Amazon's recent decision to purge some book reviews by friends, family and other suspicious characters comes on the heels of reports of an entire industry of paid reviewers as well as the practice of authors ganging up to review each other's books -- favorably, of course.
Beyond a "kerfuffle" over the reviews themselves lies the seedy world of bullying in book-review forums and other phenomena all too common in the protected anonymity of the Internet.
You also have to wonder how Amazon knows that Review A was written by a stranger but Review B by a family friend. That's a little scary.
The whole sordid business has some urging readers to ignore good reviews as presumed fakes and concentrate on the middling ones.
This puts writers in an awkward position, particularly when you're self-published. On the one hand, you want good reviews because they may be the only thing that prompts a customer to buy your book. But if readers start thinking all your good reviews are fakes you've solicited -- or worse, paid for -- they'll take their resentment at your trying to fool them, and their business, elsewhere.
I periodically check for new reviews/ratings of my novel Tainted Souls. Since readers can download it for free, nice reviews are pretty much the only validation I get for the effort I made writing it and inspiration to write another book. So it's been nice to rack up a few new four- and five-star reviews in the past few weeks. (For some reason, Barnes & Noble and Goodreads are more active; Amazon has relatively few reviews.) But I appreciate, I guess, that a couple of clunker reviews have rolled in, too, to provide some validation to the positive ones.
(The last two Amazon reviews in particular weren't especially kind. I guess that's a good thing these days. But one has to wonder -- though I doubt it, given the paucity of reviews on Amazon -- if any good ones were purged as presumptive fakes? Though I get the impression the purge only applies to hardcover books, not e-books.)
I suppose it's only a matter of time before some enterprising person comes up with an app that generates the perfect combination of high, middling and low-ranking fake reviews to generate maximum book sales.
Wonder what Amazon will do then.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Thursday, January 3, 2013
When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of Charles Durning
Would you believe this story if pitched to you as a novel?
Your protagonist is born in poverty, ninth of ten children, to a disabled war vet and an Irish immigrant mom. Five of his sisters die in childhood of scarlet fever or smallpox and his dad dies when he is 16. He lands in the first wave at Omaha Beach, where his unit is cut to pieces, but despite machine-gun and shrapnel wounds he kills eight Germans before the day is out. Later, having recovered from his wounds, he engages in hand-to-hand combat and is stabbed eight times by a bayonet, but he manages to overcome his opponent by bludgeoning him to death with a rock. When he sees that the Nazi soldier he's killed is only 15 or so, he cradles him in his arms and cries. Later, having recovered from his latest wounds, he is captured during the Battle of the Bulge and is one of only a handful of men to escape the infamous SS massacre of U.S. troops at Malmedy. Finally, a "million-dollar" wound sends him home. He battles post-war trauma for the rest of his life and struggles with menial jobs for more than a decade while pursuing a career as an actor. He's nearly 40 years old when he first tastes success but then rises to the top of his field.
Such was the life of veteran character actor Charles Durning, who died on Christmas Eve at 89, perhaps best known for his roles as the crooked cop in The Sting and Jessica Lange's clueless father, besotted with Dustin Hoffman's "Tootsie."
I read a lot of nonfiction accounts of World War II. Not the grand strategy nor how big battles played out, but the stories of individual soldiers and civilians caught up in the crazy maelstrom of those years. They have literally millions of stories to tell of the highest possible drama. Their lives are a reminder to me first, that while I sometimes may feel sorry for myself and all my woes, really I've had it pretty good: I've never known want, had loving parents who put me through college, never had to hit the beach and face machine guns, mortars and artillery raining death and destruction around me. Their lives, like Durning's, are reminders, too, of how many tales there are to be told of the human experience. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction is the best way to tell it.
I suppose that's why some of us try to write it.
What do you think?
Your protagonist is born in poverty, ninth of ten children, to a disabled war vet and an Irish immigrant mom. Five of his sisters die in childhood of scarlet fever or smallpox and his dad dies when he is 16. He lands in the first wave at Omaha Beach, where his unit is cut to pieces, but despite machine-gun and shrapnel wounds he kills eight Germans before the day is out. Later, having recovered from his wounds, he engages in hand-to-hand combat and is stabbed eight times by a bayonet, but he manages to overcome his opponent by bludgeoning him to death with a rock. When he sees that the Nazi soldier he's killed is only 15 or so, he cradles him in his arms and cries. Later, having recovered from his latest wounds, he is captured during the Battle of the Bulge and is one of only a handful of men to escape the infamous SS massacre of U.S. troops at Malmedy. Finally, a "million-dollar" wound sends him home. He battles post-war trauma for the rest of his life and struggles with menial jobs for more than a decade while pursuing a career as an actor. He's nearly 40 years old when he first tastes success but then rises to the top of his field.
Such was the life of veteran character actor Charles Durning, who died on Christmas Eve at 89, perhaps best known for his roles as the crooked cop in The Sting and Jessica Lange's clueless father, besotted with Dustin Hoffman's "Tootsie."
I read a lot of nonfiction accounts of World War II. Not the grand strategy nor how big battles played out, but the stories of individual soldiers and civilians caught up in the crazy maelstrom of those years. They have literally millions of stories to tell of the highest possible drama. Their lives are a reminder to me first, that while I sometimes may feel sorry for myself and all my woes, really I've had it pretty good: I've never known want, had loving parents who put me through college, never had to hit the beach and face machine guns, mortars and artillery raining death and destruction around me. Their lives, like Durning's, are reminders, too, of how many tales there are to be told of the human experience. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction is the best way to tell it.
I suppose that's why some of us try to write it.
What do you think?
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Storms of Denali: A Rip-Roaring Adventure for Xmas!
Monday, December 3, 2012
A Golden Age for Writers?
You'd be hard-pressed to get me to agree, but Stephen Marche argues in Esquire that we're living in a new Golden Age for writers. The barriers to publishing have fallen (hello, e-books) and Tom Wolfe got a $7 million advance. Having banged my head fruitlessly against the publishing wall for much of the past five years, I see it differently, but perhaps I'm just being narcissistic. Wouldn't be the first time.
How do you see it?
How do you see it?
Monday, November 19, 2012
Titles That Jump Off the Shelf
I took my daughter to a thrift store yesterday on a sweater-shopping spree. I strolled over to the used books while she checked the racks (she failed to find an acceptable choice from the hundreds of sweaters available) and wound up buying a used copy of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. (It's a novel, but was mistakenly stuck in the history section.)
There's so much that goes into shopping for a book, especially when you're just browsing the bookstore shelves. An unusual title is one thing that might get me to take a peek; it's what got me to take a look at a book I discussed awhile ago, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (since made into a movie with Ewan MacGregor and the lovely Emily Blunt). I'm a lot less like to pick up some book called A Blue House or The Lost Love or something.
I wonder about the science of picking a title. How often do agents and publishers require authors to change titles? Is there, in fact, even a science of title selection? Is there some old marketing report sitting in a file drawer somewhere at Random House-Penguin (or is it Penguin-Random House)? (And wouldn't "Random Penguin" be a great name for a publishing house -- or a rock band?) The same question applies to cover art, of course -- is there an actual science of this subject, or is it all seat-of-the-pants decision-making?
Anybody know the answer to those questions?
Any favorite title that you just couldn't resist?
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Truth IS Stranger Than Fiction
Is this Petraeus scandal delicious or what? A perfect example of how "truth is stranger than fiction."
A woman gets some weird emails and goes to her friend, an FBI guy, who convinces his pals to open an investigation, even though there doesn't really appear to be a crime. This winds up uncovering an affair, which really ought to be nobody's business, that brings down one of the most powerful men in the country, a potential Eisenhower-like presidential candiddate. Then it turns out the FBI guy has some kind of relationship with the original complainant, because he was sending her shirtless pics of himself, and that he went to Republican congressmen because he had a political motive -- seeing some kind of Obama administration coverup under way, even though Petraeus is a Republican -- and so now he is now being investigated for unprofessional conduct. Meanwhile, the original complainant, having destroyed the life and career of one man she considers a friend, also appears to have set in motion a process which has now ensnared another four-star general, who has sent her 30,000 (!) emails. So the woman who is carrying on some kind of weird relationship with the FBI guy, and another one with the general, may have wrecked her own life and marriage in the meantime!
You couldn't make this stuff up. No agent or publisher would accept a query this bizarre. No one would buy the story. Too many coincidences. Characters acting too stupidly: everybody knows email isn't secure, especially the director of the CIA! C'mon.
A woman gets some weird emails and goes to her friend, an FBI guy, who convinces his pals to open an investigation, even though there doesn't really appear to be a crime. This winds up uncovering an affair, which really ought to be nobody's business, that brings down one of the most powerful men in the country, a potential Eisenhower-like presidential candiddate. Then it turns out the FBI guy has some kind of relationship with the original complainant, because he was sending her shirtless pics of himself, and that he went to Republican congressmen because he had a political motive -- seeing some kind of Obama administration coverup under way, even though Petraeus is a Republican -- and so now he is now being investigated for unprofessional conduct. Meanwhile, the original complainant, having destroyed the life and career of one man she considers a friend, also appears to have set in motion a process which has now ensnared another four-star general, who has sent her 30,000 (!) emails. So the woman who is carrying on some kind of weird relationship with the FBI guy, and another one with the general, may have wrecked her own life and marriage in the meantime!
You couldn't make this stuff up. No agent or publisher would accept a query this bizarre. No one would buy the story. Too many coincidences. Characters acting too stupidly: everybody knows email isn't secure, especially the director of the CIA! C'mon.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Is the Political Novel Dead?
I've been wondering if the political novel is dead -- if, indeed, it was ever really alive. I'm pondering this as I tease out a plot for my WIP (if we can call it that), A Bright, Shiny Object, which would be one such political novel.
Not including murder-at-the-White-House-type potboilers, the political novels I can think of are few and far between. Primary Colors, Joe Klein's story inspired by Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, is the only recent one that comes to mind. Only a few others pop into my head, all of them rather old: All the King's Men, The Ugly American, Seven Days in May (was that even a novel before it was a movie?).
This is unfortunate for someone like me, who is cursed with an interest in politics. (I say cursed because our political discourse in this country has been reduced to schoolyard taunts, while the number of outlets for this jibber-jabber has exploded, bombarding us with a lot of bilious crap.)
I suppose, on the upside, that the relative paucity of political novels -- as opposed to, say, vampire or zombie books -- might leave a little daylight on the agent/publisher landscape for someone who actually churns one out.
Your thoughts?
Not including murder-at-the-White-House-type potboilers, the political novels I can think of are few and far between. Primary Colors, Joe Klein's story inspired by Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, is the only recent one that comes to mind. Only a few others pop into my head, all of them rather old: All the King's Men, The Ugly American, Seven Days in May (was that even a novel before it was a movie?).
This is unfortunate for someone like me, who is cursed with an interest in politics. (I say cursed because our political discourse in this country has been reduced to schoolyard taunts, while the number of outlets for this jibber-jabber has exploded, bombarding us with a lot of bilious crap.)
I suppose, on the upside, that the relative paucity of political novels -- as opposed to, say, vampire or zombie books -- might leave a little daylight on the agent/publisher landscape for someone who actually churns one out.
Your thoughts?
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