Ten Years Have Got Behind You

[starshipcat]

Sarah Hoyt has an interesting post at her blog about looking back on your life and mid-life crises. In her case it was precipitated by a trip home to Portugal to visit her parents, who are still in good health at the moment but are approaching the age at which frailties and health issues tend to multiply and snowball

Comments

[starshipcat]

I do my best to make sure that it doesn't have any typos or formatting glitches. Obviously there are some formatting issues that are difficult to prevent because they only show up on actual devices that I don't own, but show up fine on the previewer software. But I always keep an eye on the spellcheck alerts, make sure that everything that's marked is indeed a proper name, a technical term, or a foreign/fictional term, rather than an actual spelling error or typo. No doubt a few things slip through, especially in a text that's heavy on words that the spellchecker won't recognize.

Still, the frustration of being unable to get noticed in an overcrowded market is enough that I can understand how people would decide to fudge the rules a little bit, maybe slip a few bucks into the hand of a friend in exchange for that first review that breaks the ice and makes it easier for other people to put up their own reviews. Probably most of them know what they're doing is wrong, but they figure it's just a small wrong, like driving a few miles over the speed limit or taking a rolling stop through a stop sign when there's nobody at the intersection, not something big like murder or arson.

[sartorias]

Well, there are many using paid reviews out there. Unfortunately, most of these reviews read like paid reviews, and potential readers now trained to skim past the daily hundreds of "Read My Book!" pleas on Facebook and Twitter skim right past all the burble of superlatives that don't actually say anything about the book. When you're reading through reviews, what can you really learn about the book from "Author Firstname (always a clue to paid or friend reviews) is better than J.K. Rowling and G.R.R. Martin, with her brilliant and lyrical tale that was such a page turner I simply couldn't put it down!!! This is the times better than Game of Thrones/Harry Potter/Divergent/Katniss Everdeen, and I am so exciting about volume two coming out soon! Everyone should go out and buy this book right now!!!"

But still, giving a free copy for a fair and honest review to a reviewer is a legitimate way to get reviews out there. And some reviewers are willing to take projects if they aren't overloaded. The key is finding reviewers who appear to fall into the readership one aims at. And even then, as many writers say, giving out copies isn't a sure way to get that many reviews back, but even a few is a start.