Review Writers

Beware of fellow authors (or anyone really) who offers a review on Goodreads if you send them a free copy of your novel.  Check out their past reviews first, reviews of their books, what others in the community who have crossed their path say about them.  Don't do what I did; jump at the chance with a Pollyanna recklessness and wide-eyed innocence.

He gave it three stars and stated that he had to shelve it due to numerous errors in grammar, word choices, and chided me about revealing what the title meant too soon.  Though it didn’t send me into a tailspin, it did cause me concern.

The thing about revealing what That Dog Don’t Bark meant in the context of the story didn’t cause me any distress; he obviously just missed the point as to why I revealed the meaning in the first paragraph of the novel.   In street vernacular, if your ‘dog don’t bark’ it means you aren’t tough, which I wanted to establish right away so as the dangers arose around my main character his peril would be high.  To overcome his challenges his dog would have to learn to bark.

But the mention of ‘errors’ got me going.  So after running the entire manuscript through three top grammar and spelling checkers, I found two minor spelling mistakes that occurred past the point where he said he had to shelve it due to the ‘numerous errors’.

Those two spelling errors are now corrected, so the completed novel that will debut live on Amazon on May 15, 2019 is grammatically perfect.

It was only after satisfying myself that the problem lay in the reviewer, I checked him out.  He’s self-published one novel and it received so many poor reviews and rankings that he withdrew it from publication.  Seems like our boy is a failed writer who is looking to tear down other people’s work to salve his own ego.

Crabs in a bucket, man.  Suck it up and keep working on your own skills.

In his initial contact with me he said he would ‘give an honest review’ and assured me; ‘I’m not an asshole’.

Oh, yes you are.  Yet you taught me a valuable lesson; I’ll never punch below my weight class again.