Reviewing Reviewers

I spent most of this morning reading reviews of my own books. It's a valuable way to measure how good or bad they may be. Of course, I like my writing. But my opinion of me is quite skewed.

The extremes you can toss off without much thought. There's the occasional one which gushes as though I've written the Great American Novel. I haven't. My stuff is decent enough but won't be mentioned in literature textbooks two hundred years from now. Then there's reviews which rip a book to shreds. I pass over those equally. I think I can honestly say nothing of mine is shallow or amateurish. Yet for whatever reason the reader was terribly offended. Oh well.

It's the ones which are constructive, or at least are obviously trying to be, which are the most useful even where I disagree. I've been told I use too many adverbs. I'm not sure that I do, but the issue comes up enough that I need to consider it. Similarly, a book is occasionally dinged as in need of a professional edit. That might be useful, I admit. Yet those things cost (one to two thousand dollars is not unusual), and I'm not sure there's a real return on investment there. As I'm doing this writing thing mostly on a hope and a prayer, I'm willing to do what promotion I can on the cheap and see how it all plays out.

On the whole, things look good. Each book (five are currently available) ranks between 4.3 and 4.7 on Amazon's five star scale, and the general interest readers appear to like them. And that's my intended audience. Not grammar geeks, though grammar is far more important than we think, but folks who just like to read. Enough so to give even my scribbles a chance.