The Ventilator of Publishing: A Mighty Blaze

The first thing you realized is that you are were all alone. The bookstores had closed. Your publisher had closed. The library had closed. Your agent was in shock. And you, you have a book coming out in the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu. Now what? And you quickly realize that you will have to do everything your self. Publishing as you know it ceased to exist. When a book comes out you are dependent on a push from your publishers, libraries, bookstores, reviewers. That push is now non existent and it is down to you and your book.

So you are flailing. Enter A Mighty Blaze. This is essentially a Facebook site run by eighteen writers who volunteer their time to promote the new books coming out during the pandemic. It is a lifeline, but more than that at a time when publishing is on life support,  A Mighty Blaze is the ventilator of publishing. On the Tuesday of publication A Mighty Blaze blasts out posts and likes and tweets and retweets to let the world know that even in a pandemic books are still being published. Followed by bookstores, agents, publishers, the literati now  behind ZOOM screens; A Mighty Blaze gives a face to the author who has effectively been silenced by this pernicious virus.

Eventually the publishers will return, the bookstores will open, the libraries will begin again and hopefully A Mighty Blaze will still be here. But if it withers after the normalcy of publishing returns then we can only be thankful that in the worst of times we saw the best of some people who put the collective importance of publishing books first and gave of their time and their passion.

william hazelgrove

Authors Can Save Barnes and Noble

Authors can save Barnes and Noble. All they have to do is sell their books. Imagine if Barnes and Nobles had an author in every day. Not to sit behind a table but to sell their books. Not an author signing but an author selling. The author sells their book and then signs it. They will never beat Amazon at their game nor Starbucks or small cafes. But what Barnes and Noble does have is a physical presence and they have books and they have real live authors.

I sold 24k of my last book at a single Barnes and Noble last year. An unknown book. I did it all by talking to people coming in the front door. Most people are looking to discover a new story and guess what there is an author there to tell them all about a new story. Their own. And they can sign the book. It is a resource a sleeping sales force that Barnes and Noble can unleash right away because authors have a vested interest in selling their own books.

Look not everyone wants to talk to author when they walk into a Barnes and Noble but one in four  do. I counted it out and I sell a book about every fourth person. People are interested in the story the author has to tell and then they are interested in the author. The biggest advantage Barnes and Noble has is there are real people in those stores and real authors selling their books would cost them nothing. I impacted the bottom line of many Barnes and Nobles after four hours of selling my book and the managers were grateful. My sales swung the total revenue for the day.

This is a no brainer. The resource is there waiting to be tapped. An army of authors who just want people to read their books. Somebody just has to invite them in. The customer gets to hear about a new book, have an interesting conversation, and then get a signed book. And the author sells their book and now has an active role in controlling their royalties. It is a win for the author and more importantly the passive art of selling books will be gone for good, replaced by a motivated sales force of people going to the customers...authors.

Finally, yes it is a cyber world, but we are human beings. And humans like to talk to humans. An author can demolish any online sales model with this simple model. Give the author cards with a cover of his book. The customer walks in. "Can I give you this card? It is actually a book I wrote... "

www.williamhazelgrove.com william hazelgrove

Adjunct Hell

Years ago during my writing career I dipped in and out of teaching like a drunk going back to the same run down bar. I was the aspiring writer coming into the purview of the full time professors. I usually got the crappy classes nobody wanted at eight AM and it was usually first year comp. I taught at a very prestigious expensive private school. Two of them in fact. When they had faculty meetings the room was full of adjuncts. In the middle sat the anointed full time professors, all five of them. The other twenty five teachers were adjuncts. This was at a school that charged 40K a year in tuition.

So I learned quickly there were two worlds. The hotdog money world of the adjuncts (2500-3500) a class and the tenured full time 70k+ world of the professors who generally didn't speak to the adjuncts. My brother is a full fledged professor and he told me many times that the adjuncts came and went so why get to know them. So you show up at a class with no fanfare at all. You were hired months before and then you never saw anyone again. You teach your guts out for a class or two and then you get in your car and drive home. That's it.

No collegian conversations. No going out with your colleagues over lunch. No dinners with the University President. You are on the outside, you are the lone ranger, the interloper, in fact you don't exist. The students call you professor  but they do not know the dirty secret .You are not really employed, you are a contract player who will probably not return.Hey what are you teaching next semester?  You demure. You don't know. If enrollment is down you wont be teaching anything. And then you just disappear. That's what happened with me. You just don't get another class.

So you get the word that your class was taken by a full time professor. You try and get another class but suddenly it is like you never taught at all. You are unemployed. So you do what any self respecting writer would do...you sit down and write a book. And never look back.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

How Barnes and Noble Can Survive and Thrive

Barnes and Noble has been under siege for some time by Amazon. They just hired another CEO to get sales moving in the right direction. They are scratching their head on how to compete against people clicking away on their books. Barnes and Noble is not exploiting their biggest advantage, their physicality and the physicality of their authors. Let me explain what I mean.

I do a fair amount of book signings at Barnes and Noble. My book Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson came out in the fall and my latest is out May 1 Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt. So I have been in the stores. Here is what I tell the manager. Put me in during your busiest days if you can if not I will take whatever time you have. When I am in the store I usually sell every copy of my books. And I don't have people coming to the store to see me. In fact I sell all my books to people who had not even heard of my books when they walk in. How do I do it?

What I do is when people pass my signing table I talk to them. I tell them about my book about the story of our First Woman President Edith Wilson who took over the White House in 1919 and ran the government for two years. I tell them about Teddy Roosevelt losing his wife and mother on the same day and then going West for three years. People want to hear a good story. They want to read a good book. And then I tell them I will sign the book and it is game over. A sale. It doesnt matter if I have 5 books to sell or 20...I can sell them all by just talking to people.

If I was the powers that be at Barnes and Noble, I would have authors in the store every day of the week and surprise people by having them talk to people about their books. I would not have them sitting behind a table and waiting for people to talk to them. Have them rove the store. The very advantage of a physical store over the internet is that it is full of real live people. I see people walking around in Barnes and Noble looking for a good book. Imagine if  "surpise authors" all over the country were chatting it up in the stores with customers. The books would fly off the shelf. No one is more motivated to sell their book than an author.

Believe me, I know.

William Hazelgrove Website

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson
Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Why Publishers Drop Authors

It's simple. The authors book don't sell. It used to be publishers would bring authors along. This ended about thirty years ago if not more. Now if you do not sell then you don't get another book contract. You are simply done with that publisher. The author may kill him or herself for the book only to be unceremoniously dropped. The author then has to find another home but this is easier said than done.

So that leaves marketing. If you dont' market then you will surely be dropped. Hats off to the authors whose books magically sell without doing a thing. But for  the rest of us mortals people need to be informed a book has just been published. It is a reality of the internet age that our attention spans have grown shorter with a plethora of entertainment vying for our nanosecond focus. But that doesn't mean you can throw up your hands.

Once upon a time in a land far away authors like Fitzgerald and Hemingway sipped martinis and absinthe on the West Bank while waiting for their royalty checks. This then is the literary fantasy but then Fitzgerald at the time of his death was barely selling and Hemingway was a master at media manipulation. So if you look at it that way, maybe the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Madam President

Why Writers Can't Write Another Book

The amazing thing that has come out of the Harper Lee Saga and it is a saga now is that we are finding out she could not complete a follow up to To Kill A Mockingbird. As an author this is nothing short of amazing. Here she has the publisher telling her just give them anything because this book has headed for the moon and anything you publish will sell like crazy and just give us something. She could not.

And the question then is why? So we delve into the saga. Here is a woman who submitted a manuscript that was rejected by the publisher all those years ago. That manuscript is what is being published now. But the publisher saw no book there. So she told her to rewrite it. More than that she told her to bring in each chapter as she went along. This kind of hand holding does not usually happen these days. This process went on for two years.

TWO YEARS. She rewrote with the editor for two years and at the end out came To Kill A Mockingbird. But then then they said ok write something else. She could  not. So then you have to go into what makes  a bestseller. Timing. A story. The intersection of history and events. Luck. Writers are aware of all these things. That is why only a few hit. But then there is that next book. Why could she not produce something else?

Harper Lee might have been a one book writer. She might have had nothing else to say. We can say now that without that heavy editorial hand there would be no To Kill A Mockingbird. And once writers are cut loose to go on their own then they have to fly. Incredible as it may sound, Harper Lee simply couldn't come up with another story.

Maybe the price of mega success is just that.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Mark Twain and Subscription Books

We have authors putting 104,000 ads in the New York Times. We have authors who are starving and cant get their books in Barnes and Noble or just about anywhere else. We have authors who don't even bother and self publish on KDP and take their royalty checks Amazon sends them. We have Big Publishing screaming from the rooftops about the evil empire. We have the digitization of books following the digitization of music. When was the last time you bought a CD?

The first thing that hits you when you walk into Barnes and Noble is how does anybody sell anything anymore. There is just so much. And of course you cannot find your own book as an author unless you are the one percent who posted that ad (paid for by the wealthier authors) to complain about Amazonian treatment. And it is ruled by the few. We probably have the same gap in publishing that exists in the rest of the country. The few reap their profit while the many choke on the crumbs.

And yet the more things change the more they stay the same. Did you know how Mark Twains Books were first sold? They were not sold in stores. His books were not deemed worthy. They were sold by subscription services. In other words they were sold by mail and by door to door salesman. Subscription books were not deemed worthy of review then but of course that didn't bother Twain. He sold into best-sellerdom and beyond.

And now as the powers that be hack it out we are turning back to those subscription days. In a time when we are watching on our own individual screens our individual shows we now get our individual books recommended to us by Bookbub and Book Guerrilla. It is the future and it is now. Small bookstores will be that individual as well. Loyal patrons relying on their bookseller to hand sell them a book.

Mark Twain would get it. He surely would.

www.williamhazelgrove.com


www.williamahazelgrove.com

Price is an issue in Publishing and then again...

If you follow the Amazon struggle with publishers then you know it is about the price of the ebook. This is what the war is being fought over. Should Amazon be allowed to undercut publishers and get a bigger cut of the profit.  It is true that people are price driven but then again there is that thing called quality. When I sold books at the Printers Row here in Chicago of The Pitcher I sold twenty five books.

Now I charged full bump and I had three hardcovers priced at twenty seven dollars. The people buying The Pitcher seemed to not care at all. Well you say that is because you had a captive market and no competition. Actually no. Right across from my booth was a discount bookseller who started at eight dollars a book and worked his way right down to one dollar a book. And he was not quiet about it.

As my people were paying sixteen dollars for my book and then twenty seven the guy selling discount books literally yelled across the aisle ALL BOOKS ARE A BUCK. Still people did not flinch they simply wanted to read the book. Now in Ebook land the .99 title is king. But there is a sneaking suspicion that people would spay 2.99 or 3.99 or 7.99  if they decided that was the book they wanted. And yes there are people who live for the cheap book but they are always there.

My point is that if someone wants your book they will pay just about anything for it. Price may be king in some areas but a good book has a funny way of setting it's own price. Or market.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Words You Should Hear From Your Agent: I Love Your Book!

I love your book! If you don't hear that then move on. I have heard everything from you are going to make a million dollars to  keep writing baby. I have heard agents say they like my work they can sell my work they see my work as highly marketable. But those three words I love your book are really what you are looking for. Why? Because if an agent doesn't love  your book then they will not do what it takes in a very tough market.

It is a litmus. A bad agent is worse than no agent at all. Because you sit around waiting to hear and a lot of times you are waiting for nothing. Many agents have lots of clients and you could be way down on the food chain. That means they are not pushing your book and that means you should move on. But many authors don't and their work suffers.

So you really want to hold out until you get those three words. I love your book. You probably want an exclamation point after that sentence. You really want someone who loves your book almost as much as you do.  And that is someone hard to find but worth the wait.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher

The Writer and Teaching

Writers have always taken shelter in teaching. The Universities are brimming with writers. That's because it is friendly territory. You can actually talk about what you do without someone giving you that cross eyed look that always follows with...so what is your day job? And this is because writers are suspect. You are doing something that keeps you at home and a lot of times you don't even get out of your robe. So teaching is a respectable alternative.

I have been speaking in a lot of schools lately and you can not help thinking...what if. What if I had become a teacher. Would I still write? Probably not. The rub is this. Once that weekly paycheck comes then all that motivation goes out the window. And time becomes a scarce commodity. Lets face it after reading student fiction and grading it and commenting on it  then by the time you start on your own work you are already played out.

Still the security and the camaraderie and the higher calling of helping others is alluring. Writers twist in the wind and a lot of times they just blow away. There are no support groups or rules of the road. It is pretty much every man for himself. So who can blame someone for swinging in with the pack and taking a pension and a paycheck.

But then...you really do have to follow your destiny. Besides, who would give the author talks if everyone became a teacher?

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Selling A Novel In Todays Market

I was coming out of a Literary Festival the other day and I saw something that made me think we have passed into a new world. There was a car and on this car were the trade reviews and quotes from a novel with a picture of the cover on the side of the card. These were painted onto the car and not just temporary. I began to read the reviews from Library Journal, Rick Kogan, Booklist, Kirkus written on the back and the hood and the sides of the car.

My assumption was this was some self published author who figured why not put his book on his car. But no. This was a press that did this. And so we have passed into the age of anything goes. Some might see this as evidence of clever marketing or some might see it as desperation against the titanic wave of cultural marketing that is now our society. So lets take it as a marketing ploy.

Do people sit in their car and read reviews from Library Journal on the trunk of the car in front of them? No. Would they buy a book they saw on the side of a car? Would they remember a Publishers Weekly quote streaming by on the hood of a car? Who knows. Probably not. But the point is that this publisher has reached the point of trying to advertise their book on the same footing as a real estate agent selling houses.

So again...desperation? Market savvy? Idiocy? Who knows. I did read the reviews and I did stare at the cover. Too bad I can't remember the name of the book. I'll just have to catch that novel as it passes by at sixty miles an hour next time.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Sweaty Author

You get there and the authors are already at their tables. One guy is taking pictures upon pictures and tweeting them all over the place. He has his table right in the middle. You are there with a bookstore and are standing by to sign books for whoever may buy. The self published contingent is there. They are organized and efficient with their books and their notebooks. They sit behind their tables and stare out at the people beginning to stream in.

You did not start this way. You came form the old world of publishing. Big advances and Big Media. Signings were exclusive affairs at bookstores for people who came to hear only you. Now you are a baker at a carnival in a sea of barkers. Everyone is selling something and a lot of the products are substandard but it doesn't really matter. Whoever barks the loudest gets the sale.

And so for the next five hours you bark at everyone passing by. Authors eye each other warily. Who has self published? Who has been reviewed? Who is selling? The arty crowd is there and they just want to make contacts. You are there to sell. People steer clear because you wear a sport coat and don't evince the tired Bohemia of so many literary festivals. Your book is heavy with reviews. Another violation. It goes like this and when the people stop the authors stare at each other.

And then it slowly dies. The guy who self published Goth Horror closes shop. The experimental guy with the crazy cover who sold a good amount of books leaves. Your bookstore takes off and leaves you with a few more books. You sell another one but that is really it. Time for a drink at a bar and the lingering vague dissatisfaction of the Literary Festival.

The era of the Sweaty Author is like that.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher
 

Can Writing Be Taught?

Something to wrestle with. The problem is teaching has nothing to do with writing. We were all taught to diagram sentences with grammar spelling and punctuation. This can be taught. We can be assigned papers. We can complete the papers but this is not teaching writing. John Gardner in the Art of Fiction basically says that you have to have the talent in the first place. That if this talent is not there then no amount of teaching will do  it.

I am teaching an advanced fiction class at a private college and it is a question that pops up. Can writing be taught? Even craft is a hard one to teach to someone because it is the experimentation of rewriting that is craft. Basically writers have to be wired up. Their brains have to figure out why one word works when another one does not.

And of course we are talking connotation and denotation. What does a word really do. And this is something instinctual that no amount of courses can give you. I would even argue writing courses hurt writers because they codify what should never have been codified in the beginning. Still one has to try and convey what one has learned.

And so maybe it is like the old nudge the horse to water scenario.
But the thirst must be there.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher..What if a dream was all you had

The Long Slog Toward Spring and hopefully a Book

The holidays are over. On this we can agree. We have gained weight and added to our treasures and depleted our bank accounts. We have eaten everything under the sun and drank quite a bit too. We have made merry and now we are snowed in until the first peek of spring sometime in April or May or even June if you live in Chicago. And so we begin the long slog toward something brighter. Maybe summer.

As a writer you hope to have something for the spring. Maybe it is the change of seasons letting you know that time is slipping away. Add a birthday or a death in the family and you really feel times acceleration. The seasonal shift is always a shock. Like winter we think we can just outlast it all and that is a victory too.

But you want to have something to show for all this hibernatory living. Lets face it there is not much to do between now and the first warm days of spring except to work. Maybe that is why the work ethic in the Midwest is so fierce. The cold makes you just hunker down and grind through it. Hard to do that if it is seventy five and sunny outside your window. So time to grow your hair long and finish off that first draft or that final rewrite so you will have something to emerge from your cave with and say look; these brutally cold months were not in vain...

I wrote a book!
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The State of the Book in 2014

You could argue it both ways. Go to the Kindle boards and you will see the new frontier of publishing. Writers taking their work and bypassing the publishing and putting it out there to sell on the kindle. The ebook certainly broke the dam of writers who would never see print. And there are writers who sell in the millions who have never signed a publishing contract and conversely they have become millionaires. They are the one percent of one percent.

For the rest of the self publishers it is a brutal slog and many sell few downloads of their book. But of course you could argue this beats obscurity. And for the traditionally published writers it is the year of reckoning. You have to compete on all fronts and with the advent of the ebook the free download has changed the field of play. People literally give way their book while traditional publishers sit on their prices like trolls at the gate. You cant blame them they actually have invested money in their books and they need to hold the line.

Profit has become a word only for the big sellers for these publishers. Print on Demand books have allowed them to compete with the price to sell market of ebooks but these also bring a stigma that keeps most POD books out of the bookstores so essential to selling now. It will be the year of the Independent this we know. Barnes and Noble is taking water so fast we might just see her slip beneath the waves in the first quarter. The Nook truly was the anchor thrown over the side with no real plan to compete with the Amazon behemoth.

And Amazon will rule its domain yet she was stymied when the independents didn't take her books. So we have gone full circle. Books are still stubbornly selling and independent bookstores are the future of book selling and are gaining strength while the ebook morphs into the interactive beast it is destined to be. Community will make or break the art of book selling for the independents. And what of the author in all of this?

Writers have greater opportunities to fail or thrive than ever before. If there is one consistent mantra it is this for the modern author; If you don't do it no one will. This is the unassailable truth of publishing. Never before have authors had to have thicker ankles than right now. It is a peasants work this selling of our wares but the truth is you have only one responsibility in the end and that is to your talent. And that has never changed and never will.

Full speed ahead.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Googling into the Abyss or Book Marketing for Infants

In football there is a thing called broken field running. I used to do it in high school. Basically you run to the side of the field while everyone else is running the other way. You cut back against the grain. So on a sweep to the right with everyone flowing over to the right side you turn and go to the left and go against all that momentum. At the end of the year  2013 this to me seems an apt metaphor for how we should treat tech.

Google is a great thing. We in the book marketing world use it all the time as does everyone else. But there is a point of diminishing return where Google turns against us and the best thing to do is run the other way. We see this in someone who wants to find the very best deal and googles until their eyes fall out and misses the deal anyway. Versus the man who calls the friend at the car dealer who scores a better deal than the googler every could.

Why is this? Because the human factor still trumps the Google factor. Authors now pound the Internet looking for readers but in fact they are running where everyone else is going. So the portals they find are already bursting with authors pushing their books. Versus the author who picks up the phone and calls the editor who gets their book covered in a magazine that leads to a book signing that leads to a book club picking up the book. Or the person who visits the Independent bookstore who takes on their book and talks it up.

These things happen because we still live in a world of humans and most people now prefer the Internet as a means of interacting. It is safer  and more convenient and not embarrassing. But that is exactly why you should run against the grain and go to the opposite side of the field. Who knows. You might even score a touchdown.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

The Holiday Writer

Like everyone else writers take off for the holidays. There is little to be done in the whirlwind and so best to leave the pencil at the desk until you pick it up again in the new year. So what happens is you look back at the past year and wonder if you pulled it off. Any new books? Any new books published? And what about those Amazon rankings? Are they falling off the radar like a train running over the tracks. Probably.

Like everyone else you are exhausted and broke from way too much making merry. Like Bob Cratchet berated by Scrooge when he is late. I am sorry sir I was making rather merry. You were and now somewhere between the opened presents and the new year you look to find your bearings and of course they aren't there.  They were left back in the old year but of course you aren't to the new year yet so you settle somewhere in the middle with the kids at home and everyone sort of finding their way.

And you dare not look at that novel in progress though I notice some of my other writer friends are still frantically at work. I don't know how they do it really. The two worlds don't really mix. In one world you are separating out and in the other you are joining. Better to just put the pencil aside and let it all be and hope that when you sit back down in the new year something will still be there you can work with.

That is why they call it a holiday. Right? Right.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...some times a dream is all you have
 

Our Parents Never Really Accept Who We Are

I was smoking a Christmas cigar with my dad and he said what he always has said. Don't spend all day writing. Make some money. He is referring to my teaching or some of the other things I do supplement my writing. It doesn't matter to him that I have published five novels. It doesn't matter that I have had Book of the Month Club Selections, Junior Library Guild Selections, Starred Reviews in Publishers Weekly, Hit the National Bestseller List, Published by the Largest Publishers in the World, Interviewed by NPR All Things Considered, Spread in People Magazine, New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, Chicago Tribunes, Chicago Sun Times,  Paperback Auctions, Six figure advances, Three Book Deals, Movie deals, Foreign Rights Sales, ALA Editors Choice Awards, Two books coming out Next Year.
Nope. None of it matters. To him I just don't have a real job.

And it is something parents just cant help. They see you a certain way. They are incapable of understanding that we might not be the person they think you should be. Add a career in the arts to the mix and you have a perfect storm of parent inability to really see who they spawned. My dad can understand the money but after that it is suspect. He sees me in the newspaper and asks how I did that like it was some sort of slight of hand. He sees my book in the store and it is almost incidental but it is never connected to a job.

And maybe that is very American. We really don't accept anyone who doesn't have a traditional job. Certainly not writers. They are suspect by nature and don't really compute in parental consideration of a vivable career. Add to that novelist and again you might as well be drinking in a bar and  sleeping in. It just doesn't make sense that your child should do something as nebulous as write a book.

And so really all we are left with is that parents can not really accept us as we are. To them we will always be who we didn't become. 

www.williamhazelgrove.com



 

The Things Writers Do

Some of the things I have done make me cringe. Take the time I barged into the winner of the National Book Awards home on a cold day in November with a copy of my small press novel to have him give me a blurb. Where did I get that kind of nerve? He came to the door after his wife stared at the guy in cowboy boots and a long coat and I told him I seen him in the Chicago Tribune and that I was a writer and I wondered if he would give me some pointers or comment on my book.

Yeeeesh. I cringe thinking about what he must have thought. But he invited me in and we sat in his study while he told me the plot of his second novel for the next hour. I sat there with a half smile and listened to him talk about literature and about reading the bible and then it was time to go. I left him my book and I think he said he would look at it. I think I even called him back and he said something like good luck with the book and that was that.

Fast  forward three years later after my second book and a good bit of publicity and a three book deal with Random House. I am sitting in the basement of a library at a kids table in a kids chair with my knees up and and there is another man sitting there. He does not recognize me. We both took the hundred dollar stipend for talking to children about our process of writing. After a few moments he picked up my book and stared at the name and then turned to me.

I owe you an apology he said. I shook my head. No you don't. I owe you one for barging in like that. We talked a little and then after the library thing ended he shook my hand. I hope you make a million dollars he said.  And that was that. I saw him one more time on the streets of Chicago outside Columbia University where I was teaching. He walked by and stared at me...but my name had escaped him by then.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher....Sometimes a dream is all you have
 

No More Bad Reviews

As per a New York Times article Buzzfeed will no longer feature bad reviews. The writer of the article seemed to veer back and forth between thinking this was a good idea and then finishing up with a dig at the whole concept. My thinking is it is the final evolution in the idea the Internet fostered long ago  has taken hold big time....anybody can be anything without any sort of work at all. Or like grade school we all get a ribbon for trying. There are no losers in T ball

Taking the first concept though lets face it you want to be a rock and roll star then burn a CD. You want to be a writer publish a book on Amazon. Boom. You are the writer or the rock star  or both. The point is the message is look you really don't have to pay your dues at all just start. The only bummer in this equation was that people would evaluate your work in the form of a review. At least if you became a writer they would. What a drag.

Someone would actually say if they thought it was any good. And what purpose does this serve? Buzzfeed thinks it serves no purpose. Maybe. But of course the message that we are all the same and all have the same talent is furthered by this sort of everybody gets a star for trying motif. Lets face it we are reviewed every day. We lose jobs. We get divorced. We sink into bankruptcy. We lose our homes. Or we become fabulously wealthy or famous. Another sort of review.

So why the hands off on a a literary review? Sorry. If you pick up the pen then someone is going to review it and it might be bad. What does this do? It lets you know where you rank and how much work you have to do. Yes there are bad bad reviews but there is generally some truth lurking out there somewhere. It all comes down I guess to if you just want a ribbon for trying...

Or a trophy for winning.

www.williamhazelgrove.com