Those Five Star Reviews

The advent of the digital revolution has empowered the citizen reviewer. Essentially we are all now reviewers for good or bad. Well New York is cracking down on the pay for review industry that is screwing a lot of people in the restaurant and transportation world. In the article there was no mention of books but authors know what is going on. You are surfing along and you  hit a book with a THOUSAND reviews. Not a bestseller. Now you are in awe. You are stupefied. You don't know what to think. And the majority of the reviews if not all of them are five stars.

Because you know how hard it is to get reviewed. I have to fight for every review I get every time a book comes out. I have to make sure I send out all my review copies and then hope and pray the trades and the newspapers and readers take it upon themselves to review my books. Because it is a lot to ask someone to review your book. They have to read it first of all and then they have to sit down and write something about it. It gets really tricky when they didn't really care for the book. I am always amazed when someone writes a really bad review of one of my books. It just seems like so much trouble for their pain.

But suddenly authors were popping up with amazing reviews. And lots and lots of them. When I started out with my first and second novel the internet and amazon were just warming up. Even though the trades reviews were very good there just wernt that many reader reviews. Nine and five I think on the books. But then by about my fourth novel  the review boom was in  full swing. After four years I ended up with 81 reviews on Rocket Man. Many were not five star.  A decent mix of four star and five stars. The Pitcher my latest has the most five star reviews I have ever had and that would still be just over half of the fifty five reviews.

And why is that? Well even if someone loves your book they don't give you the five stars. That is the top of the mountain and the top of mountain is hard to get to. As it should be. So I personally am happy with my mix of four and five stars. I think it allows people to see that there is some honesty in reviewing your book. No one can please everybody.

And if they do...then they probably really didn't.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Paying For Reviews

Someone asked me the other day if I paid for my review in Kirkus. I did not. But the review was very good and the assumption was that I did pay for it. Which brings up the whole thing of paying for reviews. Lets face it the dam has been opened and we are now awash in authors willing to pay for just about anything to get their books noticed. You cannot blame them but these type of reviews along with the people who pop up with hundreds of Amazon reviews do not really help the cause. The truth is books are still sold by word of mouth or word of internet.

Lets start here with this. People envy money but they admire talent. Money can get you a lot of things and people want those things. We do envy the guy with the Porche or the guy with the nice house or nice boat or nice anything. We want those things too. But we don't admire the person. In fact we might detest the rich person. Look at the way the one percent is treated. We certainly don't admire the rich people but we sure envy them. So it is in the literary world.

We envy bestsellers. Who would not. But we admire a talented writer. We admire them when we read their books and we know that only a few people can do this. It is the way we feel when we read Fitzgerald or Faulkner or David Foster Wallace. There is something there has nothing to do with money. Since Fitzgerald died broke it must be something beyond the monetary. It is talent. And all the paid for reviews and ads and shoutouts and blitzing will not give us that admiration.

There are some things believe it or not that money cannot buy.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

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