I’m coming in late to this (work: KICKING MY ASS; the mess in my apartment: KICKING MY ASS; life in general: KICKING MY FUCKING ASS) and am jumping in the fray only because an alert reader very kindly *snort* provided us with linkage, but in case you’re a blind or somehow incapacitated and completely unable to do your blog rounds: Angie managed to blow things up quite nicely yesterday on RTB with her article about credible reviews, and Karen Scott picked up the torch, and MaryJanice Davidson provided some hilarious commentary, even if I said “bitch, please!” more than once while reading what she had to write. Which really isn’t too different from how I am when I’m reading her books, heh.
Y’all know how I feel about reviews, reviewing and authors who think readers aren’t qualified to review. If you feel any doubts, then check out this little bit of mouth-frothing from days of yore. (Tangent: Smart Bitches is almost a year old. What the fuck, y’all?)
I only have one more thing to throw into the discussion, and it’s probably nothing particularly new (I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t read all the comments in all the threads about this issue): Authors who snip and snipe about how readers just aren’t qualified to review a book because they don’t know what it’s like to
give birth to precious, precious babies all by their little selfses
survive the rigors of the publishing process love to draw similes to professions like medicine, law, engineering and the hard sciences. Look, no schlub off the street is qualified to critique, say, a research paper on quantum mechanics. And that’s a perfectly valid point. Y’all need to be certified to do that shit. The implication is: the average reader’s view is invalid, and only authors can know another author’s pain and be qualified to provide commentary on a published novel.
Oh, you know what I’m gonna say next: BITCH, PLEASE. What I want to know is: how many published authors—especially authors who write genre fiction—have advanced degrees in, say, English, Linguistics or Fine Arts? If these standards are to be accepted as logical, then off the top of my head, Sara Donati is allowed to review books and THE REST OF US (myself definitely included) need to sit down and shut the fuck up.
Here’s the terrifying part that authors hate, just hate to own up to: you really don’t need any special qualifications to get a novel published, much less write one. I’m not saying it’s easy—it’s patently not. But unlike a doctor, or an accountant, or an engineer, you don’t need any sort of professional certification to be recognized as an author. People who have successfully published books—massively bestselling books, even—have come from all over the economic, education and class spectrum: high-school drop-outs, college professors, single moms scribbling story ideas on the backs of napkins, teenagers, ex-cops, accountants, bored English majors. Shit, if books like The Lighthouse Keeper are any indication, you don’t even need to be particularly literate to write a novel that’s consquently slobbered over by readers like a 10-year-old boy at a NAMBLA meeting. And experiments like Naked Came the Stranger have proved that crap, well, sells.
So on one hand: Kudos for being published.
But on the other hand: Your masterpiece is sharing that honor with books like Desire’s Blossom and To Tame a Renegade.
And one last thing: I’m also amused by the people who are swearing off MaryJanice Davidson because of her views. My personal opinion is, yeah, she’s being an asshole, but she’s a funny asshole, and that’s some hard, hard shit to pull off. I can sympathize with the urge, but hell, if I swore off asshole authors entirely, my list of authors I could read would be very slim indeed, and frankly, I’m too selfish for that because I’m such a book whore—I like ‘em big, I like a LOT of them, and often several different ones at the same time. There’s only one reason I no longer bother to read anything MJD releases, and that’s because I’ve decided her recent books have sucked a lot of ass, even though I enjoy her distinctive, snarky voice.
celeste,
just me trying to be funny in the dirty dirty world of sock puppets.
Ah, okay. 😉
One of the main things I love about sites like SBTB and Mrs. Giggles is that I get someone’s honest opinion about a book. No bullshit, no hidden agenda. Not to mention profanity and other kool words, which I find immensely entertaining.
By sending flocks of fangirls to fill up Amazon with 5-star rave reviews and shilling for themselves under fake identities, authors make it even more likely that readers are gonna tune out those reviews and come over here.
Hey, that’s it! Candy and Sarah are doing the frothing fangirl reviews! Mwahahaha! A plan so crazy it just might work.
just me trying to be funny in the dirty dirty world of sock puppets.
I adore erotic romance authors who know how to give good sock puppet. Silk stockings at eleven? Or perhaps—in winter—chenille.
Where do you get those cool-ass quotation marks? Me wantee.
Aha! Thank you Celeste. So it’s only the “top ###” reviewers that have such links. It seems .co.uk users get the clunky version whereas .com has all the bells and whistles, though. Not only do they include a link to “See all my reviews” after every reviewer but if you go to “your store” you can also search “by people” for a particular reviewer’s name. But it looks like there’s some limits to who you can search for, since older reviewers’ names don’t appear.
Use the HTML Markup
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BlockQuote> Quited Text
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Drat! Quoted! Quoted!! Too early in the morning.
Let me start this comment by saying I’ve known Diana Gabaldon for 14 years and work with her at CompuServe’s Books and Writers Forum.
I spoke with her today and she denied being “angustroll”, said she does not review her own books for Amazon, and did not post the reviews under the name “angustroll”.
I believe her.
Darlene. I appreciate the update and reassurance that this has all been a crack-induced hallucination. I’d recommend she get that Amazon glich fixed, ASAP.
Does Ms. Gabaldon know who Angustroll is? I would love to know what Angustroll thinks of this and if she knows how it happened. Obviously she has been an ardent and steadfast fan for many years. She would have to be sick over this.
I think it’s time to reveal the truth.
Candy is Angustroll.
And I am Keyser Sose.
Ferfe—
Yes, Ms. Gabaldon is aware of those Amazon reviews and who did actually post them, but I’m not at liberty to add anything else.
I was just feeling annoyed ‘cause I knew she wasn’t salting Amazon with fake reviews of her books, but rather than just jump up and defend Diana, I wanted to get the straight story from the source.
Comes from my past as a reporter, editor and news director. One of the first things I taught my children was the unofficial motto of the Chicago City News Bureau: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!”[g]
That is some seriously goofy stuff right there, posting reviews of an author’s books, and then posting a review of an unrelated text and signing the author’s name.
I love that movie, Sarah! The first time I saw it I was watching it alone at home and screaming, “Look at the fax! Look at the fax!”
Y’all are SO WRONG about me.
EvilSilkyMarmoset: I may be a hard-bitten, flinty-eyed, ex-Navy SEAL, secret agent sheikh, but I’m not a day older than 29. TWENTY-NINE, you hear me?
And Sarah: I’m not Angustroll.
I’m actually… Harriet Klausner.
*thunderclap*
*horses rearing and neighing*
*Marty Feldman shuffles and snickers*
The hell you say!
*I* am Harriet Klausner!
We’ll thumb-wrestle for it.
Sure, I would’ve considered doing it at some point if I get published, but not after that Canadian Amazon debacle where you could see the reviewers’ real names for a couple of hours. *shudder* ~Victoria
But if you knew you wouldn’t get caught … could you? I had a hell of a time just writing a review for those few books that I liked. Can you honestly review your own work? I say it can’t be done. You would have to have some kind of multiple personality disorder to do it justice. Though I must say Bonnie Vanack’s rendition over on my blog was a classic. (Now I’m wondering if she didn’t ask Blair Valentine to write it under her name… which takes me back to the MPD theory).
HA! Twenty-nine my dainty,
tufty and territory-marking
bottom. I bet you claim that’s all your own hair too. I’ve seen your birth certificate, Sergeant “Candy” Cain Lustwolf. “Thirty-two” tactfully ignored any years after the last decade.
No, no, FerfeLaBat, I was just kidding, I swear. I would live in utter FEAR if I actually had the balls—or sick urge—to do that. When I heard about the James Frey controversy, I almost pissed myself. WHO could DO that? I mean, I couldn’t tell that kind of lie to an utter stranger for fear that I’d be regarded as a pitiful, insane piece of trash if anybody ever found out. But this guy just puts it out there for the whole world to check into. Ew, it just gives me the creeps.
I would feel like the most pitiful loser in the world, I think. If you can’t get good reviews based on the writing, then you need to think good and hard about that.
Oh, and as for the “Harriet Klausner” ruse: very cunning double-bluff, guys, but you can’t fool the discerning public. No single person can read that many books. It’s both of you. And your husbands, parents, siblings, goldfish wrangler and the slightly effeminate poet called Ambrose whom SB Sarah lured to her house under the pretext of finding a rhyme for “fluted brick chimney” and then locked in the attic, keeping him alive on a diet of violet creams and peach schnapps.
On the other hand, someone’s butler must be the “Edwards” half of Cassie E… He’ll be the first to crack under pressure. Guaranteed.
EvilAuntiePeril-
Will you marry me? Yes, yes, I know I’m a woman, and already married, and too old for you, but these are small obstacles, surely.
Your wit, your charm, your freaking unbelievable way with words – You Must Be Mine!
Say yes!
Interestingly… all of angustroll’s reviews have been removed. So I wasn’t able to see what the fuss was about.