Small miracle but a big feeling

There are a lot of literary prizes in the world, but not that many awarded on the basis of readers’ votes. This is why one of my favorite second place finishes was when All the Ugly and Wonderful Things came in second in the Goodreads Choice Awards in 2016. Nearly 28,000 people voted for my book, and it beat out such big name authors as Jodi Picoult, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. My mind was boggled that so many readers voted for my book.

This year, sadly, The Reckless Oath We Made didn’t make the first round. Then something amazing happened: readers wrote my book in. Enough readers that it moved on to the semifinals. You still have about 12 hours left to vote in the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards. You could even vote for The Reckless Oath We Made, if you wanted. It would be an even more astounding little miracle if it moved onto the next round.

Even if I don’t make it to the next round, however, I feel like I’ve experienced one of the things that writers don’t talk enough about. We talk about awards, we talk about reviews, we talk about advances, and we talk about the disappointments and frustrations of publishing as an industry. So rarely do we talk about that small piercing feeling of joy in community that comes from connecting with your readers, and hearing from them that they connected with your book.

For writers like me who are extreme introverts with mental health issues that make appreciating ourselves difficult, it’s a huge feeling to know that you’ve stitched this fragile thread between your work and its readers, to know that there are people out there who are nodding along as you tell your stories, and they’re passing those stories onto others.

So while it feels like a little miracle that my book garnered enough write-in votes to end up in the semifinals of one of the few really big reader awards out there, knowing that my people have found me is a big deal. Thank you for the part you’ve played in that.

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Things (some) writers fantasize about

I’m just two weeks late in giving a wrap-up of my trip to New York City to be on a panel at Book Expo, but I’m operating under the idea that blog posts are not like organ transplants, and so it’s better late than never.

The panel was about how my publisher used Goodreads to market my book, increase sales, and get it on the New York Times bestseller list, which is definitely something writers fantasize about. (Not all of them, but many.) The write up is here, on Goodreads’ blog. It’s heavy on stats, and shows the long view of my publisher’s plans for my book release.

Because Goodreads was bringing me to NYC anyway, I got to do a kind of victory lap: meeting with my publisher in his corner office of the Flatiron Building, lunch with my editor, my publicist, and the Director of Marketing at St. Martin’s Press, stopping off at various bookstores to sign stock, meeting readers at Book Expo, and generally doing things that are incredibly exhausting to introverts like myself. Hence the caveat about things some writers fantasize about. My writerly fantasies usually focus on selling enough books to quit my day job, although I could definitely get used to having a driver to schlep me around.

While I was in NYC, I also got name-checked by The New Yorker in its snippish coverage of the new Amazon bookstore: Amazon’s Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores Are Not Built for People Who Actually Read. (With a headline like that, you can’t kid yourself that they’re impressed, but they did note that I’m one of only six authors in the G’s in Fiction.)

Over all, I had a lovely trip, even if I did come home and need to sleep and be alone for about three days solid.

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ATUAWT Deleted Scenes: The Poll

If you saw me at any of my recent events, you may have heard me admit that the first draft of All the Ugly and Wonderful Things weighed in at a hefty 200,000 words. Nearly 80,000 words more than the final, published version.

So what became of those roughly 300 pages that I whittled off? I’ve been saving them in a file called Lost Scenes. What’s in there? All the stuff I wrote that just never quite had a place in the book. Some of it I was sad to cut. Some of it I knew I wouldn’t be able to use, even as I wrote it.

How can you get your hands on those deleted scenes?

I’m sending them out to my newsletter subscribers, so step one: sign up for my newsletter.

I’ll be sending out deleted scenes as I hit certain review numbers on Goodreads and Amazon. (Darn it! There is a catch.) So step two: leave me a review, please. I’ll send out the first deleted scene when ATUAWT hits 1,000 reviews on Goodreads, another when it hits 200 reviews on Amazon, and another if it hits 50 reviews on Barnes & Noble.

Basically, the more reviews I have, the happier my publisher is, and the happier my publisher is, the more likely they are to want to buy another book from me. I believe that’s a win-win, if you enjoyed ATUAWT.

If you’ve already done steps 1 and 2, and you’re killing time, you can also vote in this poll to help decide which scenes I send out first. You can vote for up to three.

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I’m trying to give away books over here!

The funny thing about trying to give away books is that sometimes you just can’t do it. When my publisher lists a giveaway for copies of ALL THE UGLY AND WONDERFUL THINGS on Goodreads, like a thousand people enter. Right now, at this very moment, only 18 people have entered my giveaway for my own personal copies of the book. The good news is that you still have four days to enter! Your odds are awesome! Go here to see all the ways you can enter. Or if you’re really lazy, just go to my previous blog post and tell me what kind of love stories you like. You’ve got til Monday, February 29th.

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Not every book is for everybody

You might think the title of this blog post goes without saying, but considering some of the wacky things happening in the writing community these days, you’d be mistaken. We’ve had an author confess to stalking and harassing someone who gave her novel a poor review, and we’ve had a blogger apologize for years of harassment and threats against writers whose work she didn’t like.

As a passionate reader, I have always maintained a “review” of books I’ve read. In ye olde pre-internet days, I kept a little notebook in which I recorded the books I’d read with a few lines about the book. When Goodreads emerged, I joined and began to track my reading habits there. I viewed it primarily as a tool for me as a reader. Of course, as I connected with people on GR, I also began to see my notes on books as useful to like-minded readers. All the same, in the age of the internet, where data is perpetually retained and easily accessed, I have always tried to be polite when I write reviews of books. I am neither a professional reviewer nor someone who relishes drama. Just as I would hate to read a review of my books that was nasty or personal, I would never want a writer to read one of my reviews and feel that I was being anything but professional, even if I disliked the book.

Despite my policy of being polite, I’ve still received a few nastygrams, typically from people who loved a book I didn’t, and who wished to inform me that I was a stupid poopypants. I don’t think those were the exact words, but something juvenile and unnecessary.

Not a few people have cautioned me of late that as a published writer I ought to be more careful about reviewing and rating books, so as not to attract haters. I’ve considered it, and someday, maybe I’ll need to make a more anonymous Goodreads account, but in the interim, I’ve made a different choice.

I’ve always had a Did Not Finish shelf on my Goodreads account, to identify books that I did not or could not read through to the ending. Rarely do I remark on those books and never do I rate them. This week, however, I added a new shelf: Not Every Book Is for Everybody. Let’s call it NEBIFE. We know in our hearts that this is true, but it seems to get lost within the book community sometimes. A book isn’t bad, just because we didn’t like it, and a reviewer isn’t stupid or evil or many far worse things, just because they didn’t like our favorite book. I come face-to-face with this when I realize that almost 17,000 people on Goodreads have given Nabokov’s Lolita a 1-star rating. 1 star? One? Are you kidding me? I consider Lolita to be one of the greatest English novels of the 20th Century. I love this book.

ONE STAR?!?!?! OMGAAAAAAH!!?!?!?

Yet Goodreads reveals that two people whose opinions I respect have rated Lolita as 1 star. Huh. I guess we’re gonna have to disagree on that one, but I’m not going to send them emails to tell them they’re stupid poopypants. Primarily, because I don’t think they are. Secondarily, because I accept that even a brilliant book will not be the right book for every reader.

I was looking for an apt comparison, and found it quite by accident. I occasionally pull a recipe off allrecipes.com, and it struck me that even when people dislike a recipe and give it a low rating, I have never seen anybody get nasty or personal in a recipe review. I’ve never seen a recipe submitter called a stupid bitch, or a recipe called corrosive garbage, or seen someone wish the original recipe writer be raped to death, all things I’ve seen in book reviews. Similarly, I’ve never seen a recipe submitter get hostile with someone who didn’t like a recipe. Why? Because on some level, as a society, we’ve done well at accepting that not everyone has the same tastes. After all, my mother hates Indian food. Hates it. We’re still on speaking terms, because why wouldn’t we be? I think it’s silly that she dislikes an entire culinary tradition on the basis of one ill-fated buffet visit, but I’m not going to cut her out of my life over it. Similarly, I’m not going to kill a friendship over Lolita. Or even a potential friendship.

In this week, where madness is swirling all around us, I’d like to ask everybody to embrace the concept of NEBIFE. If you get a negative review on a book you wrote, keep in mind that not everybody loves the same books. You can’t expect everybody to love your book. If you read a book you disliked, try framing your review from the perspective that not every book is for everybody, and that this book wasn’t for you.

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You might already be a winner…

Actually, two people have officially already won copies of Lie Lay Lain. Judy and Sharon, check your email for your official notice.

The rest of you, there’s still time to enter to win a copy over on Goodreads. That contest is running until April 27th.

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Oh, my stars! What’s with all the review inflation?

I’m not sure where the star rating system first originated. (Curse you, internet, for failing to provide immediate trivia information!) I believe it became well-known by its use in the Michelin hotel and restaurant guides, which have been giving stars to deserving establishments since 1926. Now? Star rankings are everywhere. From football stadiums to random hotel sites to amazon.com to this new-fangled GoodReads.

Originally, the star itself was a marker of quality. To be singled out by Guide Michelin with a star was to be raised to the firmament, put above lesser establishments. (See what I did there? ;o) Pretty quickly, however, Michelin added two- and then three-star ratings. Three stars represented the very best restaurants and hotels. As of this year, there are only 79 three-star restaurants in the world.

Michelin, like some redoubtable academic stronghold, has resisted ratings inflation over the years. The new reader-based internet rating systems for books has not held up so well. In fact, the whole system seems to be plunging from the sky in a ball of fire, like some Sputnik/Skylab/Challenger disaster of literary proportions. The whole thing is blowing up faster than I can read the latest review kerfuffle on Amazon or GoodReads.

The first time I really noticed how rapidly book reviews were becoming inflated was when a friend lamented that she’d gotten a “bad rating” for her book on GoodReads. I sympathized with her and went to see the damage. The review wasn’t vituperative or even particularly harsh, and then I noted that the reviewer had marked the book with 3 stars.

But wait! What? 3 stars? I hesitated, confused, as I scrolled back up to pass my cursor over the offending rating in question. The hover text obligingly popped up: “3 of 5 stars, liked it.” That was what I thought. 3 stars means the reader liked the book. That was the presumption upon which I’d based all of the ratings I’d doled out on GoodReads. Not that I’m all that adept at remembering to enter the books I’ve read and my ratings of them, but there were several good books I’d rated at 3 stars. Because I liked them. Not loved them. Not felt gushy and world-altered. Just liked. You know, in a positive, hey, I enjoyed reading that kind of way.

So how the heck did 3 stars became a “bad review”?

Oh, right… the same way a C became a bad grade, when we all started expecting to be above average. When we all started expecting our work to be deemed “amazing,” or “brilliant,” or “earth-shattering.” When we started getting our little feelings hurt if we weren’t deemed geniuses by everyone who read our stories.

It’s not that I don’t understand. Yes, when my first book comes out later this year, I will hope for mostly 4- and 5-star ratings. That would be very nice. We all want to be loved and admired. But it’s crazy when we expect that. Because like the old Freshman Composition teacher I am, I still want a system of evaluation to maintain its credibility. I still want there to be standards for what makes a student essay a B+, as opposed to a C. I don’t think “average” is a “bad grade.” I don’t think marking that I liked a book should be interpreted in a negative way.

The truth is, I don’t think most books I read are 5-star books. There are a few. Books that just blow me away. Books that have changed the way I think about the world. Books that I can re-read over and over and never get bored. Those are 5-star books. Maybe I’m just a bitch, but generally the highest rating I’ll give, even to the aforementioned dear friend, is 4 stars. Because although I think some of my friends are very talented writers who’ve written enjoyable books, I don’t feel like going around proclaiming they’re works of genius, just … because. For the sake of friendship. To be nice. That’s not really what book reveiews/ratings are for, right? Or is it?

A Theme

I won’t even get into the question of writers rating their own books at 5 stars. Do I think my forthcoming book is a 5-star book? No. I think it’s pretty good. Mostly well-written with some nicely crafted characters. The plot’s no beauty pageant winner, but that’s just it. Not every book is gonna be the winner. The Pulitzer Prize–only goes to one book. Not every student essay is an A++++++++++++++++

Which is not to say that everybody should have the same 5-star book. Ridiculous. The joy of such reader-centric sites as GoodReads is that each reader can expound on the virtues of their favorite books. The other side of that coin is that every reader can discourse on the failures of the books they deem deserving of 1-star ratings.

The problem, as I see it, is when we get sucked into a system of over-rating books, because we’re afraid of offending someone or being attacked for our honest opinion. Having been lambasted for giving my honest, but not cruel opinion on books that I thought were less than stellar, I’ve all but given up rating books on GoodReads. I cringe in anticipation of my entry into the land of stars and reviews and revenge ratings, but there doesn’t seem to be an alternative…

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