I respect the confidentiality of my clients. All I'm gonna say is I'm sold out of the Syphilis Special.
There are a few people whose... acquaintance... I've always been reluctant to make out of concern for my health, but if it's inevitable, might as well have a go....
There are times that it seems that writingforums.org is a sub-branch of the above-mentioned organization By which I mean only that you are in good company here, although not my particular company.
Right? It's like he never paid attention to the Bible's negative view of magic. Or any of Jesus' teachings, really. And he definitely didn't recall Proverbs 6:16-19: "There are six things the Lord hates--no, seven things he detests: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that kill the innocent, a heart that plots evil, feet that race to do wrong, a false witness who pours out lies, a person who sows discord in a family." The author basically checked three of those outright, and two on a kinda/sorta level. Reading through the comments, it seems that the author had had only four star or higher reviews before this one. I guess he flipped out over it bringing down his average and wanted to intimidate the reviewer into taking his review down. It clearly backfired. The book's average rating is sitting at 1.5 something, Goodreads seems to have removed him as an author, and one of his books that was available on Amazon is no longer available. The dude committed career suicide.
I can imagine. It's not like Amazon would want to encourage that kind of mentality. It just makes it all the more stupid to know it was some random online reviewer. xD
Which makes one wonder (as the threatened reviewer wondered) if the author had intimidated other reviewers into removing poor reviews. I read some of the 4/5* reviews and they didn't sound like 4/5* reviews but 2/3* reviews that had been assigned the wrong stars. If that makes sense... I haven't had coffee yet. However, I hope Goodreads removes the reviews that have appeared following this issue. No matter how badly the author behaved, reviews from people who haven't read the book are not okay, and it's pretty clear that none of the people trolling him have read the book.
I agree with your last point, but I do agree that the whole career suicide thing kind of serves him right for being stupid enough to threaten black magic, of all things.
Does leaving an honest (and scathing) review after being halfway through a novel count? It was bad enough to warrant it, that much is true. No magic or bodily harm involved. (I guess my punishment is to play with lots of bleach and clean the shit out of some things.) On a happier note, there is a half a pot of coffee waiting for me when I get up later.
Like any review...I've read reviews that are basically "This is really, really good...but I'm only giving it three stars because I ordered it in red and I now realise that it looks better in black". Or a recipe where the reviewer said "I don't like garlic, so I left it out, and we didn't have any cinnamon, so I used nutmeg instead."...and then proceeded to give the recipe one star.
I think that's totally valid. I'm not even sure there's a threshold for how much you need to read for the review to be justified in my mind... if there's a SPAG mistake in the first line, does that justify a bad review? IMO... yeah. I probably wouldn't leave a review for that myself, but I wouldn't consider it an unfair review if someone else did. I think "any" review is going too far but yep, I've seen plenty of that type. Goodreads is especially suspect in terms of stars because their rating system is strange. A 1* means "I didn't like it" and anything above means you liked it, as opposed to most sites where 3* would be "meh". It skews things.
I am open to any kind of review provided the reviewer explains why they've chosen to like, dislike or be lukewarm about the book. What I don't much like is the 'star system.' Why not just publish the reviews? So many 'reviews' are actually just votes. "I hated this." "Don't waste your money on this." "It was fantastic." All of these statements can come without any accompanying reason. I think ...I don't know you. Why does your opinion matter to me? If you can tell me why you hold that opinion, fair enough. Just your vote itself isn't enough to convince me. However, with the star system in place, the vote holds the same amount of rating power as a thoughtful review. If somebody says "I only read the first three sentences and didn't like it," I don't think their 'one star' rating is equal to somebody else's. Somebody else who has read the whole book and gave informed commentary on why they only awarded 'one star.' Reviews are supposed to be helpful to a potential buyer. A vote is too superficial to be helpful. A review will be helpful.
Goodreads isn't directly about buying books, though - the reviews there aren't like the ones at Amazon. A lot of readers (including me) use Goodreads as their personal "books read" list; they aren't rating/reviewing books for the benefit of other users, they're doing it to keep track of their own reading. I usually leave a brief review to go with my ratings so I can remember what I liked or didn't like about the book, but I don't always. And when I look for books on Goodreads it's pretty easy to ignore ratings without reviews, if I want to.
Could be worse. There was a recent case in the UK where an author tracked down a teenage girl who left him a bad review and smashed her over the head with a wine bottle.
Oh, thanks. I'm not familiar with Goodreads. I was mostly addressing reviews/ratings in general. I need more than a rating to make up my mind about a book—or anything, tbh.
I wish there was some kind of condition that authors have to go through a critique process, with strangers, before they can self-publish. Obviously totally unworkable but I can wish. A thick skin really isn't optional in this business. And the lack of one can actually lead to violence.
Yes she did. This is the review that started it all. Quite harsh but a bottling was probably a bit over the top. https://www.amazon.com/review/RC3UYBXYE63QK/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=150235974X&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books&tag=writingfor07a-20
As you say, @rincewind31 , that is a very harsh review. What struck me about it was its continual referencing of "writing no-nos"; you know, those rules about showing not telling, avoiding adverbs, etc. Not that I'm arguing in fav0ur of the book, but it seems to be a very "I'm a writer so I know these things" review. I know my wife gives me grief whenever I talk about a plot hole because the hero is working on the Russian dog-in-space mission in 1951.
