My current free-book promotion is doing better than any I have done before. And not only have I given away more free copies than ever before, it has already yielded one five-star review.
But you have to pour a little cold water on your head whenever you get too happy about being an author who has readers. It ain’t all bluebirds and sunshiny days.
The Pubby review exchange thingy is continuing to operate worse and worse. I am not subjecting the new book to any of that pain and squirrel poop. You break your head to read a book in only four days and write a review to earn the points you need to get your own books reviewed. And a lot of books on Pubby seeking review are written by… um, not really genius-level writers. They don’t know how to craft a scene with a beginning, middle, and end that fulfills an actual story-crafting purpose. You know, advancing the plot, building a character with depth and complexity, establishing a setting, or advancing a theme. Instead, they flood the page with adjectives and adverbs, excessive but irrelevant details, going around the scene telling you what eye color each character has, repeated cliches, and other dumb stuff. But it makes you feel mean and petty to point out in your review what specific dumb stuff made you give their work of not-really-genius only a three-star review.
And when you submit your own precious book potentially full of irritating dumb stuff, they don’t bother to actually read it before reviewing it. They write their review based on what other reviewers have said about it. And sometimes they give you a bad review because somebody else gave you a bad review with a dire dyspeptic rant about all your irritating dumb stuff. And they have no right to somebody else’s dire dyspeptic opinion if they didn’t read those things in your book for themselves to be certain the other viewer’s opinion is not based on something their dire and dyspeptic imagination saw in your story that wasn’t really there. And how do I know they didn’t read the book? Well, Pubby allows you with extra points charged to request a verified-purchase review. So, if their review isn’t labeled a verified purchase, they did not even have a copy of the book to write a review from. Pubby simply refunds the extra points you spent when the verified purchase label is not present.
Honestly, the only thing you know about the people who read your books are what comes through feedback. And you get remarkably little of that. The most important part of that is when somebody you know in real life reads your book, liked it, and tells you so. Sometimes readers will connect with your book in a way that makes them want to write a detailed review and implore others to read and like your book too. I have had a handful of those along the way, whether from aspiring fellow authors who know what the things are that you have actually done well, Twitter nudists who are literate and hungry for stories that use the word “naked” a lot without being an erotic or a pornographic writer, or fellow teachers who appreciate the many ironic, humorous, and empathetic details you have applied from your own teaching career.
I will continue to write and write and write some more. That means life to me. And I will continue to do some of the things authors do to pursue readers, because feedback grows that life. But I am old and in poor health and will not be doing this forever. If writers ever become immortal, it is not because they ever found the philosopher’s stone. At some point even Shakespeare, Dickens, and Poe had to stop writing.
Catch a Falling Star 
326 and Counting
Twice before I have gone through a year posting something on this blog every single day of the year. And not just by scheduling the publication wisely to cover every day, but by writing something and publishing something every single day. At this point, I have now written something and posted it for 326 days in a row, and being past the holidays and funeral for my mother, I am probably going to make 365 again for the third time.
This is a man who also wrote something every single day. He was a former journalist who worked as an ambulance driver during World War I, for the Italian Army, where he was wounded and won a medal for his service to the Italian government.
He developed a writing style with no author commentary, sparse but crucial details, and a reliance on the reader’s intelligence to figure out the themes of his writing.
His best work is the Novel, The Sun Also Rises.
I hold that opinion because I have not only read it, but I have also read and compared it to For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and several of his short stories. His writing is fiction, but highly autobiographical which makes his stories so realistic and accessible to all readers.
This is also a man who wrote every single day. He started out writing for newspapers, but starting with his first major success as a fiction storyteller, The Pickwick Papers, he began writing mostly comic stories for monthly magazines.
He is noted for long paragraphs of vivid and plentiful details, and especially relatable and memorable characters.
His best work is the novel, A Tale of Two Cities.
I make that judgement after reading it three times, and also reading Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and The Old Curiosity Shop. There are also autobiographical features in the Boz’s works but he was a wonderfully astute people-watcher, and that dominates his narratives far more than his own personal story does.
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This writer is known particularly for his sense of humor. It should be mentioned, however, that his fiction is not only filled with humor, but was very keenly realistic. His use of author commentary probably makes him the opposite of Hemingway, but he still carries that journalistic quality of writing it exactly how he sees it… full of irony and irrationally-arrived-at truth.
I don’t know for a fact that he wrote every single day. But he probably did. He always said, “The writing of the literary greats is like fine wine, while my books are like water. WIne is good for those that can afford it, but everybody drinks water.” You can’t have writing that is as plentiful as water without writing fairly often.
His best book is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I am not the only one who thinks so. Hemingway wrote, “All American Literature began with one book, Huckleberry Finn.”
I have also read, Tom Sawyer, Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain.
So, what’s the point of all this literary foo-foo? Hemingway would expect you to figure that out for yourself. But I’m addicted to topic sentences, even if I wait til the end to reveal it. If you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot of really good writing. And even more important, you need to write every day.
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Filed under artists I admire, commentary, Mark Twain, novel writing, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor, writing teacher