I’ve thought about trying to find a couple of serious crit partners, but I’ve decided against it. I already have two, one who is an avid reader and the other who is a fellow author, but sometimes they are too close and might not have a critical enough eye. They love me too much! :0) But the critical eye thing is why I wouldn’t make a good partner for an author trying to make their book the very best it can be. Because when I read, I want to be entertained. I want to be barely able to put the book down. And that’s my main criteria for a good book. I don’t want to get hung up on every little, teeny thing that other people might see as something that should be changed. I just don’t want to get bored. So I would probably be too easy on the author’s work. If I like it and it takes me away for awhile, I don’t care if it isn’t perfect. And I think most readers (who aren’t writers) feel that way. And even though I’m a writer, I’m not so critical of other people’s work. I know of an indie author who a lot of the other indies say is SO good. And she’s done well. But after reading the first book in the series, I’m thinking that I really don’t want to read more. After I got about halfway through the book, I started getting a little bored. If other authors say her writing is good, then maybe it is. But I don’t really like it that well. I HAVE to be entertained. That’s why I don’t like most classic literature. It’s kind of the same way with movies. If the critics don’t like it, I probably will. They don’t look at entertainment value, they look at picky little things that normal movie goers couldn’t care less about.
After saying all that, I do want to make it clear that I AM very critical of misspelled words, glaring grammatical errors, and terrible punctuation. There’s really no excuse for a lot of that. If you’re not a good proofreader, hire someone to do it for you. In fact, when I read some of the indie work, I feel like saying, “I wish you had called me! I would have only charged about $30 to proof this.” Now, I’m not saying I always catch everything. Sometimes you are too close to your work and miss things. (Or maybe you’ve proofed someone else’s work and it had so many errors it was hard to catch them all.) But I’ve only been made aware of about 3 errors in my books (there may be more that no one has caught or said anything about; I hope people will tell me so I can fix them). Even traditionally published books have that many or more. But some of the books I’ve read recently have 4 or 5 errors in EVERY chapter. One author, after getting a bad review for so many errors, stated that she actually had paid someone to edit. If I ever edited a book and it still had errors, I would drop everything and make corrections free of charge until it was right. I would never charge for editing it again if it was my fault it didn’t get caught in the first place. And I hope the author I referred to went back to her editor and demanded the corrections.
Whew, it seems like I digressed. All this was sort of part of the same thought, but it kind of came across disjointed. That’s ok. It’s just my blog and I can ramble if I want to. LOL
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lauralynnelliott.com 
Do you respond to negative reviews?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged comments, response, reviews, zoe winters on September 23, 2010| 15 Comments »
I want to throw a question out to some of you who are authors. On Zoe Winters’ blog, we were talking about reviews and how crazy and mean some readers are, etc. I was going to ask this question on her blog (since there are so many more people following it), but I didn’t want to use her blog for my own ramblings. The question is, how many of you actually respond to reviews on Amazon or other places? Does it depend on what the reviewer says or how personal they get with you? I recently responded to some negative reviews, and I got responses back from two different readers. One was kind of hateful and basically said authors shouldn’t respond to negative reviews because it was like a kid trying to get a better grade from a teacher or something like that. The other reader was very nice and explained more about why he hadn’t liked the book. My whole intent was to find out why they didn’t like it. I did probably piss off the first reader because she had said that “Blind Freddy” could have seen the twist coming. I thought that was a little too sarcastic, and said something to the effect that “Blind Freddy” must be good at that sort of thing, but none of my beta readers figured it out. I was also trying to interject some humor in my comment. Didn’t work. LOL Later I thought I probably should have let all of it go. But I’m one of those people who is laid back and easy going most of the time. So when something gets to me, it REALLY gets to me. Since things usually don’t. :0)
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