Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 191

Amazon reviews, Part Three: Who qualifies as a reviewer?

There are serious book reviewers. There are jerks who simply give a book a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, as if a book were something like a pair of boots from L. L. Bean. There’s everything in between. When I ask, who qualifies as a reviewer, I really mean, who qualifies as a serious reviewer?

I’m talking about reviewing fiction. Memoirs (too often close to fiction?), history, biography, technical, scientific, etc. are less likely to be questionable as long as the author of the review is objecti...

Interview with Jim Kukral of the Author Marketing Club…

[Note from Steve: Readers and writers here have the opportunity to meet Jim Kukral. He has written eight books and his Author Marketing Club (AMC) is a free resource for authors and readers to learn about book marketing and discover new books. Over 7500 people have connected with the club. You can join for free. There are many ways his website can help you find your way around the complicated landscape of digital publishing. I don’t usually write posts that might be construed as commercial, b...

Amazon reviews, Part Two: How Amazon is destroying indie publishing…

Don’t get me wrong—I know Amazon is a business. The management there has adopted policies they think will maximize their profits. My complaint is that they also pretend they are helping indie publishers and indie authors. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen some of the time, but they are certainly inconsistent. They adapt policies and inconsistently apply them. Reviews are a case in point, as we saw in Part One.

There is another aspect of their review policy—past, present, but hopefully not fut...

A New Years gift: Flight from the Mother World…

I like the term gift better than freebie. During my editing of Sing a Samba Galactica, released last year, I concluded that the Old Storyteller’s tale of the Rangers’ flight from Mother World took away some of our ET friends’ aura of mystery, made the novel a wee bit too long, and would distract the reader from the main story arc.

The Old Storyteller’s original name was Deep Diver. It turns out she had a very interesting life on Mother World. As a gift to my readers for this New Year, here is...

Amazon reviews, Part One: Do they have any meaning?

[Note: This is the first post in a three-part series. Enjoy!]

Amazon has gone over the top with their change in book review policy. They have responded to the egregious practice where some authors ask family members and friends to write glowing reviews of their books. These reviews often are little more than attempts to stuff the ballot box because Amazon’s algorithm counts positive reviews. This practice, of course, offers no real service to readers and hurts authors who receive few but thoug...

Irish Stew #19…

Item: Incompetence in Washington. 53% of Americans think conservatives in the GOP have to backtrack, but they won’t, because they’re hung up on ideology, instead of representing the American people—Boehner can’t even rein in his own scalawags. Same goes for the progressives, of course, but it seems that they’re too willing to make a deal and give up hard won victories that support the middle class and poor, including Social Security and Medicare. Reid and Pelosi are ideologues too, but the ma...

Quisling Obama…

Just what I feared: our President is abandoning the middle class and the poor. He’s a traitor to the people who elected him, and now that he has his second term, he doesn’t give a damn. He’s a quisling (look it up)—perhaps not a fascist, but certainly a collaborator. He’s caving in to the GOP, collaborating with them in their attack on the 99%. Yeah, I know I asked for understanding a week ago—now he’s looking like just another 1% sycophant.

It’s obvious that Barack Obama is a member of the 1%...

The right to bear arms?

The massacre of twenty children and eight adults (teachers, the mother of the shooter, and the shooter) is a tragedy. In other similar tragedies, gun enthusiasts have warned us about getting too emotional and tampering with a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment…so they say. The NRA, well-heeled lobbyist organization that it is, often leads the charge. “Not over my dead body….” Yes, I’m emotional. This time the stats are against the NRA. Twenty children. I...

Is Mr. Obama anti-American?

Before you jump to conclusions, I have not become a birther—I’ll leave that to other imaginative people, most infamously Mr. Donald Trump, otherwise known in the tri-state area as “the Donald” (the precinct where his building stands in Manhattan was the only NY precinct to go for Romney—surprise, surprise). I’m also not a fan of conspiracies as portrayed in 2016: Obama’s America, that movie based on the book by Dinesh D’Souza, an opportunistic writer if I ever saw one. No, I stand on higher m...

Irish Stew #18…

Item: Stick by your mandate, Mr. Obama. Most of the people in the U.S. are for extending the Bush tax cuts to the middle class and ending them for the wealthy. Many of the latter, probably fearing more a backlash but aware that, in all fairness, they can afford it better than the middle class, are for the idea. Warren Buffett, for example, can’t figure out how he pays fewer taxes than his secretary. And telling him to donate it doesn’t solve the problem. As Mr. Romney showed, the rich will us...