What If the Problem is in Our Pages?

REVIEW ANGST – PART II  or  What if the Problem is Not in the Stars but Within Our Pages?

                                                                          by Robert W. Walker

Now if the review has any legitimate gripes, in Legacy publishing it is near impossible to get a correction even on a second printing, but if you have put the book out yourself as an Independent author on Kindle or elsewhere, I would take the book down and address these issues. Issues such as misuse of their for there all over the place, or your for you're all over the place, or passive constructions, all tell no show, etc. At which time, you need to hire a guy like me who can repair all the damage at 3 bucks a page.

Pattern errors exist in every author's repertoire, especially new authors. Example for some subconscious reason all your characters' names are Charlie, Tommie, Billie, Sadie....every character's name ends in ie rhyme. This is not what a writing coach/professor like yours truly is talking about when I speak of Sound and Sense. You fail if your characters are all named Tom, Dick, and Harry if all the others are Rham, Rick, and Larry, or let us say Pam, Tam, Jam, Ram, Damn, Lamb, Crain, Blain, bada-bing, but as the author, you never see such flagrantly bad problems as twenty five uses of the word WAS on page one. Or there is a huge overuse of prepositional phrases, or worse yet pronoun proliferation, etc., etc. Many ways to sink a book before she is even launched. Bottom line is to get as many alpha and beta readers as you can find, rewrite as often as you can, and realize that Writing is Rewriting.

Brief bio for Robert W. Walker:

 

Award-winning author, ROBERT W. WALKER has been a citizen of Charleston, West Virginia five years and lives with his wife and four stepchildren in the Capitol City. Rob created his highly acclaimed INSTINCT and EDGE SERIES between 1982 and 2005.  He has since written his award-winning historical series featuring Inspector Alastair Ransom with CITY FOR RANSOM (2006), SHADOWS IN THE WHITE CITY (2007), and CITY OF THE ABSENT (2008).  This history-mystery hybrid straddles the Chicago World’s Fair circa 1893, and has had enthusiastic reviews from Chicago historians and the Chicago Tribune,  which likened “the witticism to Mark Twain, the social consciousness to Dickens, and the ghoulish atmosphere to Poe!”   Rob’s current work is Dead On and a 3-part historical thriller ebook entitled Children of Salem. Rob is also working on PlagueShip Titanic, a re-structuring of the Titanic story which attempts to explain why the captain intentionally sent the ship to the bottom of the North Atlantic. You can find Rob at www.RobertWalkerbooks.com ,  www.HarperCollins.com www.acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com , and http://tinyurl.com/ykch9vf

Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com

Review Angst

            REVIEW ANGST or The Angst Over Reviews…

                                                                            by Robert W. Walker

I get some lousy reviews, too same as a first novelist even after having done as many as I have (some 50 odd books), and often it is obvious the mindset or BRAIN of the reviewer is entirely in the wrong hemisphere. How does an author respond to a reviewer who is off in left field and appears to be discussing another writer’s work using his/her title?

Trust me, this feeling is not just for the neophyte. Veteran authors may say they let such roll off their backs, but in a deep place in the soul, it troubles a writer when a reader—any reader—totally misses the mark he sets, or totally questions one’s standards, or even implies or directly says the book  is a ‘ripoff’ of a previous title of some notoriety as has happened many times with me when in fact, my book was in the works on or before the publication of the one I was supposed to have ‘copied’ or stolen from.

General wisdom among old vets in authorship is to ignore a bad review and revel in a good one. The system is not set up for even bestselling authors to ‘respond’ to a review, which I suspect would be far more engaging than most reviews—to see or rather read the author’s take on the reviewer’s take. But the universal reaction to any author defending his work in such a manner is one that says, “Oh, look, the author is whinnying like a horse…big baby. Can’t take the heat, stop writing bad books. Besides, the reviewer must know what he/she is doing, after all.”

I want to discuss this question because a young author recently asked me how he could deal with an ‘attack’ review on Amazon.com.  Of course, Amazon review space is open to anyone with an ax to grind, but so too for years has been the review staff at Publisher’s Weekly so far as I can see.  At any rate, here is my answer to the question of what to do with a bad review, and it is a lesson hard-won as I have made all the mistakes I am about to warn you away from.

Sure, you can complain to the editors of a magazine or newspaper or even to Amazon’s nebulous people behind the shadows but in either case, paper or virtual, it will be to no avail 99 percent of the time.  Actually if the review is blatantly PERSONAL, you might get someone in a positon to do something about it to do something about it, but even then it is so rare an animal that it belongs on the endangered species list. I mean if it is actually personal, that the reviewer knows you, has met you, has a hatred for you, you do have more of an argument, but even if you could get the magazine or paper to print a letter to the editor combating comments made in a review, YOU are the one who will come under attack by readers as a thin-skinned author who needs to go sell Peak antifreeze or Smuckers Jellies somewhere in a country setting. Even if you are right, you can be right and still get run down. The paper or Amazon in so many cases now, they seldom to never take a review down and typically if they do, I suspect it has more to do with foul language more than anything else....Take for example one review of one of my books:  No, we won’t go there….

You can go to COMMENT below the review but universally people just read bad motives on the part of the author defending the work rather than weighing up the remarks in the same manner as the author will.  Even if the author is right – it is like engaging a ‘stalker’ if you get embroiled too far with a reader who truly dislikes the book.  The author is just spewing forth a whine-fest in the eyes of this reviewer and any others who come on to see the comments, and this can also ENGAGE the ‘stupid insipid idiot’ who did not get you or your book why? because he is from Planet 9 -- or as in my case for most of the 11 books of the Instinct Series, a pissed off other female author who believed I had stolen her work (nutbag) lambasted every Instinct title until suddenly she stopped, and I assume she died....

Can you do anything about it on Amazon or elsewhere? Best to get someone else to post a counter review, if the review gave you two stars, get a four star review, if one, get a five, but this is not always easy. However, on Amazon, especially, It is the best way to combat a one star as they put the two extremes side by side.

In the end… Do as I do -- do some giveaways on Twitter, Facebook, other social media to anyone willing then to review the book, and hope for the best, and get on to writing the next book.

Brief bio for Robert W. Walker:

 

Award-winning author, ROBERT W. WALKER has been a citizen of Charleston, West Virginia five years and lives with his wife and four stepchildren in the Capitol City. Rob created his highly acclaimed INSTINCT and EDGE SERIES between 1982 and 2005.  He has since written his award-winning historical series featuring Inspector Alastair Ransom with CITY FOR RANSOM (2006), SHADOWS IN THE WHITE CITY (2007), and CITY OF THE ABSENT (2008).  This history-mystery hybrid straddles the Chicago World’s Fair circa 1893, and has had enthusiastic reviews from Chicago historians and the Chicago Tribune,  which likened “the witticism to Mark Twain, the social consciousness to Dickens, and the ghoulish atmosphere to Poe!”   Rob’s current work is Dead On and a 3-part historical thriller ebook entitled Children of Salem. Rob is also working on PlagueShip Titanic, a re-structuring of the Titanic story which attempts to explain why the captain intentionally sent the ship to the bottom of the North Atlantic. You can find Rob at www.RobertWalkerbooks.com ,  www.HarperCollins.com www.acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com , and http://tinyurl.com/ykch9vf

ExcerpTuesday - Robert Walker

I'm baaack!

And ready to begin a new week. Robert Walker has graciously shared an excerpt today form his latest Children of Salem.

Excerpt from Children of Salem
Chapter Four

…this soft-spoken, cat-padding little woman had been around Samuel Parris for more years than most of his flock. She’d come with him and his wife and child from their last known residence, Barbados, where general knowledge had him trading in his sea legs to become a trader, a businessman.
Does Tituba hold the key? She appeared to both fear and hate her master. Not the best of relations.
Jeremy had an enormous task facing him. What had drawn this former merchant of Barbados to Salem? Not the mere promise of the parsonage and its damnably small apple orchard and rickety out buildings? There had to be more.
Jeremy thought of how Parris had ordered the black woman out of her bed as if she were a detested cur. And that look the servant had shot the minister when he turned his back on her—pure, unadulterated hatred and venom.
How that venom came to be, wondered Jeremy.
A great deal could be learned—and thus reported—about a man just in the manner of how he handled those in his care, and those he called his servants, and those he called his congregation.
Jeremy had uncinched and unbridled the horse, and he now placed the saddle on a rail. He used his own bedroll to place across Dancer’s back.
“May I have it?” asked Tituba in a surprisingly resonant, deep voice that filled the small outbuilding.
“May you . . . have what?”
She pointed, her nail like a talon. “Your saddle, Massa . . . ”
“My saddle?”
“For my head rest with pillow.” She lifted her pillow.
“You miss Barbados?” he asked as he placed the saddle where she’d created a bed of hay.
“I do . . . my family all there. My baby, too.”
“You left your baby in Barbados?” Jeremy was incredulous, and he heard Parris’ warning again at the back of his head. “Don’t talk to the woman.” All the more reason to speak to her.
“Dead baby . . . dead an’-an’ buried.”
“I . . . I’m terribly sorry. I can imagine no worse torture on earth than to lose a child.”
“There can be worse.”
“Really?” Jeremiah squinted at her. “Such as?”
Her eyes met his squint. “Not never holding your child, ever.”
“I . . . I don’t understand.”
“N-Nor seeing it.”
“You never saw the child?”
“Not never no.”

"What happens in Robert Walker's novels shouldn't happen even to fictional characters." JA Konrath.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Rob Walker has published consistently since 1979 and has to date over fifty titles in print and ebook publication. Children of Salem has been his life's work, begun as his dissertation at NU for his Masters in English Education and now a Kindle Original title. His long-running critically acclaimed Instinct Series, his Edge Series, and his City Series have sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies over the years. He currently teaches at West Virginia State University and is working on a novel tentatively entitled Curse of the Titanic, a retelling of that fateful night with a wild twist that makes it a thriller. Rob lives with his writer wife, Miranda Phillips Walker and four children in Charleston, WV. His website is http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/