Why Hemingway Doesn't Appeal to Students Today

In my Lit Class at the private college it occurred to me that the Hemingway ideal is dead. It is not just that I have the class read the The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and they don't get it but more than that they don't get the references or the world Hemingway painted. Now I wont say that he inhabited this world because Hemingway was consciously painting a world even then that was fantasy. It was a world of Big Game Hunters and the heroic ideal set in the Natural World.

But for students of 2015 this simply doesn't compute. The setting the mil yer the characters. They are not familiar with the Big White Hunter or Francis McComber a rich man who would hire a guide for a safari or his wife a socialite who has only contempt for McComber. More than all this they are not familiar with Africa as a wild place where men went to hunt animals as a badge of honor or at least a head mounted on a den wall.  Even when Hemingway was writing this he was writing a memory that most people in the thirties didn't possess as the way the world was.

Lets face it the whole Hemingway sell was one of looking back to a time or a world when men were men but for modern Americans then they could at least look back at he frontier that had been declared closed just thirty years before. But the fantasy like James Feinimore Cooper or Jack London painted a world of adventure that simply didn't exist for twentieth century Americans. But for twenty first century Americans that world doesn't even exist in Memory.

Consequently for the Dystopian set there is  no point of reference. Who the hell is this guy and why is he hunting a lion and why wouldn't you run from a lion? Hemingway was dated shortly after his death if not before. I don't think we can say he is dated now maybe simply not relevant even in the passing sense of being able to empathize or at least find the thread that allows the modern mind to participate in the fictional dream.

This would rankle Hemingway I am sure. He was the modernist smashing Victorian convention in his time. But sadly, not in ours.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Funny State of Literature

The vapidity of winter probably is a good metaphor for what has happened to literature in the year 2015. It is cold out. Zero. The wind whips against the windows and nothing really moves. As I read Richard Fords Let Me Be Frank With You it is clear what has happened to serious writing in this early part of the twenty first century. It has gone the way the of the LP and the CD. It is simply not relevant to a large segment of the population.

Harper Lee is bringing out a rejected manuscript. Why would an old woman do that who has a secure place in literary history? But of course content is king and so the more the better. Amazing this modality should nibble at the stalwart of classic lit but there you have it. We don't know if she wanted it out there or someone else but it doesn't really matter. What matters is there has been a watershed and there is no going back.

We are writers brought up on filmic imagery. Our scenes are much more relevant to a Parenthood than a reader of E. M. Foresters A Passage to India. It happened to the music industry. The same juggernaut that has pumped out elevator vocalists from American Idol now pumps it out from Dystopian set pieces like Divergent or randy Army manuals like Fifty Shades of Gray.  It isn't so much that any of this is so bad its just that it is not so good.

Then you read Richard Ford and you remember again that literature was never about that. It was about cracking the existential moment. The wonder of being alive in the year 2015. And it is still there but people would have you believe it is not. There is much more money to be made in pulp than art. But like the winter that howls even now. There is that suspicion we are mortal.  And the great consolation is this.

Literature will live on despite our best intentions.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher...Library Guild Selection

 

Literature in the Classroom might be DOA

Literature in the classroom might be DOA. I have my comp students usually blog on current topics. Our conversation is lively before as we discuss the topics and get primed. Then we write and then finally we read back the blogs. This leads to more discussion. Sometimes it does feel like a current events seminar but we really are just formulating ides and hurling thesis  out into the blogosphere. I feel this is what is going to help students most in the year 2014.

So on Halloween I shook it up and brought in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story  A Short Trip Home. It is the only ghost story Scott ever wrote. I read it to one class and  the other class I had read a page for every student. It was a snore. Besides people tripping over words  no one could really follow F Scotts meandering prose. I realized too Fitzgerald was probably never meant to be read out loud. But I think the greater issue is literature in the classroom.

I would argue it doesn't really work. It is too passive and too remote and just not relevant to the digital age where we operate in the present tense. I think for English Majors and serious writers literature is essential to learning craft but to our twenty first century view it feels like taking a spin in a Model T. It just doesn't go fast enough.

So we are back to blogging. Like this.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Is Lit Dead?

Every time I begin teaching a Composition Class this question comes to me like a nagging pain. Is Lit Dead? And this comes from reading the opening to The Great Gatsby and having the students complain about the elevated language or the face that no one really reads literature anymore. And I don't teach Lit. I teach composition and so I am just skimming the surface but certainly my decision to bring blogging into Comp is based on the fact I blog quite a bit but also that Comp like so many other things has gone real time.

And Literature is anything but real time. The very opening of a novel lets us know that this story is happening somewhere in the hazy twilight of suspended time. Be it John Williams Stoner or Ishiguros Remains of the Day. The fact that old clocks are ticking somewhere in the room is evident in not only the pace but the viewpoint and of course the language. Literature is at heart a romantics language. There is something wonderfully tragic in the fact time has passed.

And yet in the year 2014 I wonder if this has a place. Certainly people still write literature but do they write it for those who expect literature to act like literature and what will happen when those people pass on. Will my bloggers rule the day with our real time commentary or will people year again for something not so in our reach?

Time will tell.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Changing Face of Literature

Chapters are getting shorter and shorter. At least mine are. I don't know if literature is changing or I am but the last two books have about sixty chapters with 220 pages. And people tell me this is the way books are going. Our shrinking attention span demands these shorter bursts. Of course flash fiction is the new kid on the block that may or may not be the future.  Hard to say.

But I cant help but wonder if the internet has done its dirty work and is starting to rewire all of us. It would make sense that something we spend hours and hours interacting with and reading would change all of us. At the very least we might rebel against longer discourses that tend to take a while to get to the point. The point in the internet world is usually in the first sentence. Don't bury the lead right.

But fiction is a building process. A river if you will that we have to get used to the water first. And this takes a little time and a little acclimating. Sometimes the water is cold and rough and we have to find our way across. Then we get out payoff. But maybe we don't have the patience for that. Maybe we want to jump in swimming or not at all.

Anyway. I will try for some longer chapters next time. Maybe to just prove I can still swim.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher...on Summer Sale
 

Those Oscar Blues

So American Hustle didn't win. So Gravity didn't win. So Matthew McHero  is himself in ten years. So Ellen DeGeneres gave movie stars pizza. So Jim Carey was really funny. So we saw U2 being the last Great Rock band again. So we saw lighting and set design people accept Oscars for things we never knew existed. So it seemed everyone died last year. So Robert Deniro said writers are twisted and neurotic...at least someone got something right. It still was the top of the mountain for just about anyone on the planet. At least for a night.

And then we watched a  movie from a book written by a slave a hundred years ago win Best Picture and beat out 2001 A Space Oddity. And maybe Matthew McHero should have said something about AIDS instead of rambling about himself. Maybe we just all want to live where it is warm now and look like a million bucks in a dress or a tux. And what are those after the Awards parties like? Does Bono ever take off his glasses? Does the Edge take off his hat? Probably not.

And how did Pink become everywhere. And wasn't there someone else who could have sung Somewhere over the Rainbow than the bionic woman who is so blond she looks like a Goddess from the planet Teutonic. But she does spin very nicely at the Grammys and so it was different to see her with her clothes on . And so we are left with that funny feeling again that Mickey Rourke cited in the movie Diner while staring at a rich woman riding a horse..."did you ever wonder that there is something going we  know nothing about?"

Absolutely.

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

When Writers Run Out of Gas

Watching Downton Abbey. Self proclaimed junkie after Breaking Bad. Season finale fizzles like a wet balloon sputtering around the room and then falling on a bare light bulb...sizzling in flaccid relief. Such over burndened metaphors would have been a relief to the turgid soap opera Downton became at the end. It would seem Julian Fellows lost his way but probably after five seasons he probably just ran out of gas.

Lets face it it happens. After the early seasons built around the verisimilitude of the era and the characters drawn so handsomely to the early twentieth century standards of gentlemen and their servents we were destined to drift aftter Matthew Crawley left the series and we lost our great love story. But more than that Julian burned through his material after World War I ended. This gave the series natural drama and we remained focused on the main characters.

But then history paused and we were left with flappers and F. Scott Fitzgerald besotment done badly by the upper class and worse by Rose wannabe flapper who goes for African American jazzmen and then forgets about him after matriarch in training Mary's wrath. The point is the soap opera moves in when the writer moves  out because then we just have drama for dramas sake with no underpinning.

Alas Julian probably should just shut it all down instead of ending the season on the beach with the servants and strange little sublots that wither and die like vines in a toripid heat. If this overwritten it is only because Downton was so underwritten and I wanted to right the apple cart.

I still have some gas left.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...


 

The Road Not Taken

Actions have consequences. You get to a point in your life where you see your choices and what they mean to how your life turned out. Went over to a friends the other night and had dinner. His house is paid for. He has had a successful business. He can retire and do nothing. He and his wife travel. They go to warm climates in winter. They go skiing when they feel like it. They buy a new car when they feel like it. They have no kids.

And you cannot help wonder about the road you have taken. I have kids. I have a mortgage. We cannot buy a car when we feel  like it. We cannot travel when we feel like it. I chose a high risk way of life a long time ago. It does not get much riskier than being a writer. Maybe being a motorcycle rider in one of those cages you see in a circus with a stick of dynamite burning in one hand. That might be comparable.

So there is no doubt I will keep on writing until I fall over at the table. My kids are many and ensure college will keep us well anchored to massive debt. And you cannot help but feel jealous even though you know this is silly. By the time you get home the questions are looming. Should I? Did I? Maybe I...then you crawl into bed with all that young breathing in the night.

Yeah...Ok. That's right.
You close your eyes. 

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

 

JD Salingers Next Effort

Maybe you have heard that JD Salinger will begin publishing again starting in 2015. His estate has left specific instructions to dribble out the novels he has been working on for the last fifty years. The question is will they be any good? There apparently is a WWII romance and something else that is expands the Holden Caulfield character. Salinger made a career out of disappearing and saying nothing about his next novel.

But now we know they are coming. And I would have to say that most people will be disappointed. There can only be one Catcher in the Rye and this is probably why he did not publish further. How could you follow up that novel? You don't. Same with Harper Lee. How do you follow up To Kill  A Mockingbird? You don't. Interesting that both authors never published again.

But the fanfare will be mighty and the sales will be huge. But after that when it all dies down you are talking about a man who hid in New Hampshire for half a century importing young women to live with him at various times. He went into a time warp and sadly we will probably see something historical come out of those New Hampshire woods.

Catcher in the Rye was brilliant because no one had done it. No one had turned the novel on it's head with this antihero. It was stunningly contemporary and predicted the future of literature and movies. The antithesis of this would be something published forty years after it was written in isolation. We have probably seen the best JD Salinger has to offer and the rest will be the manuscript authors all have that never see the light of day. Until they are gone.

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

 

Components of a Bestseller

Bestseller. It has a ring to it. But what are the components to a book that make it take off when another book sputters. First. It has to be good. And maybe that lets out a lot of books. Good is defined by the reader who tells another reader who tells another. Bestsellers are a word of mouth phenomenon when it is all said and done. Even today with the Internet the word is still passed on from trusted source to trusted source.

This is why the people who buy  two hundred five starred reviews get little traction. The reader is missing in that scenario. And yes bait and switch is alive and well. We will still download a book that looks great from the Amazon reviews only to find we have been had. The reviewers were friends or family or they were bought and paid for. This sadly happens.

But the book that is honestly reviewed by someone who really loves it is a double edged sword. Not only will that person review the book they will then tell someone about it. It happens more than you think. I get asked a lot what I am reading and I will rattle my brain and say...well this is a great book that I read a while ago. I even helped sell a copy of Wilson's biography when a man picked it up and stared at it and I spouted out and said, 'That's a good book." We talked and then he bought it.

Yes of course you have to market. Yes you have to do all those thousand and one things to get people to notice your book. But really the real test is is your book good enough to have someone in a Barnes and Noble blare to someone else "hey I read that book! It's good." That is the acid test of any potential bestseller.

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

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
 

Why It's Hard in the Arts

The New York Times had a fascinating article on the state of humanities in the middle class. Basically it is terrible. Writers, musicians, filmmakers, painters are in bad shape. It begins early in college when you decide to major in the humanities. Your starting salary is around 31k while someone in business is around 56k. And from there we go down hill. If you decide to become a writer lets say the odds you will make a living are very against you. So you decide to become a teacher or a professor.

Teaching in high school is all encompassing and so that leaves no time to write. Teaching in college is now an adjunct world. So you make no money. The few get tenure. So you take a low paying job you don't do well at because your heart is not in it. Compared to your business counterpart who likes making money and does much better. But you are an imposter looking for employment in a world that does not offer it.

I know that when I started out I worked sales jobs because they allowed me to write. I always got fired because they smelled a rat after a while and I moved on. The comparison to sports is apt here. Sports are subsidized in our country in a very large way through universities and cities and states. It is very acceptable to build stadiums and give Universities grants for sports. Try that with the arts and a mantra of 'get a job' rings in your ears. It is no wonder it is hard to survive say as a writer or an actor when the one percent rule is generous at best. A small group of people make all the money.

The article ends with saying  society needs the humanities and we should support our artists. I could not agree more but I don't see that happening...but at least someone wrote about it.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Donna Tart and The Cretin

When Donna Tarts first book came out I went to her book signing in Chicago. It was crowded and there was no where to even stand. You could not see her reading My Secret History. I was an aspiring novelist and I wanted to see and hear a big time writer whose first novel was setting the literary world on fire. And so I stood on the lip of a bookshelf and I could see her. The place was jammed with people holding their books waiting for her to sign. Then...crack.

The bookshelf snapped and the books spilled out. Not to be daunted I moved to another bookshelf. So far so good and then crack. The books spilled out. A woman came running over and started scooping up the books. A man with a beard stared at me and said: Don't just stand there. Help her you cretin. I was frozen. I couldn't move. I stepped close to the man and said. You're the cretin pal. He took a big step back. A pissed off wannabe writer can inflict harm.

Then I  left. And Donna Tart went on to literary fame and a kind of literary life that really only exists for the one percent if even that. Not marrying or having kids she went into seclusion only to emerge every ten years for another book. I married and had kids and published books and perched in Hemingway's attic and lived the life of the struggling author. Donna lived in New York and Europe and doesn't give interviews or go on the net except to find restaurants. I use the net until my eyes bleed.

And now she has another book. Another smash. Then she will go into her vaunted seclusion. And the cretin is still writing. Still publishing.  Still marketing. Still trying to find another bookshelf to catch a glimpse of that big time literary writer.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The Second LIfe of a Book

Thirty one thousand downloads later and Tobacco Sticks has a second life. This was not possible for a book unless another publisher bought the rights and resuscitated some out of print title. Because books don't have a long shelf life and if they don't sell then they tend to disappear. Enter the net where suddenly books that have been dead have life breathed into them by readers looking for a title they can get a deal on.

I had managed to keep the ebook rights to Tobacco Sticks and had not done much with them until I saw other authors putting out their backlist at a discount. A highly reviewed book may or may not reach it's market. And when that window of opportunity closes down then the book disappears. A lot of time it is market forces and  a book doesn't have a chance. Who knows what really sells a book.

But now an author can take a second shot and readers can have a second glance. It beats the alternative. A book damned to the darkness after a very short life.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher
 

Best Book I Ever Dropped in the Bathtub

Alright so I read in the bath tub. It is one of the few places I wont be disturbed. I have written in the bathtub but the risk to the computer is very high and the screen clouds from the steam. But I read there and always pile up books around the edge of the tub. Just got Scott Bergs  monster biography of Woodrow Wilson. Beautiful book. Gorgeous cover. Heavy. So I took it into the tub with me and settled down among the suds and the steam. Just me and Woodrow. The book is so heavy it makes my wrists ache. So then I reach up to flip the page and that's when it happened.

Somehow I lost my grip and WILSON did this funny cartwheel and then KERSPLASH into the hot sudsy water. But I made a grab before the Titanic went completely under  and sort of juggled the book on the surface of the water before it disappeared below. And now I am tearing off the paper cover and grabbing a towel and blue ink is running down my arms form the very deep blue cloth cover and it is getting all over the tub but still I wipe frantically trying to keep the pages from becoming sodden sponges.

And I am mostly successful but now the ink is everywhere and I look like a mad printer with blue all over my fingers and forearms and the white towel is now blue but I have the book and get the majority of water before it becomes that heavy mass of pulp. And I even am able to read again moving the pages like thin wet tissue. By morning the book is dry and a bit wavy but I put the cover back on and except for the blue ink still stained all over my hands you would never  know Woodrow took a  bath.

Without a doubt. This could be the best book I ever dropped in the tub.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

How Paid Reviews Have Hurt Everyone

 I have a Publishers Weekly review coming out on Monday. All five of my books have been reviewed by PW. I never paid for one. Of course you really couldn't pay for any until recently. My career was built by a starred review for my second novel Tobacco Sticks. I was virtually unknown and then one starred review in PW and wham. Movie sale. Paperback auction with seventeen publishers. . Book of the Month Club. Foreign Rights. Two book deal with Bantam  with nice advances. So...what is the situation now with a PW review.

Well when I posted the advance PW review someone asked me if I had paid for the review. I took offence. Of course not! But when I received my Kirkus review the same question came from someone else. Again I was offended. I would never pay for any review. It is not in my DNA. But the point is a lot of people do and because of this the reviews themselves have been hurt. Publishers Weekly has PW Select and Kirkus has a  program as well. So people who want to shell out some coin can get some sort of review.

But the damage is done to everyone. Publishers Weekly was the gatekeeper before. If you received a review in PW and it was good then everyone took this as a nod that this was a special book. I can attest because it happened to me. But now some people question the review itself. Doesn't everyone pay for reviews now? No. They don't. But it doesn't matter. People are having a hard time believing that a book can actually carry its own weight.

So if you get a review in PW or Kirkus the old fashioned way then you should feel very good about it and if someone asks if you paid for the review. Push out your chest and scream HELL NO!!!That should leave no doubt.

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

 

Why Is Authorial Spam Any Different?

I find it interesting on the Internet where three quarters of the dribble is spam that people take exception to authors pushing their books. We take no exception to the spam on television that hits us over the head to the ratio of about fifty to fifty. Half spam and half content. Could it be that we cannot respond to the hundredth beer commercial? Or are we just more interested in the drama of the commercial.

I would say it is the fact television is a one way street. No one can respond so we take it. But some poor author who posts a link to his book gets blow back. Spammer! Please Everyone on the Internet is a spammer of some sort. Even those who post pictures of their vacation are spamming. They are spamming their life versus yours. We are all well acquainted with the Facebook person who just cannot let us know enough about their life and how much better it is than ours. This is spam. They are selling you on themselves.

And so we get down to how do we define spam. The Internet pushes out information tagged with products. We know this. We accept the bargain. We get information and companies get to us over the head with their products. This is the same agreement we have with television and radio. We want the content so we accept the spam. So why should someone posting about their book be anymore  of a spammer than anybody else?

Again there is accessibility. We cannot complain to corporations about their spam. And we wouldn't because they are companies. But authors or someone selling some product on their own...how dare you spam me! You really cant have it both ways.

 So the next time you run into authorial spam just pretend it is a beer commercial. Your regular programming will return and the world will be right. And you know what...unlike beer, the book might even be good.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

 

The King of Crap

There is a new paradigm in publishing now. Who will be the King of Crap.  Crap being what games the algorithms on Amazon. The publishing world is changing so fast it takes your breath away and then makes you want to hold it for the stench it is producing. I am talking about the crap that is moving into the cyber vacuum and it is crap. It is whatever is put behind an ecover and flung into the blogosphere. The King of Crap doesn't care. Because the computers kick up the title for a  nice bump and a list appears.

#45 on Ants/literature/walnuts/books about toilet paper. And this then is taken as gospel. Bestsellerdom. Throw some free giveaways into the mix and you have The King of Crap crowing from the rooftops #1 on Toilet paper books about wiping! This then is the new modality. The new fame of the self published author who is not about literary quality. In fact the KOC makes no bones. "Whats the point of being good at something if you cant sell?" An actual quote. Commodification at it's lowest point.

And so KOC publishes. And publishes mightily. One hundred titles a year is a stated goal. You heard right and take it from me producing one hundred titles of self published Crap is not hard. You just sit and write one and three days later upload with your cover. And the computer will treat you as a darling. This is what aspirants to the crown know. Algorithms dictate sales. New books get pushed up front. So you repeat and repeat and repeat until the crown is yours.

The newly crowned and admired King of Crap. Welcome to the publishing world of the early twenty first century. We can only go down from here.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Journey of the Self Published Novel

When I started out writing I started with a  very small press. So small in fact it came down to one man who had never published a book but wanted to try. He brought out my first novel on a big Six Color Heidelberg Press on the South Side of Chicago. I remember watching the first sheets of the novel, Ripples, come off the press. It was exciting. He had no idea what he was doing and neither did I. He had offered to publish the book after his wife read it. The book was well reviewed and that was it.

Come to my second novel, Tobacco Sticks. Again the man with the press and again the good reviews and then, then...the world changed. The big publishers came knocking and an auction was held for the paperback rights. Bantam bid the highest and I ended up with a two book deal. Along comes by next novel, Mica Highways with all the trimmings. There are movie rights and foreign rights and Book of the Month Club rights. They even bought Ripples my first book. Make that a three book deal. And then things quieted down.

And I could not get another book published. Call it the changing times. Call it the plight of the midlist author. But I wrote Rocket Man and ended up self publishing the book. Again the reviewers came calling. Another publisher bought the rights. But he never brought the book out. The book languished. It would seem the rocket never would fire under Rocket Man again. And yet the book would not be quiet. I wrote another novel, The Pitcher.

And this time the book sold quickly. Due out next fall, but there was Rocket Man. The publisher asked me about this book. They read it. And then a two book deal with Koehler Books took shape. Rocket Man and then the Pitcher. Rocket Man is now due out May 1. So what is the lesson here? Publishing is crazy. Yes. You can never tell how a book will end up. Yes. You have to believe in your book. Yes. You have to take a chance when no one else will. Yes.

And finally. Never ever give up. Never. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the story of the upside down generation
 

Paying For Reviews

Big article in the business section (aptly so) of the NY Times about a man who made quite a bit of money selling reviews to writers. He found out that writers would pay up to a thousand bucks for five star reviews in online publications and at his peak he was making 28 grand a month. The self published writers forked out the money happily and some were driven onto the Bestseller List of Amazon...one man sold a million ebooks of his CIA novels. Not bad for a thousand dollars. And of course the Times was very factual and pointed out that this man was fulfilling a need. (SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND SELF PUBLISHED BOOKS THIS YEAR) and he made some really good money in the process.

Which leaves us with a strange taste in our mouth. Book reviews are a final arbiter of sorts for your work. Or they used to be. A very personal moment between you and that faceless reviewer who is NOT PAID but is rendering an opinion on the work. It is the nail biting moment. And if you have received a great review by Publishers Weekly or the New York Times then you know that warm glow. And conversely, you know the feeling of wanting to hide in your basement when the reviews are bad and how they tear at your soul.

I remember a woman coming up to me in a grocery store once. So sorry to hear about your bad reviews in the Sun Times she she said, almost gloating. It was a bad moment, but that  comes with the territory. And so you take the good with the bad and you move on. Now in our age of instant gratification (SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND SELF PUBLISHED BOOKS) we have a way to go around any sort of judgement at all on our work. The Walmartification of publishing if you will. We can all have a book and we can all be well reviewed now. I can have everything I want and not pay the price seems to be the message.

But of course we all know dont we? We know who is the real thing and who is the phony, the bought for accolade, the plagiarist, the also ran, the artist in posing. Cream still does rise to the top and people still gag on sour milk. And whats more YOU know. Even if no one else does. And so the man who made a killing on selling reviews is no longer. Seems there was a disgruntled author who received a bad review and his operation was shut down by Google and Amazon. But there are others who are taking his place. You can still buy a five review if you want too.

But you will know what your book really is even as you read that glowing paid for review; a one star effort by no star person.

www.billhazelgrove.com