Responsible Reviewing, Part 2

What I'm reading: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford (book club); Contest entry #1 of 8.

After the discussion in the comments on Monday's post about reviews, I decided to carry it one step further. Since there does seem to be a lot of abuse of the review system, I went to both the Barnes & Noble and Amazon sites to see what they said about leaving reviews.

Barnes & Noble (where there's still a lengthy discussion of sick cats on my Danger in Deer Ridge page) does seem to be trying to guide reviewers as to what's appropriate. This is from their site:

What to include in your review:

Please focus on the title's content. Your review will be most helpful to others if you include the reasons why you either liked or disliked the title. Hold your readers' full attention by limiting your review to 500 words or less.

What to exclude from your review:
Don't ruin the ending for others, and please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the title page. If you see any errors in the information on the title page, please send us an email.

Reviewers and Genres

What I'm reading: Angle of Investigation by Michael Connelly (Nook); A Simple Winter, by Rosalind Lauer (bike)

I know some of you read my post last week at Jenny Milchman's blog about writing outside the box, or at least outside some of the genre conventions proscribed by the print publishing industry. If you haven't read it, you might want to pop over, as today's post is related to that one.

I got an email from the publisher of my upcoming Blackthorne, Inc. novel, ROOTED IN DANGER, that my ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) were being shipped. These are the final galleys, printed in trade paperback format. It's the last chance to read the book for any errors, and these are strictly errors of the typographical kind.

But what raised my concerns was the spreadsheet she sent of the reviewers that the publisher has sent ARCs to. (Or, to whom/which the publisher has sent ARCs if you're not into ending a sentence with a preposition.)

What Makes a Book Good?

Have you ever read reviews or had people recommend books, and then you read them and can't understand what all the fuss is about? What works for one reader might not work for another. And there's nothing wrong with that—that's why there are so many different books!

While I was in Los Angeles, I had time to hook up with a friend from high school. We discussed reading and writing, and we got started discussing the male-female thing. He'd read books by a well-known female mystery author, and he said he rushed through all the "emotional" stuff because he wasn't interested in that. He wanted the "mystery" stuff, not all the "feeling" stuff.

I recently read two "out of my normal genre" books in anticipating of attending a book club meeting. I'll be interested in seeing how the book club works, especially since the woman who invited me stressed that they served a delicious breakfast rather than extolling the brilliance of the book discussions. I've never joined one before, since they remind me too much of assigned reading in high school.

One of the books I read would, by today's standards, probably be considered poor writing. But it was a memoir written by someone born just after the Civil War, who had very little formal education. The publisher had opted to leave the manuscript virtually intact rather than edit it for spelling or grammar.

What's in a Review?

First: Thanks to Rob and Miranda for their views. Most helpful.

Next – a bit more on plotting. I've been dealing with my latest story board plotting system here, but I've also discussed my "needlepoint" approach to plotting at the Author Exchange Blog.

On to today's post:

In my routine blog-hopping, the topic of reviews has come up lately. How reviews for the same book can vary from one reviewer to the next. Whether they have any effect on sales. How an author should respond. Or if the author should respond at all. It's an arena where subjectivity rules.

Since I write for one publisher that targets the library market, I've had to look at reviews from an entirely different perspective. It's not the what, it's the where.

People who purchase books for libraries often base their acquisitions on whether or not a book has been reviewed by a relatively limited number of publications. And it's not necessary, apparently, that the review be a good one. If the title shows up with a review, it stands a much greater chance of being added to that library's buy list.

Keep Reading...

Some readers say that they will go out of their way to buy books that get terrible reviews, because they want to see whether or not the reviewer was being nasty, or if the book was really that bad. And what's bad? I've read a heck of a lot of books that hit the best-seller lists that have rave reviews, but I don't care for them. What makes a book special for one reader may be a total turn off for another.


When dealing with reviews, it's difficult to separate the "book" from the "me." And those five star reviews give the author a feeling of success. Yet there are also authors who will tell you that a 3 star review is more dreaded than a 1 star review. Why? Because the 1 star means there was an emotional reaction from the reader, even if it was negative. There was some sort of a connection. The 5 star review, of course, is coveted, because it also shows that emotional connection, but in a positive way. The "me" gets stroked along with the "book." But a 3 star review says the book didn't resonate one way or the other.

That being said, a friend sent me the following, which in addition to being a review is one darn great sentence.

Quote from the NYT "Opinionator:

Tyler Cowen says “the best sentence I read last night” is from a review of William Vollman’s new book, “Imperial,” in New York magazine by Sam Anderson.

“Imperial” is like Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” with the attitude of Mike Davis’s “City of Quartz,” if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac.


And, in closing, if you want to help me bypass the 'not enough reviews in the right places' dilemma, if you'll request that your library carry When Danger Calls, that might help get the book onto that golden buy list.
ISBN: 978-1-59414-723-4
Publisher: Five Star, a part of Gale/Cengage Learning

Regrouping

What I'm reading: Shadow Prey by John Sandford

After a trip through the movie listings, we found absolutely nothing that enticed us to leave the house and spend money. The James Bond flick was a single showing, at 10:30 pm, and that doesn't fit our circadian rhythm. However, we did go out for our traditional Chinese dinner. Nice to feel welcomed; they know us well enough to bring chopsticks and brown rice. And at least we're not in such a rut that we order the same thing every time (except the hot and sour soup). Plenty of leftovers for tonight.

Since we'd already watched out Netflix offering, we went through our meager DVD collection. When the kids gave us the player a few years back (trying in vain to bring Mom & Dad into the new century), they sent videos as gifts. We may even have bought some ourselves. We perused the shelf independently, and both chose the same movie. (After 40 years, we seem to spend a lot of time in each other's head). And, since the DVD had never been opened, it was 'new' for us. We watched "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes" with Basil Rathbone. Good fun. We have "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" on tap.

Other news that reminds me I should be working harder on the writing (hey, I DID get all the errata for HIdden Fire sent to the publisher Wednesday). I'm getting more Google Alerts on When Danger Calls. Don't know if people are buying, but they're looking.

One head-scratcher. I got a review by a prolific reviewer who posts her reviews everywhere. She did one for When Danger Calls before it was released, and it's posted as a 5 star review on Barnes & Noble. The exact same review showed up this morning on Amazon, but with 4 stars? No clue why. But that's the game.

Also -- I have a short story featuring Randy & Sarah in the All Romance eBooks weekly newsletter, Wildfire. It was one of those "can't let the characters go" stories I wrote after I finished Finding Sarah, and it's been sitting around in my computer. Nice that it's getting a little time out of the hard drive.

Happy Hanukkah, Boxing Day, and Kwanza.

Voting, Reviews, and Excerpts.

It's been over a week of trying to vote. Every time I've driven by the library, the places is jammed and there's no parking for blocks. Wait times have been two hours. Not my cup of tea. Today I revised my strategy thanks to hubby's suggestion, and arrived at our library about twenty minutes before the polls opened. Pleasantly surprised that there were still a few parking slots IN the library lot, I parked and joined the line of people waiting to vote. A cold front blew through last night, and it was about 48 degrees, which is decidedly brisk weather in central Florida. I should have anticipated that they wouldn't have the lobby open before the official ten AM opening time, but I didn't, so I didn't have particularly warm clothes on.

Things did move efficiently once the doors opened, and I was inside by 10:15 and out by 10:30. Check-in was very high-tech, but the voting was on a paper ballot using a black ball-point pen to fill in the bubbles. Since my hands were still frigid from waiting outside, this was more of a challenge than it might have been. The longest line was waiting to feed the ballot into the counter. But it's done, and I feel good that I've done my part. Now, if this information could somehow be transmitted so that I'd stop getting phone calls and, even better, so there wouldn't be any more political ads on tv, I'd really be in 'good citizen heaven.

Other news: I got my first review for When Danger Calls last night. And I've updated my website, so there's now an excerpt from the book. It's the first time I've used an excerpt that doesn't start on Page 1. My editor and I discussed it when I had to give them something for the back cover copy, and she thought something from chapter 3 was a better choice. If you check it out, let me know if it makes sense. Do you like an excerpt that comes from later in the book? I'm so anal about things being in order, I often feel like it's a spoiler if I know what's going to happen later.