12 one-star reviews that will make you want to read THE CASUAL VACANCY and one that won’t

So! The new J.K. Rowling novel The Casual Vacancy has hit the stores, it has nothing to do with Harry Potter and it’s for adults. There’s no doubt at all that it will top the best seller lists.

It’s also racking up the one-star reviews!

If you’re like me, those reviews are like candy: unhealthy in the extreme but irresistible. They fall into four basic groups, and if you’re at all like me (which I doubt) the first three groups will make you want to pick up a copy.

Screencapped Amazon reviews behind the cut. I’m not sure how well they’ll turn out in this format, but you can click through to read them if you want.

First we have the most predictable group of all: the alarmists who are terrible unhappy that a child might read a book meant for an adult (My God! It’s like Romance novel trash!) Continue reading

“The Truth About Dishonesty”

Do you guys like the RSA Animate videos? I do. They’re occasionally inaccurate (when the speaker gets a fact wrong) but I think they’re a visually arresting way to take in information.

This one is especially good and it’s relevant in several ways. Check it out.

Additional thing about that attack on the agent

As a followup to yesterday’s call for public shaming, I want to make a point that I’ve made on Twitter, G+, and of course in the comments on LiveJournal: When bloggers or Goodreads reviewers receive crazy hate mail from authors unhappy with their unhappy writeups, there’s a huge groundswell of support. Comment sections fill up with commiserations and well-wishers, and folks turn to their own blogs and Twitter accounts to talk about how awful it is.

That’s how it should be.

But when agents receive hate mail for a form rejection, they get crickets. As I mentioned yesterday, the flow of vicious emails agents get camouflages the threats from truly dangerous people, and it should not be accepted with a sigh and a what are you going to do?. There’s no reason to accept it; those writers should be exposed and shamed just like the self-publishers who get nasty with reviewers.

Rejected author attacks agent: a call for public shaming

Last night on Twitter it came out that an agent was attacked outside her house just after she’d gotten into her car.

After being convinced to call the police, they wanted to look at the emails she’d gotten recently. She was sure there was nothing to it. All she had were the usual responses to rejection every agent gets from writers: “The normal I hate you and I want you to die and I’ll kill you”.

The cops were not so casual about it. They identified one guy, went to the address he put on his query, then busted him.

But here’s the thing: how did we get to the point where an influx of hatred, threats, and vicious remarks are an acceptable thing? I realize people have been turning a blind eye to the horrifying shit women bloggers get, but agents have been receiving the same treatment for years to the point where it’s seen as the normal course of business.

Here’s a tip: If you’re so outraged at receiving a rejection that you have to send a hateful response, self-publish. Seriously, if you’re moved to respond in a nasty way, you aren’t ready for that end of the business. Just go ahead and publish your work yourself.

Because every nasty response, every threat that you didn’t really mean, every expression of contempt, is just cover for threats that come from the crazies who really will do violence. It normalizes the awful behavior to the point that recipients can’t tell when the threats are genuine.

I suggest there be some sort of public display of these hate messages, along with identifying information: name, city, email address. Your query would be confidential. Your response to a rejection would not.

I don’t know if that would work, but I wish there was something we could to.

Real Review or Sockpuppet? A Handy Guide

There’s been an awful lot of talk lately about sockpuppet reviews: essentially, dishonest reviews posted under pseudonyms that either praise books or slam them. Sometimes the author themself is writing the review. Sometimes it’s a firm they hired, or friends. Sometimes the review was written out of spite by someone who hasn’t read the book.

Still, book buyers say they still use reader reviews to help decide whether they will buy a book or not. So! How can a reader tell the difference between a genuine response to a book and a review written for those Nefarious Other Purposes?

Allow me to illustrate some basic principles from the fictionalized examples below. And feel free to play along? Sockpuppet? Or Real?

At first glance, this might seem like a sockpuppet. Look at how effusive that praise is! And completely unqualified! But note that the reviewer makes sure to mention that they totally found the book at random, not because they were intrigued by the premise or the author’s other work. It was just crazy luck! Convincing? I say yes.

Also, there’s no way this could have been written by, say, the author’s friends. My God, it’s like, two sentences. Two and two words. What kind of shitty friend would take the trouble to post a fake review but only write a line or two?

Verdict: Real

*****

If you thought this sockpuppet review was the real thing, then I feel genuine pity for you, my friend. Look at it again and you’ll see within those few words a brutal personal attack on the author. To whit:

What kind of inhuman monster says they would recommend a book to their friends and then give it only three stars? Have YOU ever looked at a three-star review and thought “Gosh, I should pluck that out of the ceaseless tsunami of printed matter washing past me every day!”

Of course not. That’s a clear and obvious taunt directed at the author.

Verdict: Sockpuppet

*****

A less-savvy observer might view this as a kind of author advertising, most likely placed by the author themself!

However, note the run-on sentence and sloppy spelling (er… in the review, not the body of this post). Would a sensible author write so poorly? I think not. What’s more, the book named in the review is on the Kindle, which means there is almost certainly a free excerpt available. These books are pretty much uniformly terrible. Would an author want readers to sample a terrible book? The idea itself is ludicrous.

Verdict: Review.

*****

The raw, vicious hatred behind this review is clear on its face.

Verdict: Sockpuppet.

Remember, authors: Any review that makes you feel bad is probably a personal attack.

Remember, readers: Any review that makes you reluctant to buy one of my books is absolutely a fake.

I hope you found this lesson helpful.

Money = Visibility

It’s no secret that SCOTUS has declared that money is a form of speech. I’m no constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that money is the volume knob on the megaphone you speak into, not speech itself, but maybe that’s not a valuable distinction. At least, the top court in the country didn’t think so.

But money is visibility, too. It’s common for creative types to talk about obscurity as the biggest threat to our… well, I guess the word would have to be “careers” even though it makes me want to go back to bed for the rest of the week. Writers obsess about getting the word out about our work; yesterday’s post about the best seller letting her husband, assistant, and readers harass reviewers for low ratings is one example. Another was my own obsession with sending Child of Fire to every blog reviewer I could find.

People buy ads in magazines, on blogs, in Google search results. They make bookmarks, keychains, and other swag. They plead for positive reviews on Amazon.

And so on and so forth. Anything to spread the word. Even if it’s not ethical.

This week, the news came out that self-publishing success story John Locke boosted himself out of the long tail by purchasing reviews on Amazon. He paid a service an even grand for fifty reviews (to start); each reviewer also bought his 99 cent book, so the reviews would show up as ‘verified.’

Now, he claims that he didn’t demand the reviews be positive, but surprise surprise, they were. He also couldn’t have made the Kindle 1 million seller list if he hadn’t had something in his books that made people want to read them. Have you read any of this work? It’s not good, but it has a quick pace some readers want.

Still, the dude rose out of obscurity by lying to readers. That’s a shitty way to build a career and not only is it deadly to his reputation, but to the entire system of reader endorsements. Customers are still enchanted by the idea that the best stuff will naturally accrue positive attention; game that, and you leave us with nothing but paid ads and publisher PR campaigns.

Worse, the review vendor outed in the article is treating it like a PR boost, which I suppose it is. Quick tip for Mr. Rutherford: he should stop identifying his clients to journalists if he intends to stay in business.

Salon touched on this, too. Here’s a quick quote: … employing a service that dishonest and cynical demonstrates a bizarre contempt for the reader. It casts the writer as a producer of widgets and the reader as a sucker who probably won’t complain if the product doesn’t live up to the hype, because hey, at least it was cheap. Books, in this scenario, become flea market trash — wind-up toys you buy on a whim and expect to break.

The comments on that Salon article are the usual hash of self-publisher ranting. It doesn’t matter what charge you lay on any self-publisher anywhere, publishers are always worse in some unspecified way.

But it comes down to one thing, really: Don’t lie to people. Don’t try to trick them into liking you or your work. It’s not that hard.

Four ways to use YOUR social networking skills to build a large community of assholes

This weekend’s entertainment (aside from seeing PARANORMAN–review upcoming) was yet another author (and surrogates) behaving badly. The Readers Digest version: after passive-aggressively complaining that her wonderful readers hadn’t pushed her to #1 on a best seller list (apparently she landed on the #2 spot for the nth time) her husband, assistant, and readers began writing outraged notes to people who had posted negative reviews on Amazon.

Eventually, they dug up the phone number of one of the reviewers and began leaving scary messages on her voice mail. When the author heard about this, she suggested all this would blow over if the reviewer would just take down her critical post (and boy, she sure must love all this attention).

But hey, maybe YOU would like to have legions of assholes willing to bully and threaten readers who leave negative reviews. Maybe you would like to be surrounded by people who think it’s romantic when your spouse calls a reviewer a “psycho.”

If so, here’s a four-step method (because the internet loves lists!) for building your own community of bullies:

1. Be yourself but not, you know, your actual self.

Your bullies will expect you to share your authentic self but will be put off by your actual self. Your actual self might acknowledge ambiguity, might equivocate or feel uncertainty.

You don’t want to show that. Simply talk about your enthusiasms, your goals, and your belief in a fairer, better world. Try to avoid any kind of self-doubt and reserve your negative or critical remarks for your chosen out-groups (See below).

2. Your assholes need regular feeding.

And nothing feeds an asshole quite like unequivocal praise. Tell them you love them. Tell them you could never succeed without them. Thank them profusely. You “owe” it all to them, don’t you? Bullies love to be told they are important

Even better, if possible, is to share “inside” information with them. How publishing works, how TV production works, how Congress works, whatever. Let them feel they’re getting the inside scoop that out-groups are not getting (the poor, deluded fools). Insider info can limit your community to people with an interest in the insider topic at hand (rather than the more diffuse praise-devouring mobs) but it can also intensify the bullies’ attachment. Use your judgement to decide which is best.

3. Can you believe the cruelty of [out-group]?

Assholes love the rush of power that comes from bullying people online, but the ones who use their cruelty solely for the rush are not numerous enough for your purposes and they are difficult to control; what if they turn on you??? Best to avoid them.

What you want is a mob of closeted bullies, people who think of themselves as essentially good people but are willing to bully and insult people at the proper instigation. And there is nothing that pleases a closeted asshole quite like a Just Cause.

This is why it’s important to identify an out-group who are the essence of cruelty, who believe themselves intelligent and authoritative but are in truth utterly deluded. Your chosen insider information will be useful for this: Are you sharing tips on successful self-publishing? Advocating for a return to the gold standard? Pushing for single-payer health care? The out-groups suggest themselves.

If you’ve decided not to narrow the focus of your community with insider info, you’ll want to turn them lose on more personal enemies. Remember in point 1. where you were told to share your dreams and goals? Well, this out-group threatens those dreams with their negative reviews, personal attacks, and nasty schoolyard rumor-mongering.

4. Where ever you’re standing, that’s the high road.

You can’t turn your personal assholes loose on your chosen out-group without a Just Cause. You yourself must maintain the appearance of fairness and honest dealing while hinting at personal attacks you’ve hidden from the community. Also, every negative review or disputed fact must be attributed to personal attack and/or a secret agenda. If you’re going to insult your out-group by, say, calling them “pinheads” be sure to insist that “They started it.” In fact, no matter how nasty or ugly things get keep asserting that the out-groups are the ones making everything awful.

Never directly ask your bullies to go bully. It’s much more effective talk about your personal pain, caused by someone on a particular site. Don’t be specific and don’t link directly, but make sure the assholes can easily find it on their own.

Talk about how much it hurts to get a negative review, and how obviously personal it all is, and that you suspect this is the same person sending (undefined) awfulness to you privately. Your assholes, seeing a threat to their steady diet of praise, will do their best to drive that negative review off the internet, and the person who wrote it as well. After all, you’ve convinced them that you “owe” them, right? They will feel a powerful urge to protect their emotional investment.

It’s possible that you will feel the faint urge to ask them to stop–perhaps you’ll think there’s something vaguely wrong with calling a woman’s home and threatening her–but you should squelch that urge. Ignore it until it goes away. Remember to always act as though you and your bullies are only responding in kind, and that the whole kerfuffle would stop as soon as the other person stops.

Finally, you may be asking yourself: Why the fuck would I want this?

I have no idea. People do, apparently. I’m convinced they don’t do it consciously. They take their offline behavior and bring it online, where it creates this awful crowd of self-justifying creeps and bullies, and they convince themselves it’s what social media success is supposed to be.

Personally, I’d never go online again if my own readers started doing this.

One of the most dangerous things I do, productivity-wise

One of the most dangerous things I do, in terms of my productivity, is leave my house with the wifi still live. I always mean to do work, but somehow I get caught up in email/Facebook/Twitter, and Twitter is the worst of all. It’s not just that the messages keep coming, prompting me to load new ones; it’s also that they are usually full of links to completely awesome things elseweb.

That means a 50-character leads to a long Kate Beaton cartoon, or an article Olympic drama, or health care politics, or that excellent “How to Kill Yourself and Others in America Slowly” essay I linked to everywhere last week.

Today it was the Readercon public statement, a couple of articles about sexist coverage of the Olympics, a change in the comments policy of a popular writer’s blog, and…

Really, does it matter? All that matters is that I’m not at work on my book. So I’m going to do the grown up thing now and turn on Freedom for a few hours.