there are alternatives.

One might say that buying a Kindle would allow me to purchase a wide volume of novels at a much lower cost, but then again if you knew me and how I feel about e-books versus the real thing, you’d know that I’m just not ready to go there yet.  Plus, if I won’t splurge twenty-four bucks on a book, I certainly won’t pay $115 on an ad-supported Kindle.  So what’s a reader to do then?  That’s easy.  I patronize my local King County Library.

            Actually, that’s a lie.  Sort of.  I do use the library, but from the convenience of my own desk chair.  I can access the entire library system’s stacks via the Internet.  I can search a favorite author’s name and see what titles pop up, then peruse the book flap copy and decide if it interests me or not.  Or if I’ve heard or read a book review and it interests me, I can search that title.  The library even offers me suggestions based on what I’m currently viewing or what I’ve already read.  I love that feature, by the way.

Once I’ve selected the titles I want, they are put on hold and when they become available, they are sent to my local branch just a couple of miles away from my home.  I receive an email notification as soon as the book has been placed on the hold shelf, complete with my name on a reservation slip which makes it easy to locate alphabetically.  And since everything is automated these days, I just scan my own library card then the bar code on the book and viola!  I have that book for at least four weeks though I can renew online, as well.

Now, like with most things, there are drawbacks.  For one, if a title is popular, as many of my selections are, I will likely have to wait a few weeks before that title becomes available.  But I know this up front as the info is supplied to me when placing the hold.  It will say something like my hold is the 25^th hold on 50 copies, which means it might take me a month to receive that title.  I currently have one hold that says 297^th of 195 copies and that’s after already waiting three months, so yeah, that one could take me awhile to get, but I’m patient.  I usually have about six titles on hold at any given time and a stack of at least that many books sitting on my desk, waiting to be read, so I can wait.  I’ve got lots to keep me busy. 

Of course, the biggest drawback to borrowing from the library is that the book is not actually mine.  I can’t keep it and display it on my bookshelf.  But then again, I have so many books and not nearly enough shelf space that I am already stacking two rows per shelf.  That means I can’t even see half the titles I do have as they are hidden behind the forward row.

Conceding that, I do find the fact that the book I’m reading is not mine to bother me a bit.  So if I really, really, REALLY love that book, I will go out and splurge on it.  In the case of Greg Iles’s titles, I loved so many of them—thirteen total—that I had my husband buy them for me off Ebay which meant they were second-hand and I was not supporting my favorite author.

I do feel kind of bad about that, but what can I do?  I don’t typically like paperbacks though they are much cheaper.  And as in the case of Iles’s titles, most of them are not kept on the brick and mortar’s shelves so I would have to back order them only to receive a paperback.  So, for now, my method works for me.  When I’m back to earning some good money, I will start buying books again.

One thing I do love about borrowing books from the library is that I will often read books that I would not ordinarily buy, something that is outside my typical genre of choice, thrillers.  The last book I read outside my genre was Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford.  It is a book of historical fiction set in Seattle (near where I currently reside) during World War II.  It is the story of a Chinese-American boy who falls for a Japanese-American girl just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and right before she and her family are sent away to an internment camp.  It flashes back and forth between the war years and 1986, when that boy is in his fifties and hears of the discovery of many personal belongings of local interned Japanese-Americans at the Panama Hotel in Seattle.

Definitely not my normal reading choice, but the fact that one of my favorite literary agent bloggers, Jessica Faust of BookEnds, reps the author and the story is set in Seattle, I was very intrigued.  And as I was reading, I found myself constantly using the Google Maps app on my iPhone to locate the streets in the International District that the author described.  I enjoyed his setting so much that I want to spend time exploring the neighborhood, including the Panama Hotel which still exists to this day.

This love of setting harkens back to my last blog post.  I would never have otherwise read this book had I not had the library.  I never would have considered actually buying this book because I don’t think I would have liked it just by reading the flap cover.  But now that I have read it and know how much I love it, I will buy that book and most likely any other Jamie Ford writes.  The library allowed me to open my eyes a bit more and fall in love with another author and said author will now benefit from that, whereas before, he would not have. 

I actually read a lot more books now that I have rediscovered the library.  The ease of use permits me to at least try to explore titles I never would have otherwise.  Now, I will admit, sometimes I don’t always like the titles I’ve checked out.  The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber, while in my genre and beautifully written, was way too slow for me, The Dead Don’t Dance by Charles Martin was too sickly sweet and The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow, well, I found it so uninteresting I couldn’t even make it to page forty though it is an award-winning debut novel.  And though Karin Slaughter’s books are my friend, Lisa’s, favorites, I found, for the most part, that I just don’t care for crime fiction.  Then again, I did love Lisa Gardner’s Say Goodbye.  And I won’t even get into how I feel about Jonathan Franzen.  But the library did allow me to discover Michael Connelly and James Scott Bell, both of whom I love.  And I never would have found out that sometimes the very authors I love most don’t always write spectacular fiction.  Hey, they’re human, too.  Who knew?  

           So all in all, even when I do start raking in the cash again, I think I will most likely keep using my library card to discover new writers and new titles.  In the long run, I believe it will allow me to support those authors I truly love, whose books I really want on my over burdened bookshelf.