There’s a Reason Critic Rhymes With Prick (sorta)

It’s Like People Are Trying to Piss M... My Dog Is Giving Me a Bladder Infection

There’s a Reason Critic Rhymes With Prick (sorta)

If I’m going to be in the business, I really have to develop a thicker skin.

Here’s the thing. I don’t pan other indie writers, even if their work sucks. I don’t write criticisms of products or books…unless I have a personal vendetta against the author…or unless the person if famous. As far as I’m concerned, once you start making $10,000,000 for being lucky, you open yourself up to criticism. That’s just karma.

What I don’t do is go hunt down an unknown, debut author and shit all over their work in order to market my crappy book design business.

Where is this coming from? Well, it wasn’t even from a review of my book. If fact, my critic didn’t even read it. It was from a review of my books cover.

See, I made the mistake of googling my own book, just to see if it got any mentions because I’m doing a free book giveaway tomorrow. I was super excited when I saw it was listed on someone’s website. Hoping for a review, instead, I got a slap in the face when I saw it was listed on a book designers website under “Lousy Book Covers,” with a snarky ‘in other words, not drunk enough’ posted underneath it.

First of all, if you’re going to make fun of the title, let me offer some better suggestions;

Strangely Sober? Nobody would have designed this sober
Well, the ‘Strangely’ part is right
If this book was a woman I met in a bar, I would chew my own arm off in order to escape it in the morning
What kind of name is Essa Alroc? Its sound like what happens when you randomly type a bunch of letters on your keyboard without looking.

The guy even notes the following. “Bonus! If I’ve featured your book cover here, I’ll design a FREE ebook cover for you! See my portfolio @ imnotgivingyouanybusinessbecauseihateyou.com”

Wait, you mean I won! Awesome. You want to spit in my coffee tomorrow then offer to buy me a new one as well? Way to drum up business dickhead.

I am so tempted to create a new page called ‘shitty blogs’, post his page on there, then throw in an offer to provide content that doesn’t suck. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll bitch about it in this blog and forget all about it tomorrow.

Here’s the thing. I LOVE my cover. It was designed for me by an incredibly talented artist and it was selected out of six other options, unanimously, by a group of other people (industry people, not my family reunion) who actually read the book. He captured my characters perfectly, he worked incredibly hard on it and he did just what I wanted with it. I wanted it to be original. I wanted it to be memorable, and my guy did it perfectly. I’m not going to list his link here without his permission, but if he would like me to, I will go ahead and add it in on his say so. His portfolio is dark, complex and beautifully orchestrated and I am proud of the cover he created for me.

I also plan on having him do the next one for me as soon as I’m finished with the sequel.

So whatever, rant over. I needed to get this off my chest so I could work on my book without the whole ‘why bother? Everyone is going to hate it anyway,’ feeling hanging over my head. Like I said, this is probably going to be the first in a long line of criticisms and if I’m planning on doing this for a living, I’m going to have to learn to roll with it.

I still reserve the right to bitch in a later blog about crappy reviews I get from people who have actually read the book.