Edible Spam

When I was growing up in 1980’s England (yes, I’m showing my age now) Spam was a kind of compressed ham that came out of a tin. It was incredibly cheap and a British staple in our diets. Other kids loved it, my sister included but I didn't. You knew your mum was struggling that week when you peeled open your sandwiches at school and it smiled up at you, complete with jellified goop poorly disguised by a slice or two of cucumber.  My heart sank and it was the one week I didn’t eat my lunch at morning tea.

Just to get this straight, I had
friends who loved this stuff
and still do. 

 

Internet spam has the same effect on me. I post on social media sites, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and am a member of online writing and reviewing forums. There is very little more sick-making than the BUY MY BOOK brigade and in the same way that I slapped the bread down over the sandwich so that I couldn’t see it, I exercise my right to press the ‘Delete’ button. I just don’t read them.

 

Now I’ve had discussions with several authors and sales people, who truly believe that it works and that their sales are generated through the 

***FREE***CHEAP***BUY NOW*** 

posts and good on them. If it’s working for you, go for it. But you won’t have quality relationships with readers or other authors and will remain little more than a decorative, automated billboard for your product.

 

Where I was raised in Lincoln, England we had a street market every Saturday. Mum would go down for her fruit and veg because it was cheaper there and it had a good atmosphere. Traders wearing fingerless gloves against the cold would bag up their produce and stow the hard-earned cash in pouches around their waist. The area was a hustle and bustle of noise and chatter and over the top of that would come the sound of shouting.

“Get your lovely fruit and veg here. Carrots a pound for a pound!”

Now that was disconcerting if you happened to be standing right next to them when they yelled it. I am hugely noise intolerant as my four quiet, non-shouty adult children can vouch for. Shouting gets you nowhere with me and the minute the volume goes up, I will either be nowhere to be seen or reacting completely out of character. We did calm talking in our family and if they raised the volume and the stakes, what they got was not worth the effort. I used to think I was weird. I am, but I have encountered many other weirdos like me in my 45 years on earth.

 

In the markets, it was bearable. Mum did the trading and I carried the bags laden with the week’s supplies. It was outside, it was loud but my mother used the voices as a beacon to lead her to the stalls she wanted.

 

When authors screech ***BUY MY BOOK*** online, they are competing in a vast and cacophonous marketplace .

But they are yelling into my face, out of my laptop and in the peace and quiet of my home. 

I hate it.

 

I hate it like the telephone sales people that ring up to sell you a vacuum cleaner just as you’re dishing tea up for children who are gnawing on the table edge.

I hate it like the people in malls, who approach you with outstretched arms, wanting to slap some innocuous cream onto your face without permission in the hope that you’ll buy their vastly overpriced product so that you can finish the rest of your face.

And I hate it like the salesmen who lie about their wonderful electrical product to my face, when they actually don’t know what they’re talking about and it doesn’t do what they say.

 

I got chatting to an author on Twitter once. He asked me what he had to do to get me to buy his book. He seemed successful, spouting figures and stats like a pro and I was just starting out. I bought his book for 99c and told him in a private message. I never heard from him again. He didn’t want a friendship, he wanted the sale and review. It was very short-sighted of him because the book is sitting on my Kindle unread and he never got a review. I frequently consider deleting it even though I paid for it and would never review it even if I did read it.

 

What that tells me about myself is that I read the books by people I like. I make a purchase and pay money because the product is good and I like the look of it, but also because I like you, the author. 

So, author is important.

 

I’ve read all of Demelza Carlton’s books because they are quality products and I like her as a person. She has never yelled at me in capital letters and always responds to my fangirl gushing with good grace and appreciation.

 

I’ve read some awesome novels by authors who don’t shout at me, Terry Maggert, Tom Tinney, Jada Ryker and so many others. They tell me that their books are free or on a deal in a calm, informative way as part of a conversation in an ongoing relationship setting. 

All in lower case.

 

I don’t think I’m unusual anymore. I am beginning to think that I am more like the usual kind of reader, who wants to fangirl a bit, name drop a bit and read lots.

 

When I first started publishing and my book plummeted to the bottom of the 900,000 others on the Amazon database once my mum had bought it and a few loyal friends, I too was consumed with the same panic about marketing my work in order to get sales. It became all about the sales. I quickly worked out on Goodreads, Book Review Depot and other forums that nobody likes a spammer and I watched many authors come and go, shown the door after an automated ***BUY THIS*** appeared momentarily in my news feed. Many sites ban spam in a big way, preferring instead to have meaningful discussions about relevant issues without the popping up of book covers and capital letters on pre-set autobots. The other thing I’ve become more relaxed about is reviews. That doesn’t happen from shouting either, at least not effectively.

 

***REVIEWS NEEDED*** doesn’t work, not with me anyway. I have had some lovely messages in social media from people who will never review anything. That has to be ok. I know they enjoyed my work because they said so. The review is just where they tell everyone else. It’s great when they do but it’s not life threatening when they don’t. If something is around long enough, it will get reviews but it’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t have to happen in the first week or even year.

 

In short, if you want to garner a sale or a review from me, talk to me, don’t shout. And in the same way that I balked at the edible spam in my sandwich all those years ago, I will react in the same way today to the internet stuff. Only now I’m an adult and have the option of not starving to death.

 

     I will not eat it and I will not read it.

 

Just so you know, this blog was inspired by the 82 Spam posts on my Twitter feed when I woke up this morning. If that was you, you might find yourself 

                                     ***UNFRIENDED***

Ocean's Gift by Demelza Carlton

I liked Water and Fire, but I loved Ocean’s Gift. It was fascinating seeing Belinda in her mermaid setting, as I had got to know her in the first novel even though I knew little of her background. But in this novel, I adored the character of Vanessa. She had an innocence and yet a matriarchal power that was really enticing. I felt as though there was an opportunity to really get to know her. Demelza Carlton has struck the perfect balance between the archetypal view of mermaids and that of the sirens of old, blending the two to make a tender and yet dangerous species of females.

The storyline is awesome and frighteningly plausible. The earth is dying and nature will have seen the tell-tale signs long before man pulls his head out of the TV and realises it.

Joe is a decent man in a world full of typically bawdy males. He is solid and honourable and bashful without losing any of his sex appeal. He is reassuringly male without the unappealing baseness of the other fishermen, which is probably why Vanessa picks him. The mermaid race seeks liaison with men as a duty, but Vanessa is different. She has previously known love and it presents a vulnerability within an otherwise fearsome character portrayal.

I love how truly Australian this novel is. It has all the raw beauty of a stunning corner of the world. I appreciated the descriptions of the geography and the oceans; they were colourful and well-drawn and made the reader feel as though they were taking part in the novel. I was there in Joe’s hut and Vanessa’s boat. I liked this novel enough to read it in one sitting, not wanting to put it down and miss anything. It had enough of a hold on me, to keep me from doing the myriad other things that I actually should have been doing and I felt sad when the last page had been finished and savoured. I would have felt more devastated, had I not known that there were other books in the series to pick up.

It was incredibly well written and refreshing clean editorially - not a single distracting flaw to spoil the reading experience. I would definitely recommend it.

Get your own copy of Demelza's awesome book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Oceans-Gift-Demelza-Carlton-ebook/dp/B00AFEO80O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403333968&sr=8-1&keywords=Ocean%27s+Gift

Wanted - Serial Joiners, Dead or Alive.

I’m not really a serial ‘joiner’ to be honest. I tend to be the person that pulls a face at wedding invitations and ends up going out in the cold to the mall on a Saturday night, just to disprove the lie I told about being too busy to go to the birthday party. The lengths I’ve gone to in order to spend my life getting out of things, makes me wonder if sometimes, it would have been easier to show up for a few hours, drop off the obligatory present and then leave when decently acceptable.

So what changed when I started publishing my work? 

I decided to write a list of ten reasons why I joined all the myriad sites I seem to be a silent member of, in the hope of preventing someone else from going ever so slightly insane spending their life typing...without producing a single chapter of their novel. 

1.  Well, for starters, it’s a pretty isolating experience. You write by yourself, figuratively even if you can’t manage it literally. Yes the children were climbing the curtains, but you were happily ensconced in a fantasy world or stuck in a hotel with a pair of love birds. You saw what your offspring were doing, but only stopped typing when you heard the ripping sounds and were forced to grumpily tear yourself away from the keyboard. If you weren’t a loner before you started writing, you soon will be. I’ve agreed to all sorts of stupid, random things, just to get a bit of peace and quiet to finish a chapter or two. Writing makes you lousy company. You join sites, pages and groups to find kindred spirits.

2.  We are told as authors that social media is our friend. 
Who told us this? Well, people on social media of course. So we grab as many sites as we can, setting up pages for this and blogs for that. Then we fail to remember what we actually signed up to and definitely didn’t anticipate the hours of work that maintaining the monster would take. It eats at our writing time like a page eating dinosaur and ensures that the kids get beans on toast for their tea for the fourth night running. That’s ok. They haven’t bathed for a week so you don’t recognise them anyway.

3.  Our own sense of creative inferiority means that we have to obtain everything that other authors have. If they have an account with a book site and claim to have made a sale through it; we have to join. We forgot to put it in our favourites, cringed at the number of immediate messages asking us to join this or that forum on the site and two weeks later will try to join it again, bemused when the site tells us that it recognises our email address and would we please enter a password - which we now can’t remember.

4.  We want sales obviously, but what we also need is the lifeblood of authorship - reviews. Anything that promises ‘honest reviews’, we will join. We set off after them in the spirit of Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail and return battered and broken having acquired none - or none that we ever want to read again anyway.

5.  Like the silly children who skipped gaily after the Pied Piper, we follow other authors into hell and back, because we once struck up a conversation with them online and assumed that they knew what they were doing. We end up in forums where we and our work are horrifically tortured by ghouls who lurk in the shadows waiting for suckers like us to just show up, with our wide eyed innocence and pretty copies of our nice book to give away for free. What's your problem, you joined it, didn't you?

6.  Joining becomes as addictive as checking our sales on the KDP reports page. It’s like we actually believe that the more we check, the likelier it is that someone will have hopped on and made a purchase in the last two minutes while you were stirring the baked beans. If we are online and ever present, that same anonymous someone will see us, like us and buy something, especially if we put our best foot forward and smile, smile, smile. Hunt them down and join where they're joined.

7.  A hint of the dollar sign and we’re there, like flies around a cow pat, jockeying and jostling to be first to join, even though there is no such thing as a free lunch and any offer that is too good to be true, probably is a big fat con. We might have to part with a little something up front and we agonise and worry, but hand the money over anyway, justifying it to ourselves as we raid the biscuit tin where we were saving up for school shoes. It will be ok, our books will pay us back. Won’t they?

8.  Instead of giving ourselves a break and enjoying flexing our creative muscles, we put ourselves under pressure, berating our partners for the lovely meal they took us out for to soothe our frazzled nerves - because we weren’t online for a whole two hours (if you don’t count taking your phone to the toilet for a quick peek at Facebook.) It’s not just that we haven’t joined anything in two days, we’ve actually run out of things to join. We’re everywhere, like a bad smell, waving our book and shrieking, ‘Buy this, buy mine...please...anybody?’

9.  We suddenly discover that we are ‘all joined out’. The task is too massive for a single human being. We physically can’t do all the unrealistic tasks we have set ourselves. We can’t fulfil our obligations to post, tweet, blog, comment and message. There just aren’t enough hours in a day, even if we don’t change out of our pyjamas and get a shower. We join a different site and automate it, thinking that we’ve found the solution. But then we have to monitor the autobots, who email us just as regularly as all the other sites we joined earlier, telling us who followed and unfollowed us and giving us something else to worry about.

10.  After a miserable bout of self-doubt, during which time, we realised that we hadn’t written a single chapter all week, we go back to the keyboard and try and undo the damage. We spend hours trying to remember what we joined so that we can un-join ourselves, tying our brains up in knots as we reset thirty different passwords in one sitting and try and sort out the mess. As we fall into bed feeling marginally satisfied, we just allow ourselves one little peek at our sales reports and hey, what the heck, we sold a book...on Thursday. Oh crap, I think to myself. I bet they saw it on that site with the funny logo. I should probably rejoin...

You might not 'realiSe' that it's time to 'apologiSe'.

I’ve come across this issue a number of times now, so thought I would raise it. Although I currently live in New Zealand, I was raised in England and West Germany and did my English degree in Wales. Throughout my education, I was taught what was loosely termed ‘Queen’s English’ which involved much more use of the letter ‘s’ than ‘z’.

 

In the years before I began publishing, I would happily read everything that I could get my hands on. Yes, reading books by American authors was at first strange, the prolific use of ‘z’ was initially jarring to the eye - realize instead of realise, but it wasn’t difficult to put these anomalies to one side in favour of the general enjoyment of the novel. I love the colloquialisms which inherently creep into a story through the author’s hands because the writer is after all, a huge part of the evolution of the plot, characters and the very atmosphere which enfolds the reader. A quaint turn of phrase can indicate to an astute reader where the author hails from, how they feel personally about a particular issue and what kinds of experience prompted certain parts of the plot. Those are the very things that readers pick up on and head straight for when they meet you and often, your input as the author is what drives them to read more as they revel in your story and try to understand you.

The first time I came up against the dreaded ‘s’ versus ‘z’ war, was when I began doing paid reviews for an international review company. They complimented me on my first review for them, but alluded to the editing issues. Now everyone lets one drop occasionally. It doesn’t matter how many times I proofread my own work, something still slips through. So I asked for a list of what exactly was wrong and up it popped. I had used the word ‘apologise’ and it needed to be corrected to ‘apologize’. There were a few more ‘errors’ including ‘realise’, and it was quickly obvious that the relationship was not going to survive the distance between our understanding of grammar rules.

To their credit, the company actually emailed me back, acknowledged that they were an international company accepting novels from all over the globe and having an English woman on the team was probably a good thing. I still write for them and they humour me. Or do they humor me?

 

The next time it happened was when I wrote a blog for someone. They thought it was great, again, but for the editing. They altered it for me and I was surprised at the sense of mortification I experienced. The English language originates from my homeland of England. I don’t have a problem with the fact that it has evolved and changed in its lifetime, or that other nations have borrowed it and changed it. But I began to feel like my beautiful, archaic, expressive tongue was being cauterised and thrown out.

It raised its head again when I published Artefact, as it was originally titled. The wonderful author who gave her time to help me release it, debated back and forth with me about whether it was artefact or artifact. The book was set in England I argued, and we spell it artefact. But, she replied, you publish in the American market and we spell it artifact. I relented and changed it and haven’t regretted it. The novel sells really well in Amazon.com and readers seem to love it. In addition to that, she made me a gorgeous cover and gave me lots of fantastic help. Who could argue with that?

But as for changing the way I write, wouldn’t that be a bit like trying to fake a foreign accent, whilst not being particularly comfortable with it? It’s just not me so why would I do it? I like the way that Her Majesty speaks and I can guarantee that if I could grab a peek at her Christmas Day speech, she would have used realise and apologise and there wouldn’t be a ‘z’ in sight!

Being a UK English writer, without the added fact that I don’t reside in England, I am in a relative minority compared to the vast offerings from the US continent. But the English language itself isn’t quite as small fry as US editors and publishing companies would try and have me believe. I wish I knew the statistics of the ratio of realise to realize users, because then I could do a pretty graph and look intelligent on the subject. I know English writers raised in the huge continent of Africa, who spell words like me and to the best of my knowledge, definitely New Zealand and possibly Australian schools teach UK English. That's a fair hunk of land mass that agrees with moi.

To have a crack at my cultural heritage, which yes, my spelling of certain words is part of, is akin to me walking up to a Maori and telling them that their spelling of the word for family - whanau - is actually a bit rubbish. Not only would it be rude and disrespectful, it would undoubtedly upset them and I would be in big trouble.

So why shouldn’t I get defensive and upset, when beaten with the broad stick which shouts, ‘Let’s all be the same - my same, not yours?’ Just because I don’t spell something the same as you, doesn’t make me wrong, but if we want to play the ‘etched on the face of history game’, then I will win hands down. Realise has been around a damn sight longer than realize, I’ll have you know!

I guess the long and short of it is this: judge my work, judge my skill as an author and feel free to review my books. But at no point does that give anyone the right to disrespect the greatest representative of my cultural heritage - my language.

 

It’s mine. I love it. So back off!

 

 

What? You actually want my opinion?

 

I’ve spent my whole life reading. I have memories of living in West Germany as a little girl, where my father was stationed with the Air Force and the library on the air base was better than a sweet shop for me. We had no TV and our entertainment was the British Forces Broadcasting Service radio programmes, Barbie dolls (dangerous with a little sister who had a penchant for snapping off arms, legs and occasionally heads) and books.

Books were expensive even back in the 1970’s and the likelihood of getting something written in English where the national language was German, was remote. But the library on the base had them all lined up neatly on shelves, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, my heroes, wearing dustcovers and little plastic jackets to protect them from our tiny, eager hands. We went there on a Sunday after church but we had to be quick as the lunch would already be in the oven - my organised parents put it there before we left. There was no time to do proper choosing, it was just smash and grab, child style. It was the highlight of the week for me and sadly not always guaranteed. If Dad was on nights or working Sundays, we didn’t get to go anywhere as Mum couldn’t drive.

 

I remember once, getting home, scoffing my lunch and devouring Enid Blyton’s ‘Castle of Adventure’ for pudding. I couldn’t get enough of it. My mother refused to believe that I had actually read it all in that short space of time, coming upon me as I closed the back cover in sadness about two hours after lunch. I recounted the whole thing and she was probably sorry that she had asked, when I finally finished following her around the house four hours later.

 

But what is my point here?   
 

Well it’s basically that back then, nobody really cared if I liked the book and went back for the next one at the earliest opportunity. The publisher didn’t, the library just had it there and the author would never have known that she just make a little girl’s boring Sunday afternoon a whole lot better.

 

 

I started publishing a year ago, but only got my Kindle six months later as a gift from my mother. Up until then, I was still feeding my library habit, only I could choose six instead of one and didn’t have to pay my younger sister in household chores just to let me have her choose as well. Again, the library didn’t care if I liked my picks when I returned them, they probably measured their stats on how many times that book was issued, but they never actually asked ME personally if I had enjoyed it.

I always read the bit about the author in the back and love it when there’s a photo because I can see if they look how I imagined them. Maybe there were email addresses and website addresses but I had a book in my hands, not a computer and so I don’t recall ever looking anything up.

 

The world is different now. When I finish a book on my Kindle, a box pops up asking me if I want to give it a star rating. Amazon emails me if I ignore that and asks me what I thought of my purchase. As a reader, I’m bombarded by questions and asked for my opinion about somebody else’s work. It’s no longer that detached experience, it’s an interaction with a real person, who is going to see what I think and have an opinion on it. As a reader, I’m not sure how I feel about that. I like what I like and surely that’s nobody’s business but mine. Isn’t it?

As an author, I am ranked and rated and statistically examined a million times over, based on the reviews I get for my work. Some authors give away copies of their precious works in return for reviews which they may never get, knowing that the greasy pole which our books have to climb is aided by the solid opinion of our readers. Others cajole, encourage and resort to begging readers who perhaps agree cagily and then don’t, for a whole variety of reasons.

What seems to have happened in the last few years, is that readers who willingly and genuinely place reviews for every book they read, become hot property. Amazon and Goodreads both have lists of their ‘top 100 reviewers’. I do routinely review almost every book that I read nowadays, because I know that it’s important and even I have a rank as a reviewer - not a very good one yet, but it’s getting there. Authors used to be powerful people, able to influence the fabric of society, the perception of governments and the mood of the people. Now it’s readers.

With the click of the keyboard, a reader can place a review that either devastates or delivers hope to somebody who has put their work out there in the ether. There are no surprises (other than perhaps content) as the author will be eagerly awaiting that opinion. Some authors must check hourly for reviews. I’ve put up a review as a reader, only to get a notification from Amazon within minutes that ‘somebody’ liked my review and found it ‘helpful’. I know it’s the author, who else could it be? I’m going to time the next one and see how long it takes. I might even keep a book on it, in a light hearted, completely non-financially advantageous way, you understand.

A few reviewers really do understand the power of reviews. I have heard awful stories of reviewers deliberately trashing work which they haven’t even read, just because they can. They spend an afternoon dolling out one star reviews to random authors because it’s raining and they were bored. But I wonder if they get and keep that power, because not enough of the other readers out there, know that their opinion is wanted and valued, very much. Perhaps if the load was spread among the other millions, the corrosive influence of the few would be dispersed.

I’m not really sure what the answer is - I’m just musing as always.

I guess what I’m saying is that, if you are reading this and currently enjoying something on your iPad, Kindle or other device, just know that there is an author on the other side of that creation who is desperate to know what you thought. Yes you! They care about how your received their main character, what you liked or didn’t about the setting. Are you bothered that they killed off the lead actress at the end or did you hate her anyway? Did you want to marry the leading man or take out a hit on him and more importantly, when this author puts out their next book, will you be there? Do a 5 minute review. Let them know.



 

Reviews - What Goes Around, Comes Around


I’ve seen some really spiteful reviews out there in the ether, needlessly unkind words that have absolutely no relation to the work which some reviewers claim to have read, and hated. Until I began publishing, I had no idea that I was even meant to write reviews for the books I read - I guess it never occurred to me that anyone else would be interested in my opinion and perhaps that’s part of the problem. Nobody was - and now they are. In fact, an author will go to great lengths to get that reviewer’s precious opinion, in the dreadful numbers game that pushes publications further up the food chain because of the number of verified reviews.

Gutenberg Bible courtesy of Creative Commons
Wikimedia uploaded by Gun Powder Ma

Until a couple of years ago, I was happily getting books out of my local library and reading them, before just as happily returning them. The lady behind the counter would take them and put them back into the system, not even remotely interested in whether they had met my expectation or if I had failed to get beyond the first chapter. I wasn’t awfully inclined to hand them over with, ‘Thanks, that was really great, I read it in the bath,’ or, ‘I didn’t like all the expletives in that one’ (opens page to make point) ‘I don’t suppose you know what that swear word actually means...?’ She wasn’t interested in the minutiae of my reading experience, what I thought of the cover or blurb and she definitely wasn’t passing on any of my inane observations to the author.

Now we live in an age where the author is not just someone remote; that photographed gentle looking soul on the back page who wrote the book in your hand, but with whom you can have no meaningful interaction. They are accessible, their email address and website is in the back of their work, you can get in touch, compliment or abuse them and walk away largely unscathed. You can follow and un-follow them, like and unlike them, scour their lives and find out personal things about them. It’s all out there and in their eagerness to engage you, the reader, they handed it all to you on a plate in short bios, comments on Facebook, posts on Google+ and throw away comments on Twitter. You can have an opinion on what they wear, where they go and who they go with, in addition to that all important critique of their latest piece of work. You can extol or rubbish it as you so desire, depending on what mood you’re in or how much you enjoyed the thing they pulled out of their head for your pleasure alone.

Old book bindings at the Merton College Library
Picture courtesy of CC Licence Tom Murphy VII

Just scrolling down random reviews on Amazon, I can tell you now that there are some horrible things written about novels which were published with the best of intentions by good people full of hope. Things like, “Hated it. What a load of rubbish...” “Just couldn’t finish it...” “He’s mad if he thinks that’s literature...” and yes, maybe good money was spent on something that wasn’t really print ready and the author needs a bit of a kick into reality, but surely there are nicer ways to do it? I have to balance the thing out to be fair, as I also saw some really helpful comments too, “An awesome storyline but the book needs a really good editor...” “Some parts of this novel weren’t very realistic and it lost its believability for me when...”

Good on you, those awesome people who put up a review at all and bravo to those readers who, instead of ranting about their wasted 99c, actually gave some helpful pointers to the author. We’re so full of our own sense of ‘me’ as a society, that it’s suddenly become ok to say, ‘I hated that book,’ but not why. If you take something back to a shop, you give a reason if you’re expecting your money back, ‘It didn’t fit me, it didn’t look right on, it made my butt look like HMS Interloper.’ You wouldn’t get away with saying to a shop assistant, ‘I hate it. It sucks.’ If you’re unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire of someone else’s family dispute, they’re really quick to tell you why they don’t like that particular family member. Believe me, they can go on for hours. Anyone who’s ever watched Jeremy Kyle or in the olden days, Jerry Springer, try and mediate between two raging forces who can’t even remember how it all started, knows all about the ‘why’s’ of arguments. If you get a horrid cup of coffee and paid NZ$4 for the pleasure and have the courage to take it back to the barrista, rather than sneaking out and leaving it on the table, you can’t just say, ‘I hated that coffee,’ because they’re bound to ask you what in particular was wrong with it. So how come it’s alright to tell someone that their book sucked, in public, on the internet for all future customers to see for time immemorial, but not tell them honestly why?

I had a bad review recently and it actually rocked my confidence initially. A book that had been getting only 5* reviews from perfect strangers suddenly had this 3* thrown at it and why? Well, I honestly couldn’t tell you. There was nothing coherent about the review that gave me a clue, other than that the person just didn’t like it. That’s ok but it would have been helpful to know what in particular they didn’t like. They raved on about nonsense really, not getting parts of the plot which, when I checked again were clearly explained and accounted for and they even used the wrong name for one of the characters and misunderstood the location of the whole book. So whilst they had admittedly damaged my poor book’s stats without just cause, I had to dismiss the review as the strange ramblings of someone I would probably rather didn’t ever buy any of my novels again.

Some reviews are so downright unhelpful, it makes me wonder about the kind of people who bother to place their fingers over the keyboard and type. One novel I bought recently was ruined for me because the reviewer decided to blatantly reveal the ending. (Note to self - never read reviews when you’re half way through.) I mean, why would you do that, destroy the ending for everyone else just because you thought it was rubbish? And some of them are so littered with grammatical and spelling errors, I wonder if they are even qualified to be commenting on the quality of somebody else’s work.  

I think the moral of the story is to do what our parents told us when we were kids:

Think before you speak...only in this case, it’s think before you type.

Some salient questions before pressing ‘submit’ for that mean review:

1. Am I being deliberately personal?

2. Did I give this novel a fair go?

3. Have I been reasonable in my criticism and offered examples to back it up?

4. Have I listed at least one thing that the author got right?

5. Would I stand in front of this author and be prepared to read my review out  
    loud to them, when I can see their reaction?

If you can’t think of even one nice thing to say, then perhaps you aren’t reviewing with the right heart, but are just needlessly assassinating another person’s work for the sheer fun of it. In which case, don’t expect to be taken seriously and if you are an author trashing another author’s work, don’t be surprised when what goes around, comes right back to bite you.