Hey guys,

Before I get into the beefy goodness of today’s post, I’d like to talk a little about me.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE WITH THE MAN IN THE BEAR SUIT

So I’m in Florida for a conference and… the airline lost my luggage. This, apparently is a regular thing judging from the nonchalant attitude of the man in the Baggage Service desk (this guy, BTW, wins the award for Most Ironic Job Description. His job is to apologize for the lack of baggage service). To add to my woes, my boss is a crazy party animal and I hate hangovers. So I’m hungover. But the hotel I’m staying in is beautiful. Don’t worry, I’ll post pictures when I return!

WE NOW TAKE YOU BACK TO YOUR REGULAR PROGRAMMING

So Warren Ellis posted something interesting on the old BAD WIRE e-newsletter. His idea for self-promotion was this:

– Write up a one page short story (true micro-fiction, like less than 200 words)
– Put your website address at the bottom
– Print out a hundred sheets
– Tape said sheets anywhere you have a captive audience. Bus shelters, bathrooms, your friend’s shirt (this work better if you have a hot friend), wherever.

This is an excellent idea. If people like your fiction, they’ll either take the story or write down your web address and check out your site. Instant audience. The idea works even better if you have a book coming out. Total cost to you: like 5 bucks in paper and ink.

To expand on Mr. Ellis’ idea. I’m sure you could print out T-shirts with some micro-fiction on the back. Is this too cheesy? Maybe. But it’ll help get the word out nonetheless.

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Gimme Shelter“ by The Rolling Stones

Many of you have probably read the article I posted earlier on the reviewing system at Amazon.com. In the article I commented that I thought Midwest Review’s policies of awarding 5 star reviews to every author was damaging the review system. A reader who had received a five star review forwarded a link to Jim Cox, managing editor at Midwest Book Review, who then sent an e-mail that tried to explain the reasons for some of his policies.

I had a few questions of my own so I seized the opportunity to interview him.

Here is the interview in its entirely with my comments at the bottom.

Questions:

1. You receive 2000 book/month. Are all the books read? How do your in-house reviewers decide which books get a positive recommendation? How is a book’s intended audience determined?

When books arrive each day, Monday through Saturday, our mailroom guy takes them out of their respective bags, boxes, and packages, puts the accompanying paperwork with them, then stacks them all on my desk. Then I sit down and do a kind of literary triage — meaning that I personally screen them and put them into one of three stacks:

Stack 1: Automatic rejection. This can be for such reasons as they submitted a title that is a galley or uncorrected proof — and we review finished, published copies only. The book features a substandard cover that would make it non-competitive with others of its genre or category as encountered on a bookstore or library shelf. The type is too small for its intended readership. A cursory inspection turns up typos or flagrant errors of grammar. The book arrived without an accompanying cover letter and/or publicity release.

Stack 2: Automatic acceptance. This is usually because I’ve got a reviewer who specializes in the genre or category the book represents. The book is especially unusual, well-made, or otherwise distinctive. The book is in a very popular genre such as a cookbook, an art book, or a significant social issue currently in the news.

Stack 3: Possible acceptance. The book arrives accompanied by the appropriate paperwork, passes muster in its physical appearance, and I’m hopeful that it will be accepted for a review assignment by one of our reviewers sometime in the next 14 to 16 weeks. This is, by far, the largest stack to come out of the daily screening process.

2. What happens if your volunteer disagrees with the in-house reviewer? Is their review discarded?

All reviews by our volunteer and freelance reviewers are run regardless of whether they give a positive or a negative recommendation so long as they coherently explain to the reader the basis for their opinion. Occasionally we will have two or more reviews on the same title. I run them all on the basis that each reviewer brings to their review of that same title differing life experiences, skills, abilities, and perspectives.

3. Midwest Book Review’s Wikipedia article was recently changed from

Your site claims you do not accept compensation for reviews, but because of the above, I would like to ask you straight out. Do you accept any donations or compensation at all from authors or publishers or any other agent at any point in the review process?

We do not permit authors, publishers, or publicists to contribute financially to the Midwest Book Review in order to be able to avoid any conflict of interest issues. We do permit anyone to donate postage stamps to the Midwest Book Review if they want to express their appreciation or simply say ‘thank you’ for what we try to accomplish in behalf of the small press community. Our board of directors determined that postage stamp donations would not constitute an inappropriate means of expressing support for the Midwest Book Review’s three part mission statement to promote literacy, library usage, and small press publishing.

4. Why are so many of your reviews similar to the Editorial Descriptions? Many of Midwest Book Review’s reviews could be written without having read the book. Is there any vetting or oversight of your volunteers?

The reviews turned in by the reviewers range from brief blurbs to multi-page essays. We provide reviewers with a ‘Reviewer’s Guideline’ (you can find it in the ‘Advice for Publisher’ archive that is on the Midwest Book Review website at http://www.midwestbookreview.com). Basically a good review provides an accuratge summary description of the book’s content followed by a coherent recommendation with respect to it’s intended readership. Often that summary description can be drawn from the publicity release in combination with the book’s contents.

5. Please elaborate on why you believe Amazon’s rating system is flawed.

This has long been a pet peeve of mine because it is so arbitrary. One’ person’s 3 is another person’s 4, and a third person’s 2. There are no standard definitions of what these numbers should mean or stand for. I’d like to see them done away with altogether — but Amazon won’t permit the posting of any review unless it is given a number in their 1 through 5 rating system.

So I instructed our webmaster (who does all the posting for reviews generated ‘in-house’ by the Midwest Book Review editorial staff) to use 5 if the book was given a positive recommendation.

The theory is that for a book to make it all the way through the Midwest Book Review process from its initial screening, through it’s being accepted for a review assignment, to the review being completed and published in one or more of our monthly book review publications, it merited the highest recommendation available under the Amazon rating system. Inferior books, flawed books, substandard books are assumed to have been weeded out and never made it to the ‘finish line’ of publication in one of our book review magazines.

This applies only to our ‘in-house’ reviews. The reviews turned in by the freelance reviewers and volunteers are their property. Only they have the right to decide whether or not to post their reviews on Amazon. They (and only they) have the right to decide what rating number to assign to those reviews they decide to post on Amazon.

For example, one of the Midwest Book Review’s most prolific freelance reviewers is Harriet Klausner. She is also one of the most prolific reviewers on Amazon.com — and she does not uniformly ward 5′s to the reviews she writes and posts.

Then consider the phenomena of differing opinions! One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Books I read and disliked as a teenager in high school literature classes became books I appreciated when re-read as an adult some thirty or more years later.

The moral of this story is that while you should make yourself open to the opinions of others, ultimately it’s your own views, opinions, judgements, and values that should determine your choices in books as in life.

6. Why do all of the books you rate merit a 5 star rating? Surely each of the 32,000 books you’ve rated cannot be flawless. Why are there no 4.5 ratings?

See the above response to Question 5.

I sincerely thank you for your time.

It’s my pleasure. I always enjoy discussing what we do here at the Midwest Book Review. In many ways we are so unique as to be something of an anomaly in the publishing industry. We’ve been written up (and uniformly positively) by some 22 ‘how to’ books over the past 30 years. As experienced and organized as we are, there is always something new to be learned, something that we could do better, something previously overlooked and needs to be paid attention to.

Anytime an author, a publisher, or a reviewer deems themselves to be above critique and criticism, that’s when that author, publisher, or reviewer will begin to atrophy and eventually make themselves obsolete among their peers and with the public.

I’m going to include this Q&A response in my monthly column the “Jim Cox Report” which I write for the benefit of the small press community. It is also archived on the Midwest Book Review website

..You have my complete permission to include my comments in your own blog and anywhere else you feel would be appropriate.

First, let me say that Mr. Cox responded to me in one day. The guy is obviously a class act. He also reacted professionally to my question about accepting payments. Since the typical response from scammers is defensive outrage, I’m inclined to believe Mr. Cox despite the Wikipedia article. His goal of bringing attention to self-published and small press books is laudible.

That said, I disagree with some of his policies. If you look closely, you can see that Mr. Cox has instructed his webmaster to award a book 5 stars if it is a “finished, published copy”, if it has a nice cover, the type is large, a “cursory inspection” reveals few typos, and if the submission is accompanied by a cover letter. That’s why all of his reviews get 5 stars. These kinds of review mislead Amazon’s clients since there is no way they can know this in advance. They merely see that Midwest looks professional and has given the book a five star review.

He claims that he does this as a kind of protest against Amazon’s “arbitrary” rating system. “One’ person’s 3 is another person’s 4, and a third person’s 2” he says. I contend that it is a professional reviewer’s job not to tell you if they liked the book, it’s to say if, in their professional opinion, you will like the book. This is why they’re paid the big bucks. You read a review because you trust the reviewer’s opinion. Reviewers don’t have to precisely say what YOU would rate it, they have to say what their overall readership will think of it. Rating every book a 5 out of 5 betrays this principle.

I also believe that it is Mr. Cox’s responsibility to have a member of his staff vet reviews before attaching his name to it. If a reviewer merely rephrases what is contained in the Editorial Description, A) they may not have actually read the book, and B) the reader of the review gains nothing. What we, as readers, want is to be able to form an opinion based on a knowledgable, in-depth review that talks about plot, characterization, theme, and writing style. Rephrasing the book jacket doesn’t help us.

Mr. Cox, please consider adding some oversight to your reviewers. A lot of people depend on your opinions to guide their purchases. Please don’t let them down.

EDIT: Mr. Cox responded in the comments. I have to say, I’m a convert. It’s a pleasure dealing with someone so open and professional.

Hey guys,

It looks like “The Cons of Writing.com” post I wrote last week sparked some controversy with a reader. Originally, they commented on the post, but some of their concerns meritted further discussion, so I’ve posted it here.

Here is the comment in its entirety with my own comments in return.

>Writing.com only works because writers post their work >online to get critiqued,

That’s a nice statement, but blatantly untrue. Why? Because not everyone that posts there has any desire to get their work critiqued. I’ll use myself as just one example. I have a lot of stuff online there, and quite a bit of it is public. I really couldn’t care less if anyone reads it or not. I’m using it as an online portfolio that I can refer people to for examples of my writing. There are far more people that do this than there are who are trolling for crits.

If you are doing this, you are creating content for a for-profit enterprise (Writing.com) for free. You are far better off driving traffic to your website or blog. How to you drive people to your Writing.com portfolio? By inviting critiques, of course.

I’d debate your last statement. The site is geared for critiques (every story has a review tag on it, and readers are often rewarded for their reviews with the site’s cash equivalent). If you want exposure, you’re way better off posting your port on your own site.

>If you post your work at Writing.com, many editors won’t >buy it. This is because when you publish your work at >Writing.com, you have to grant them non-exclusive rights >to publish your work (or they wouldn’t be able to display >it).

This is true but it stops short of making the real point. Anything you post on a public forum any where online CAN (and is by some) taken as ‘first publication’. That includes posts to a forum on SFReader, posts in a blog (such as this one) and everywhere else.

Now we get to the blanket statement ‘publishers won’t buy it’. While this is true of some, it is not true of other.

Sword Review, for example, requires you submit anything previously posted online as a resubmission. They’ll happily consider it then. Bewildering Stories could care less if you posted it any where else and doesn’t even ask if you did. Every publisher, be it magazine or book publisher, is different. Before posting something online, it’s a good idea to find out whether the publisher you’re interested in submitting stuff to will have a problem with that or not, but to make a blanket statement like the above accomplishes nothing other than scaring newbie writers into not posting anything at all.

You are talking about selling your “reprint rights”. The Sword Review, which you quote, has this to say about Reprints:

We do consider reprints, but we do not favor them, so they must be exceptional. Further, recent reprints (within the last year) are of little interest to us.

For the many student and new authors, it is important to keep in mind that stories and poems posted on blogs and discussion boards has been published.

Why would you shoot yourself in the foot like that? If reprints ARE accepted, then they pay at a far lower rate than first run stories. Bewildering Stories is a non paying market, so in effect you are “donating” your work to them, they aren’t purchasing it.

As for scaring newbie writers, I’d say many of them run afoul of the legal issue without knowing it (judging from the number of submission guidelines from places like the Sword Review that specifically mention it). You call it “scaring”. I call it “educating”.

>Another downside is that the site is only really effective >for the beginning writer. Why? Well, the site is full of bad >writing (Except, of course, for your writing [I heart my >readers]).

Everywhere is full of bad writing, including a lot of printed items in newspapers, magazines and even books. That’s got nothing to do with why the site is effective for anyone or not.

Again, another blanket statement which isn’t true at all. There are a lot of professional, published authors on writing.com who use it for a number of things, and who find it very useful. Just the amount of exposure from the large number of visitors is useful for advertising.

Again, and I can’t say this enough, you are better off driving readers to your own site. As for professional published authors, I would challenge you to produce one traditional published novel that appeared on Writing.com after it’s been traditionally published (ie. while it’s still on the shelves, not out of print). There are some professionally published authors on there, true, but everyone I’ve come across has removed the content (often at the request of their publisher) after it’s been picked up.

I think authors like John Scalzi have proven that building your own brand name is the way to go. Since Writing.com treats all authors the same and doesn’t even give you the flexibility of a MySpace page, I still contend Writing.com is not a good tool for self-promotion.

>Nothing that’s good enough to actually get published is >on Writing.com. Now there are exceptions, chiefly among >the writers that fudge on the legal issues as mentioned >above, or with those too afraid of rejection to sub >anything.

now we get into slander and liable. And another blanket statement that is blatantly untrue. Jordan can possibly be forgiven as I’m pretty sure he hasn’t taken the time to read every single piece on the site, but a number of my pieces which have been accepted for publication are on WDC, as are plenty of other people’s works. Still up there even after being published some where else.

Not every publisher requires that pieces online some where else be taken down if they accept them for publication.

It’s certainly not “slander” as I haven’t spoken anything to anyone. As for liable, well this is a blog and is, by definition, simply my opinion. It is impossible for one’s opinion to be considered “liable”. As for publication, I was referring to professional, paying publications (5c a word according to SFWA). Again, if you have examples, even of your own work, that fit this criteria, post a link in the comments.

I’ll stop now. It’s evident that Jordan is angry at WDC, that he feels he has cause to be and that’s fine. But to make blanket statements and stand on a soapbox shouting about things which are perhaps true in his experience, but not true in someone else’s, does everyone a disservice. The simple addition of ‘in my opinion’ or ‘as far as I have experienced’ to the blanket statements would go a long way toward fixing that.

Now this is where I start to take offense. I’m not sure you’re qualified to know what’s going on inside my head. Frequently, I don’t even have a clue. The simple addition of “in my opinion” that you are talking about is inherent in the fact that this is my blog, on my page, on my domain. If you read the “about this blog” link on your right, you’ll notice that nowhere do I claim to be an expert. In fact, quite the opposite.

That fact that you commented on my negative post and not on the positive betrays your own bias. By creating the two posts, I was trying to be as fair and even handed as possible. You have not done the same.

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Fall to Pieces“ by Velvet Revolver

Okay, I’ll just come out and say it right now: The reviewing system on Amazon.com is broken. So there, I said it, and I stand by it. Here’s why:

Midwest Book Review posts a lot of reviews on Amazon. Thiry-two thousand of them at last count. Yes, I said thirty-two THOUSAND. They must have quite a range of reviews. Except that they don’t. Every single review they’ve ever done gets five stars. Even self published authors universally get five stars reviews. I have nothing against the self-published, but can they ALL have written a work equal to Vinge’s? I think not.

One argument I’ve heard is that they only post positive reviews, to which I ask, why? Readers rely on reviewers to tell them not only when a book is good, but also when it’s bad. By posting only good reviews Midwest is homogenizing the reading landscape. If a reviewer claims all books are equally good, then their reviews are useless. As for the initial assertion, I don’t believe they publish only good reviews. If they’ve given 32000 5 star reviews (the top tier), can you imagine how many reviews they must do overall? How many books are perfect, 1%? So that means they do 3.2 million reviews and toss out all but 32,000? Sure…

Out of the reviews they DO do, many of them show no actual knowledge of the book itself, other than what can be read in the Editorial Book Description (written by the author). This is often a real good sign that the review is fake. In my opinion, if these guys think they’re doing some good by spamming 5 star reviews, they’re daydreaming.

We’re also not fooled by authors that get their friends and families to log on a give them five star reviews. Even a “Real Name” moniker doesn’t help in detecting them. A good rule of thumb is to never trust a reviewer that’s written only one review.

Especially bad are anonymous reviews that are clearly written by the author themselves (like, for instance, if you review your book using your Writing.com handle. You know who you are, and now so do we).

But the very worst kind of review was the subject of a recent post on Amy Casil Sterling’s blog. Sterling’s book was given a poor review by George Randolph Calverhall. Like the fake-looking reviews written by Midwest Book review, Calverhall’s reviews were all spurious, containing very little information that wasn’t available in the Editorial Book Description. Upon further investigation, Sterling discovered that Calverhall was targetting books by minorities for bad reviews. Personally, I was stunned at the pettiness of this tactic, but, looking at the review, it sure seems like Calverhall didn’t read the book. I could have written that review (Sorry Amy, IMAGO’s on the reading list).

What can we do about this? Amazon needs to post a few of each reviewers stats next to their names, not just their location, or if they are using a real name. They should include the number of reviews the reviewer has posted as well as, and this is key, the average rating of their reviews. Amazon could then use this information to “sort” reviews according to relevance. Reviewers like Calverhall (too many negative reviews) and Midwest Book Review (too many positives) would migrate to the bottom of the list . Even if Amazon doesn’t perform this sort, the reader could, themselves, decide which reviews are relevant.

Readers deserve to know when they’re being hoodwinked and minority authors deserve to have their work judged on merit, not the colour of their skin (Or in Ms Sterling’s case: her sex). The system needs to be fixed. Come’on Amazon, put a fire under it.

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Under Pressure“ by Queen

I’m not going to cover more ground here on how to avoid getting scammed. There’s TONS of material about that on the web already. But, as you know, part of the mission statement of this blog is to bring those resource to you. So, on that note, I’ll mention three very importants bookmarks no writer should be without.

The first one, of course, is SFWA’s very own Writer Beware. The page is maintained by the folks over at SFWA and contains warnings about larcenous literary agents, predatory publishers, and um evil(?) editors (no relation to the Evil Editor who, aside from some snarkiness, is generally a good guy).

The site is highly recommended. Some must read sections are the Thumbs Down Agency List and the Thumbs Down Publisher List.

And that brings us to our second spot. It’s A.C. Crispin’s and Victoria Strauss’ Writer Beware blog. The blog was definitely the right format for Writer Beware. Many dubious agencies change their names frequently to avoid bad publicity. These two writers have actually succeeded in putting fraudulent publishers in jail, so you know they’re serious. The site should be called “Con Men Beware”.

I’ll just mention the final resource briefly as I’m nearly late for dinner with dad. Preditors & Editors has numerous services available to writers, from agency listings that contain a “recommend” and “not recommended” tag, to lists of attorneys, awards, and publishers. The site also holds an annual “best of” e-awards contest for best zine, best story, best editor–you know, the usual categories. If the awards mean anything other than that the recipient has a strong web presence is up for debate, but any exposure is good exposure, right?

Anyways, that’s it for now. Upcoming posts will deal will tackle Amazon head on… so stay tuned for the carnage!