Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts

Wednesday, 16 January 2013

This passes for a thought process, apparently

I was going to write something terribly interesting (or perhaps merely terrible) about writing and technology but that can wait.  I'm going to rave about someone else's book instead.

There are many ways I choose what to read, ranging from browsing idly to discovering something by an author whose work I've enjoyed before to a sudden craving for an old favourite.  And then there's the method which is more me than any other: going off at a tangent.

In the past this has led to some fantastic finds, particiularly when I've applied the priniciple to music (an interest in David Bowie's more obscure work leading to Iggy Pop singing Belgian jazz, for example).  The book I'm reading now is one I came across originally as part of a gift set when I was a student, which I suppose comes under idle browsing because I liked the look of the set but couldn't get to the blurb.  And it's an old favourite, establishing itself as such on first reading as one of the books I wish I'd written (although to have done so I'd have to been a) much older and b) deceased by now, which would make this blog marginally more interesting).  But I've come back to it through a classic piece of tangentery.  I shall take you through it in stages so you can tell if you too choose books by this method.

1. Over the Christmas holiday, the 1983 film Wargames was on TV.  I knew I'd loved it as a kid but couldn't remember enough about it to know why.  About ninety minutes in, John Wood turned up and I realised that was why, he'd made a huge impression on me when I was about nine.

2. So after the film I tried to think what else I'd seen him in, which meant a browse on the Internet Movie Database, very useful for settling 'oh, it's whatersname from thingy, oh you know, no, not her, you fool' arguments in our house.

3. And I saw that in the 1960s he'd been in an adaptation of Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, playing the poet Richard Cadogan.

4. Richard Cadogan is one of my Fictional Men For Whom I Have A Soft Spot.

5. John Wood would have been excellent in the role.

6. The series does not seem available to watch now.

7. Therefore I am rereading The Moving Toyshop and it is every bit as good as I remembered - and it's been a while since I read it so a lot of it is coming to me almost as new and it is a huge treat.

So, in a roundabout way that is no kind of useful review at all, I recommend that you try Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels, solving Oxford crimes decades before Inspector Morse while wearing an extraordinary hat.  Except Swan Song because that wasn't as good as the others.

Which brings me back, in a tortuously roundabout way, to my original question.  How do you choose your books?  Do tell...

Sunday, 30 September 2012

Pottering on

I feel sorry for J.K. Rowling.

Writing a book is hard.  It takes time and effort and a lot of emotional investment.  I should think every author worries if anyone will want to read their book, let alone actually like it.  Now imagine the pressure of being so famous and so successful.  Either people will be desperate to read your book and vocal in their disappointment if it doesn't meet their impossibly high expectations, or they'll be desperate for you to be seen to fail just because you're so famous and so successful.

There is no way Rowling will get an unbiased review.  Every reader who has heard of Rowling or of Harry Potter will come to The Casual Vacancy with some sort of agenda.  So, yes, I feel sorry for a very successful author.

There's a moral here for us minnows: be careful what you wish for.

Thursday, 30 August 2012

Just because you think they're out to get you...

As Lexi Revellian wrote recently, Writer's Angst is a well-documented complaint.  I've moved up a gear.  I have Writer's Paranoia.

It's been coming on for a while.  I had a week where Looking for Buttons sold pretty well.  Then I had a week with no sales at all.  I panicked and held a three-day free promotion over the Bank Holiday weekend, which saw it climb to number 7 in Amazon's UK humour chart and number 29 (I think) in their US humor chart.  I waited, with the obligatory clichéd bated breath, to see how this would affect sales.

It didn't.  Nothing happened for a few days, then today, glory be, I had a five star review on Amazon UK (thank you, whoever you are!) and sold a respectable handful of copies.  When I checked a little later (compulsive checking of ranking and sales figures is an early symptom of Writer's Paranoia), two of these had been returned for a refund.

Well, that was it.  Crushed does not even begin to describe it.  While the calm-eyed scientist part of me was pointing out that it may not be that they actively disliked it, it may even have been an inadvertent multiple purchase caused by wobbly fingers, and anyway, does it really matter, the rest of me, the stressed majority that is already gibbering because I start a new job next week, is obsessing over those two returns.  Did they buy the book expecting haberdashery tips?  Fifty Shades-esque squelchiness?  Did they hate the prose?  The characters?  The plot?

I've taken some deep breaths and listened to my inner dispassionate scientist.  Sometimes you buy something and it's not what you expect so you return it.  I'm sure M&S don't weep because I've returned a jacket that makes me look like I'm wearing a cardboard box underneath it.  Why should I react any differently when someone returns my book?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to check my sale figures again...

Thursday, 9 August 2012

You know how to whistle, don't you?

If you'd asked me about feedback ten years ago, I'd have launched into an explanation of how amplified sound leaving a loudspeaker is picked up by the microphone, causing a cycle of further amplification until you get the whistling screech familiar at rock concerts or near a hearing aid wearer.  Possibly I'd have drawn a diagram.  If you'd asked me on a day when things were going particularly badly, I'd probably have gibbered into my copy of Fundamentals of Acoustics and lapsed into miserable silence while scrolling through the vintage jewellery listings on eBay.

But those days are behind me now and today I'm more concerned with feedback from readers.  Yesterday a friend told me I had my first US review on Amazon.  I was a little nervous.  I don't know anyone in the States so this was my first review by a complete stranger.  Eventually I plucked up the courage to read it and it was far kinder than I'd dared hope.  This was A Relief.

Writing is a solitary pursuit.  It's easy to lose all perspective over whether what you write is any good or not, and it gets worse once you've had a few knockbacks from literary agents (although I still cherish the rejection letter than described Looking for Buttons as "well-written and perceptive").  Until now, only friends had judged the book and, delusional though I am, I could not regard their opinions as totally unbiased.  But now Looking for Buttons is out there, fending for itself, being read and, I hope, enjoyed by people I will never meet.  I hope that some of them will tell me what they think.

Until then, I'll just have to whistle to myself.

Friday, 22 June 2012

Starry-eyed

Looking for Buttons has received its first Amazon review.

Five stars.

If this self-publishing lark becomes any more exciting I'm going to have to lie down with a damp cloth on my forehead.

Tuesday, 12 July 2011

Money has not changed hands

... although I did send homemade chocolate chip cookies in the post, which may or may not have influenced the outcome.

The first review of Looking For Buttons, by the charming and erudite Norfolk Bookworm can be read here.

I think I should probably go and bake some more biscuits.

Monday, 11 July 2011

A teensy teaser

Great excitement after a rather too long period of silence.  Looking For Buttons is about to get its first review (even though it's yet to be published).  I shall, of course, post a link here as soon as it appears.