Embarrassing Mistakes

It took me a long time to understand why, in reviews, a certain brand of troll armchair critic would castigate me for my supposed spelling mistakes.  Spelling mistakes that didn’t exist, but that nevertheless called for either firing or hiring a proofreader.  Immediately!  Before I somehow managed to humiliate myself further.  But then I got into an argument online (someone had come to my page, complaining that I wasn’t more sympathetic to racism) and the problem was laid bare: my vocabulary was too large.  She, too, told me I needed to “learn how to spell,” in that case because I said denigrate.  Not knowing that word, she assumed that I must mean degenerate.  And so she tried to score a point.

And it was like a light went off!  Ahh!  [cue singing of angels]

They don’t understand me!

I suppose the larger question, though, is why we want to score points on each other at all.  Let’s say my books were riddled with mistakes.  Would that really be worth damaging my livelihood over?  A few, much bigger names than mine have horrible copyediting for their books and I’ve never felt the need to point it out.  Probably because I’m confident enough in myself, that I realize there’s enough success to go around.  Nobody else, by creating, is “stealing” anything from me.  I read their books, and others, for fun; not as some kind of exercise in competition.

Now do most people understand my books just fine?  Yes, they do.  Or, at least, this is what my sales seem to indicate.  But most people don’t leave reviews.  At least, not on my books.  I’ve calculated it out and for every, honestly, I think it’s at least 6,000 books I sell I might get one review.  One.  Which means that my detractors get a much bigger platform than–I think, at least–they should.  Or that I, based on the quality of my writing, deserve.

I feel like saying to these people, Amazon isn’t the right place to try to prove to the world–or, more properly, yourself–that you’re somehow superior.  Including to those people who’ve actually written a book, as opposed to just thought about writing one.  And no platform is the right place to try to tear somebody else down, to affect their livelihood, because you’re feeling insecure.

But that’s what trolls do: they spread the love.  The fact that their criticisms are baseless and stupid isn’t going to be obvious, though, unless and until someone actually takes the plunge and reads one of my books.  Then they’ll discover that color wasn’t a spelling mistake; I’m American, and use American English.  Neither was a reference to a camel hair coat.  One armchair critic, never having heard of a camel hair coat, informed me that I’d meant “caramel.”  And in every single review, which mentions this type of thing, there’s nothing about the story at all–only the sentiment, expressed with varying degrees of rage, that the “mistakes” made it impossible to read.  Or, if not read, then enjoy.

Someone even asked, on Wattpad, in reference to the first chapter of Book of Shadows, “what language is this?

TLDR: since I’m not about to start writing like a semi-lobotomized lemur on acid, those of you with a vocabulary larger than twenty words need to make the effort to start reviewing my books.