When a nobel author claims to be the best

Am I the only one here who thinks this is trolling?

 

I find it hard to believe that two books, with as much research as you describe, could be written to any substantial level of quality in only five years. You have emphasized five years as if it's a lifetime, but five years is really a very short time.

I'm going to return to my discussion of the need to believe. If it turned out that you're not the best author that ever lived, what would that mean to you? Would giving up that belief mean that you would see your writing as a waste of time? Do you feel that it's not worth engaging in an activity unless you can be the best in all of history? What does that mean for all the rest of the world, most of whom are not the best in all of history at what they do, and most of whom who have not formed the belief/theory that they're the best in all of history?

Most people can accept that they have peers and superiors. What would it mean to you to accept that you have peers and superiors?

 

I wouldn't care.

All I want is success. If I were regarded as a mediocre writer by the critics, but I were full of money like the author of Fifty Shades, I would be a happy man. E. L. James is considered a trashy writter but she enjoys the support of her fans. She cannot say she wrote something that contributes in any way to humanity or whatever, but she has money and she appeared in a magazine as one of the 100 more influent persons in the world.

So, I think that's awesome. Stephen King is a good, decent writter. I enjoyed IT and whatever. He lives peacefully and got some recognition. That's okay.

The real scenario is that all that research and all that effort I put in those books is just me trying to succeed. Isn't that what all of us want? I think it is, at least it is a big part of our motivation.

I tried to read Mace Runner and I couldn't. I have no idea how that author got his book published. I think it's horrible but hey, he did it. Does he care about... what? Do I care about... what? I tried to read The Divine Comedy and I couldn't. It was too heavy for me. Good writers, bad writers... "whatever". We are all writers.

The sad part of the story is that we don't even get to see the faces of our readers as they enjoy our books. It is an ungrateful work what we do. A lot of effort and little reward, excepting the process itself.

I enjoyed the process. That's something nobody can take away from me.

As for the need to believe, ChickenFreak, I am an atheist and I apply my atheism to everything, including to myself. I doubt about everything and I question everything. I really don't see how my work could be less than a master piece. Does it sound pretentious? It is nothing but an objective evaluation. I could say "I don't see how my work is not a commercial regular book" and it would be the same, only that it would sound OK, because it wouldn't affect the sensitivity of people. Well, get over it. There are all kinds of works. It may even happen that if you read it you preffer Fifty Shades, because the ability to enjoy literature is a very subjective matter.

People who get interest in my work should be people who are curious about "literature", people who read about literary theory and stuff like that. Truth is, my audience is fairly small and editorials know this. I know this and I'm thinking about a way to rise interest in it.

Eitherway, I am on my last vacation week and I really don't have anything to do right now, so I may further ellaborate on the virtues of my work. After all, we all love to talk about our books.

 

What evidence do you have for that? I'm not seeing any evidence. You've mentioned, I believe, two professors(?) who like it. That's not overwhelming evidence.

You can't objectively evaluate your own work. Certainly, your own work may be your favorite book; much of my own cooking is my favorite food. But I don't extend that to claiming that I'm the best cook in history.

Are you able to understand that claiming that you are the best author in all of history is an extremely unlikely claim? I'm not quite sure that you understand what you are claiming.

 

Actually, that makes me think--Augusto, if you did cook something that you thought was really darn good, something that tasted delicious to you in the moment, WOULD you call yourself the best cook in history? Is this just your mode of expression?

 

We can debate about it if you want. The method would be like this: I offer arguments and you ponder them. If you show me a single work that is close to what I am describing, I will admit being a delusional idiot.

If you're not too busy, it should be fun. So let me start:

The difference with your example and my position is that I am not talking about personal taste. I am not talking about my feelings but about specyphic literary qualities of my work. This has nothing to do with enjoyment. You may like it or hate it, but the qualities, the characteristics of the book, are there for anyone to extract them.

Cervantes' fame is not related to Don Quixote being a cool book (two books, actually but let's call it one). If you do a quick search on Wikipedia, you'll see what I mean.

Now, I mentioned Apotheosis is the first Epic since the XIX century. Does it ammount to something? What are the reasons nobody wrote a single epic book since the XIX century? What is the implication, the value, in having resurrected the genre after more than 100 years?

Awaiting for your reply, and please don't come and tell me I need to send you my novels for you to see if it's an epic or not. We're grow up people and I trust you'll play fairly.

 

Interesting. You claim your book is the first epic since the 19th century, and then provide a Wikipedia link which lists notable epics which have been written in the 20th and 21st century

 

I think it's a very interesting approach. How many celebrity personalities got to be so simply because they were brash and even crude. Many of them simply claimed to be a celebrity, and so became accepted as one. Then there are the talentless Big Brother loud mouths, who have become regular celebrities off nothing but their loud mouths. So, it's not like it hasn't worked for some before.

Good luck. You'll either make it, or be a flaming train wreak.

 

And who has judged these literary qualities? So far, it sounds like there are two professors? I'm afraid that I don't consider two professors to be an indisputable source.

Also, who has decided which "literary qualities" are important?

The use of a specific literary form is not evidence of quality. The evidence of quality would be, in part, whether you execute that form well or badly. So I fail to see the relevance of the fact that you can classify your work as an epic.

There's also the validity of your claim that no one else has written an epic in a certain number of years; plothog points out that issue.

And 100 years is not a very long time. You are claiming to be the best author in history, not merely in 100 years.

 

Thanks, Australis.

Plothog, I should have checked that link before posting it. As far as I can see, that list contains novels written in poetry clasified as epic novels. If you look at the title of that wikipage, you'll see it says "epic poetry", as if epic and poetry were the same thing.

I will do some more research on that issue, tho. But for the sake of making a point regarding what I mean by epic, here is a list of ten characteristics any epic must have:

1. Summoning or begging to the muse.
2. Initial formulation of the central plot.
3 Beginning in media res: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
4. The scenario must be huge. It should cover many countries or the whole universe.
5. Use of epithets and repeated formulas.
6. Inclusion of long ennumerations.
7. Presence of long, admirable and carefully set speaches.
8. Intervention and implication of divine entities in human affairs.
9. Presence of heroes that incarnate the values of a nation, civilization or culture.
10. A tragic descent of the hero to the underworld or a prophetic vision.

So as you can see, I am not talking about a novel written in poetry. I also noticed several of those novels are in red (they don't have an article) and many of them just say it's a novel, or a poem... I may need to further investigate. Thanks for pointing at this, until today I believed there wasn't epics anymore and I may be mistaken.

ChickenFreak, I think you made a good point. I cannot simply mention a bunch of qualities and expect them to avail my claim without several independent evaluations from different experts. Granted...!

However, since you're not an expert and I'm not posting my books, let's assume they're fairly good. They're not poor executions, they're okay and there's nothing bad to say like "what an idiotic trash", it's a minimum request I'm asking to make the debate possible, and I will drop the subject of epic too. If I find something pointing that I was wrong regarding the gender being abandoned, I'll post it later. I have no problem in admiting being wrong.

So, this is something I said on a previous post:


---------------------------------

"Without going too technical, Apotheosis is a story of the last 120 years of human life on Earth before going to the supernatural realm. It is the result of a study that combined four different views regarding religion: Christianism, Judaism, Islamism and Atheism (hence the eschatological part). I actually builded a story that harmonizes the views of the Qran and the Bible regarding the end of the world, but I did not stop there.

I did an extensive research on history and phylosphy (I read many writtings, since Plato to Bertrand Russell) to reflect human nature on a world wide and timeless way, and I also enriched the characters by applying formal psychology to the whole thing, not to mention I also used contemporary elements and created a story that ranges from individual affairs to universal moral issues and political dilemas.

This means Apotheosis can be read by a broad variety of people who can extract very different kinds of elements from the story. In fact, there are hundreds of references implied in the text for people to find.

In the literary part, I did a lot of experimentation during those five years (in which I also worked on my other book) and got as a result a story that is completely linked like a spider web. This causes that as you progress in the reading, the implications of what you're reading will make you remember what you read before. It is a psychological strategy aimed at increasing the pleasure of the reading and to break the saying that people tend to remember just the beginning and the end of a story.

In adition, I created some support elements that are meant to motivate an active reading, rather than a passive one. The reader is invited to investigate and to think critically (rather than being told what to think and who he is suppose to like/hate) while progress in the reading.

The system works like this: there are 120 foot notes that give additional information pertinent (but not essential) to the story. So you decide if you look at it or not. If you look at the foot note, in several cases it will include a biblical verse number between parenthesis. I included a glosary of biblical passages (reworded by me for aesthetical and brevity reasons) at the end of the book, so when you find a biblical number you must choose if you want to further enrich the reading by consulting the glosary.

While I did not quote the Quran for obvious reasons, there are countless of indirect references to it in the story, so a Muslim reader will have a very different understanding on the significancy of events than a Christian reader, which is also true for an atheist or a jewish reader."

---------------------------------


So... please point at any work that has done something similar.

This are not the only virtues of my work, but I want to cover this part before I move forward.

 

But that's not the point. You can't be the "best author" based on your books being "fairly good". They would have to be incredibly, mind-blowingly good. A list of topics and techniques and experiments and ambitions doesn't eliminate that requirement. Your premise seems to be that your standing as an author is based on how much ground you cover or how ambitious you are or how much research you've done, but that's not how it works.

 

Yeap, well, this is a random forum and we're just two guys talking. So, unless you can invite a bunch of literary experts that can speak Spanish, we're going to need to adapt to what we can handle right now.

I am going to go on with my case because you motivated me to do so with your objections. I think I can make my point to a very reasonable extend if you give me the room to expose my arguments... actually I'm going to do it eitherway.

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Regarding the gender Epic. I find a language gap between English and Spanish and I simply cannot find a propper word to define what I mean. Check this out:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=epic
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_(genre)

Basically it says epic is something "cool" and whenever one tries to define the gender of the Iliad in English, it conflated "epic" with "poetry", while at the same page in wikipedia, the ten characteristics I mentioned are there, without any mention to poetry. If you look at the epic novels you get stuff as bizarre as J. R. R. Tolkien's german poetry and whatever.

In any case, regardless of this unexpected issue, Apotheosis may still be the most ambitious epic ever conceived, since it represents, not just the adventures or the values of a culture or civilization in particular, but rather focuses in human kind as a whole.

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You said the research I did and the ground I cover doesn't count. Well, I can see what you're saying, but let me be very clear in what ground I am covering with Apotheosis and how much research I did for that single novel. Why? Because I am, as you said, claiming I am the best author ever and I think this argument serves to make a fair point:

Taking into consideration that in practice the investigative labor that is necesary to shape a novel may end up looking chaotic or even anecdotic; and with the goal of avoiding to reduce the subject to a simple bibliography; I have decided to organize this subject, in general terms, to seven frameworks, all of which took place in a sort of simultaneous way along with the creative process, resulting in a difficulty of such level that just the description of this aspects should suffice to produce nauseas to anyone:

1. Psychologic framework: This framework consisted in the aplication of diverse elements and principles of psychology to most of the characters and to different aspects of the novel with the goal to imbue the whole product with the biggest possible deepness and richness. This reflects, for example, in the damaged relationship of Husam Al Jalal (one of the main characters) with his mother, as a result of a trauma suffered in his early childhood.

2. Teological framework: The first thing I want you to know is that the teological branch that focuses in the study and interpretation of prophecies related to the end of the world is called eschatology. The fact that this particular variety of prophecies corresponds to one specyphic teological branch should give you an idea of the magnitude of this subject. Efectively, this prophecies are in almost all of the biblical text and, besides being loaded with a lot of simbolism and demanding an understanding of the culture, the intentionality of the authors and the particular prevalent religious current (variable, depending on the time and socio-political conditions), not always are easy to harmonize between eachother.

We have the corpus of the major prophets, the gospels (seeking to adapt to it), and the book of Revelations as a final piece that pretends to embrace it all, imposing at the same time its own vision, adapted, as one should expect, to the needs of its time. So it is possible to talk about an evolution in the apocaliptic prophecies of the jewish people, with their corresponding contradictions and divergences, on top of which Christianism pretends to create its own.

With this I believe I established the prophetic ground I wanted to fit the novel represented a huge challenge. I had to decide if I wanted to face it, and if so, to which degree I was going to do it, since it would have been enought to just take a few emblematic characters and develop an independent vision, as is the case of almost all the literature of this kind. Wasn't this what anyone else would have done? My desition, as you already know, was the oposite: I increased the conplexity of the formula by studying the prophecies of the Quran; and it wasn't long until I found myself seeking the way to rise an structure that could sustain simultaneously and with elegance, not two, but four radically different points of view about faith: Judaism, Christianism, Islamism and Atheism.

3. Socio-political framework: At first, this framework started as a consequence of the demands of the teological framework, without being limited to the study of the circunstances of ancient civilizations. The socio-political framework allowed me to develop a wide enough vision that could embrace the whole Earth. Even when in this sense the result is reflexed in a very general way. I believe it is understandable that this is the case. However, the conduct of the multitudes got a representative threatment of human nature, in such a way that what is perceived in Apotheosis is something like an essence of what men, as a society, have been at any place and any time, including our capacity as political animals. Of course, to sumarize all this on a single novel would have been an impossible task without the consult of the following frameworks, particularly the philosophical and historical ones.

4. Philosphical framework: The study of many of the major philophy essays proved to be of a trascendental importance in the final configuration of the novel. In it I included the thoughts of diverse lines of philosophical traditions, ranging from Plato to Bertrand Russell. Giuliano de Got is a good example of this. This character (a world emperor) drinks from the most famous work of Machiavelli, The Prince, to develop a political agenda that reflects in many ways Plato's vision, expresed in The Republic and The Laws, and Aristotle's Ethic regarding his perception of human vices and immorality as enough reasons to dehumanize all the poors of the Earth and consecuently eject them from his politics, ignoring their rights. To all this I added the especulations of Bertrand Russell about the hipothetical configuration of a world order, contained in his book The Scientific Outlook, plus the bitter perspective of Nietzsche about the conditioon of human beings and the dignification of cruelty, a perspective that can be infered from The Antichrist, one of his most polemic writtings.

Because of this, the reader is invited, without knowing it, to judge the perspective of many of the most emblematic philosophers of history, not only in the events, but also in the psychology of the characters.

Take into consideration that the example I offered is just that, one example that doesn't represent the totality of a work that also drinks from my own philosophy, something I will talk about later.

5. Historical framework: In order to reflect the multiplicity and richness of human behavior, it was necesary to consult huge books of universal history. I showed preference to the works of ancient historians like Flavio Josephus, Plutarcus, and Herodoto of Halicarnasus. Particularly, references to the history of Christianism and to certain representative events from different periods of human history were included in a more or less veiled way, thanks to which some prophecies fulful, in a way, according to the original intention of the biblical authors. Roman emperor Nero comes to mind.


6. Contemporary framework: This one started developing in a much less intentional way than the previous frameworks, and it was mostly determined by the influence that certain news and situations (national and international) had in my work, some of them even without me noticing it at first. Eitherway, the political activity of the last years in islamic countries was of great interest to me, just like the particularities of Bush and Obama's government, the pontificacy of Benedict XVII and the atheist movement leaded by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

Obviously, this framework was also marked by the reading of abundant and diverse writtings (articles, books and essays) and it served as a base for the configuration of some of the characters in the novel.

7. Literary framework: This one is fundamentally the result of my own thesis as a tool oriented to the elaboration and execution of different narrative strategies. However, the investiguative labor in this area ment the consult of practically all of the literary theories I could find, as well as the thoughtful analisis of different novels I used as inspiration to develop my own style.

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That's enough. I think I sumarized the enormous ammount of investigation and the nature of the work I asumed almost without interruption for about five years. I know there is no way to do justice to the complexity of the whole, particularly to the achievement that meant the armonizing of the prophecies of such different belief systems.

You would have to be with me to see me stuck amongst books days and nights, months... and years. You would need to see my place of work and the infinity of notes scatered everywhere and add to all that my personal problems and the many challenges I faced.

How to describe the process? It was one of transformation. After almost five years of fighting with words and ideas between endless sleepless nights (a time that could very well be defined as a voluntary confinement in a monastery-prison-madhouse), I stop being the same person. Being exposed for so long to such ammount of materials and having to work with all that on a reflexive and creative level turned me into a very different man from what I was or what I thought I could ever be. I am, and so I define myself, the book that was written in those years of lights and shadows.

Latter on I will be sharing the unsuspecting literary structure that I builded during those years. I think I can illustrate a certain number of principles and strategies that take into consideration, not just an individual aesthetic criteria, but also what happens in the reader's mind.

 

You cannot mythologize yourself, though, in this fashion. This doesn't work. It has nothing to do with humility or the lack thereof. It has to do with the fact that the dynamic simply doesn't function this way.

Let us examine other writers and artists who are mythologized and raised to such Olympian levels. Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, when they were friends, when they were creating their works, when they were young, were not the icons of Spanish culture that we know today. How we view them now is not how they were viewed then, and not how they saw themselves. The mythology of who they became, the personage wrapped around the person, came later, and came at the hands of popular culture. It is a gift culture bestows open certain people and the paradigms they become. The same holds true for the Beat Writers of America. Allen Ginsberg, when interviewed about what it felt like to be a "Beat Writer" explained plainly that he had no idea because when he was young and part of that milieu, they were not the thing that we later encapsulated and made into a movement. They were just a bunch of more-than-slightly lost guys in college trying to be writers.

You cannot start as Dalí from the start. You cannot be Kerouac from the beginning. You cannot auto-otorgar that status. No one can. It must come from el pueblo.

 

Maybe...

But while the individual is smart, "el pueblo" is dumb and answers to propaganda. If you stick around and read what I have to say about my works you may just end up convinced that I really am playing smart by embracing this posture.

The way I see it, it will work like this:

1. I make some extraordinary claims.
2. The claims produce a few reactions.
3. A few people buy the book and spread their subjective opinions on my work + what I said about it.
4. The word reaches the ears of literary critics.
5. My work is formally evaluated and important literary articles appear.
6. There is a confrontation of opinions between people who got offended and people who support my position.
7. A lot of people become curious and decide to buy my book in order to "find out" by themselves.
8. I am invited to talk about it.
9. The phenomena increases sky high.
10. I become filthy rich.

Remember that just because something haven't been done before, it doesn't mean it cannot be done. Lorca, Dalí... whatever. I think I can get what I want from "el pueblo".

Stick around so you can read my arguments. I am not going to look like a fool for saying what I am saying and internet is a great tool. I am planning to share my whole argument little by little, giving anyone the chance to ask questions or make any objection.

 

It could go like you listed. It could also go like this

1. I make some extraordinary claims.
2. The claims produce a few reactions. (This is true, however the majority of the reactions will be that you completely turned off a potential reader. Of those who are curious to check your work out based on these claims, most will read hoping that it is a literary train wreck.)
3. A few people buy the book and spread their subjective opinions on my work + what I said about it. - (The people who are most likely to buy the book after reading self obsessed author claims are the people who most want to rip it to shreds. The feedback and word that they will spred will be through scathing reviews. There are also users who review books that they have not read, and will go out of their way to pan an author who seems arrogant.)
4. The word reaches the ears of literary critics. (with hordes of negative reviews, critics wont waste their time with your work)
5. My work is formally evaluated and important literary articles appear. (without any positive reviews, literary articles will not write about you.)
6. There is a confrontation of opinions between people who got offended and people who support my position. (the people who support you will be drowned out. That noise will prevent any potential fans from giving your work a chance.)
7. A lot of people become curious and decide to buy my book in order to "find out" by themselves. (Why?)
8. I am invited to talk about it. (Even if everything that you have written in true, do you really think that you would come across well in an interview or lecture? Their are very few authors that i have seen that are also good public speakers. for every J.K. who is incredibly personable and marketable there are hundreds who publishers hide away. You have mentioned repeatedly that you have a habit of turning people off and alienating them. So what do you base this assumption that you giving in person talks would help?)
9. The phenomena increases sky high. (Only if you are extremely likable in your talks, or if the book is extremely well written.)
10. I become filthy rich. - (There are much easier ways to become filthy rich than by writing. If the end goal is money become an investment banker. In that field a god complex is actually needed.)

 

To paraphrase the great Mark Twain: Those who yell the loudest often have the least to say.

Or as we say in the South: Boy thinks he's a genius, bless his heart.

 

Our world doesn't define "the best" by how hard a person works. If they did, I'm confident that five years of work isn't the hardest that anyone has worked on a novel in history. And our world doesn't define it by one's ambition, or the number of different aspects of one's work that can be listed. Nothing that you have stated so far is evidence for the idea that you are the best author in history.

I urge you to release this belief. It will kill your work. You work hard. You learned many things. You may have created a worthwhile book, or you may have learned enough to create a worthwhile book. You may get a book published. Any of those goals will be destroyed by the belief, and particularly by an insistence on broadcasting the belief, that you are the best author.

 

Augusto, you have made some very large claims for your work, but the only aspect of it you've discussed at any length is the structural framework. Is the structure ambitious? Sure sounds like it. But it takes a lot more than elaborate structure to make a good (or even readable) novel. You've barely mentioned any characters or the situations they're in. Readers will want to read about characters they can understand and even relate to. They'll also want some kind of narrative that takes the characters along their arcs. They're not really going to be much impressed by structure. Many of the greatest novels ever written have very little structure, or very rudimentary structure.

What does your work have to offer besides elaborate structure? From the arguments you've presented so far, you haven't written a novel so much as a textbook on fictional structure.

And, as others have pointed out, five years isn't really a long time to spend writing an ambitious novel. James Joyce spent seven years writing Ulysses and seventeen years writing Finnegans Wake. Other writers have taken comparable amounts of time (sometimes even longer) to write their works. (For example, Marcel Proust worked on his seven-volume novel A La Recherche du Temps Perdue for thirteen years, and hadn't completed his revisions at the time of his death in 1922. David Foster Wallace began Infinite Jest in 1986 and it was published in 1996 - that's ten years.) Most writers (including me) who write carefully and pay attention to voice and style take a long time to finish a piece of work. We don't claim the work is good simply because we spent years on it.

 

Very well. I agree that the ammount of time I expended fully dedicated to my novels is not an indicative of anything. That was an emotional argument and I recognize it as such. Please understand that, to me, five years is a lot. It is the time one finishes a university career, and if you consider I was fully dedicated to that, and that I almost didn't go outside of my house, I was in prison for five years. I have been without formal work for five years, and that's a lot of an investment.

So, putting the real arguments aside for a momment, I ask for understanding regarding my stress in those five years. It's not four letters for me. It is a significative percentaje of my life we are talking here. If you want to practice some empathy, picture yourself in prison and see yourself trying to pursue a legal procedure to claim some money back because you were innocent. It all ammounts to justice and retribution.

Also look at MY FEAR:

1. I find an editorial and my book gets published.
2. There is scarce interest in it and people don't even know it exists.
3. It sells poorly.
4. Several months later I receive my paycheck and it's 40 dollars.
5. Two years later I am asked if I want to buy the books that did not sold on a cheaper price.
6. I throw myself into a bed feeling like a loser, pick a bottle and bury my pain in alcohol.
7. Whenever my son grows up a little and asks me who I am, I will tell him "I'm nothing".
8. Whenever my wife asks me what happened with the novel I will tell her: "I failed".
9. Whenever someone ask me what did I do to avoid failure I will tell them: "I did nothing, I just shut my mouth and waited for a miracle, which of course didn't happen, because chances to become a successful writer are one in a billion and I never won any lotery price".
10. I die... eventually, after years of feeling bad about myself and resented to that world that praise terrible writers and get their books turned into movies while I was completely ignored, even when I remained silent and humble.

So you tell me what I am missing here, and exactly what am I risking? That people talk bad about me? Fuck them! I don't give a shit about what people say or think. We all are in the 0.000000000000001% chances to succeed. We may as well say we already lost this battle, and don't come saying you don't care about not selling anything because everyone does.

If I am going to look my wife and my son to their face and tell them I failed, I intend to also say "I really tried".

Now, think about it. What am I risking? My insignificant chance of succeeding? I think that chance is a lie. I don't think it will ever happen unless I make it happen.

I will continue explaining my reasons to believe I am entitled to my extraordinary claims in a little while. Right now I want to thank everyone for being civil and posting thoughtfully, and also for showing interest in this thread.

 

I think you're an arrogant and unpleasant person. Not very useful that your topic was conning us.

 

yeah, gotta agree with this. At this point i would actively avoid the OP's writing.

 

Seriously? Have you actually listened to her? She's not a nice woman. Everything which comes out of her, every single snipe, every sly comment, has the full belief that she's superior to everybody, and everybody are morons. And this wasn't a result of her becoming famous. Don't believe me? Look up the word muggle. That's what she thinks about us. If she wasn't a best seller, I'd guarantee you'd be saying the worse things about her.

There's a saying in life. People don't hate cheats, they only hate cheats who don't win. And the same applies to everything in life. If Augusto wishes to present himself in the way he is, then he will not only be forgiven for it if he succeeds, but celebrated for it. However, if he doesn't succeed, there will be no forgiveness.

Would I do it. The answer is no.

 

No one is saying that you shouldn't promote your book, but your approach isn't the way to go about it.
Making grandiose claims about quality isn't so unusual that it sets you apart from the crowd. Instead it puts you in a subset of the crowd which largely doesn't know what it's doing.
If you read the blurb on the back of traditionally published books, it's mostly dedicated to saying what the book is about, rather than how good it is.
Any lines which do talk about quality are always attributed to a notable third party. (Newspaper, magazines or famous authors)
Never is it made to look like the author of the novel or the publishing house is making such claims themselves. The publishers know that approach doesn't make people want to read books.

And unfortunately if it doesn't look like you know what you're doing promotionally, a lot of people tend to assume (maybe unfairly) that you won't know what you're doing when it comes to writing either.

 

look up the word muggle? ok, sure.

Muggle is a person who lacks any sort of magical ability and was not born into the magical world.

well i most definitely do not have magical powers, so i guess she is right about me on that one.

As for the rest, i've heard her speak a few times and she seemed very pleasant and friendly. She also normally comes across as pretty humble, regularly talking about how she was at rock bottom and had been a failure in life before she got a win with HP. I'm not actually a big potter fan (never read a page), so maybe im not aware of some of the instances where she has been rude and or mean-spirited to fans. Do you have any examples?

 

Just generally being a bad person, really. She complained Emma Watson was not ugly enough for the role in the films, for example, and ranted about Harry's eye colour being wrong in the films.