Message from the Soap Box: Research and Consistency in a Book

Topic: Research and Consistancy

This is seriously becoming a theme in my reviews lately. It seems to me that a lot of newer authors are either lazy, or just think their fans, reviewers, book lovers are stupid.

It’s becoming all too often that I find myself having to lower a book’s ranking due to an author failing to research the topic they write about. Whether it be a demon race, the name of a item that arrows or crossbow bolts go into, or whether or not a race shares the same name regardless of gender. Google is your friend people.

I am all for poetic licenses, don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen male Sirens. I’ve seen Vampires with beating hearts. But the narration, unless in the 1st person pov should be written as though the author knows what they are talking about. I’ll give an example…

A book I just recently read had a skilled, does this for a living, eighteen year old, shooting off arrows with a crossbow.  Crossbows use bolts, not arrows. A standard crossbow would snap a standard arrow in half before it even got projected, and considering what this girl is using a crossbow for, I doubt she’s using a light weight one. This SAME book has the arrows being kept in a canister. RESEARCH! If you do NOT know the name of something.. LOOK IT UP. Arrows are kept in Quivers, bolts in Bolt Cases.

Another example of failure to research. In a book I read a while ago. An Angel told a human that the male feeding off the mortal they saw was a Succubus.. RESEARCH! Succubi are FEMALE. Incubi are MALE. This is easily found on Google.

Consistency is another major problem a lot of books have. Loopholes will be a book’s downfall if they’re spotted by a reviewer like me. You CANNOT say something happened in one sentence and then have a whole chapter that contradicts that one sentence. Someone WILL notice, and that somebody is usually me, which results in me breaking out the soap box and ranting to the general public since I will not call out a book or an author on my review blog in something less than a professional way.

Loopholes are a HUGE problem with 9 out of 10 books I’ve read. Something that doesn’t make sense because an author failed to put it in the book assuming that the reader will just know because the author does.

Understand.. You can write a single word and know what your entire story is.. The readers however are NOT mind readers. They will not understand why vital information is missing from a book. They will not understand why you, as the author, think it’s okay to omit this vital piece of information, and they sure as hell aren’t going to understand why you’re calling them a troll and trashing them and reporting their honest, non bashing review because YOU don’t like what it says. (No this has not happened to me but it’s happened to quite a few of my friends)

Don’t pull the “but my friends knew what it meant” card. They knew because when they asked you to clarify something you did. But to people that cannot contact you, they’re left in the dark and confused, and guess what? That WILL affect your rating. That WILL affect your sales.

So do the readers of the world a favor.. Stop verbally explaining things about your books and start filling in the holes that are getting you the 1 and 2 star ratings. It will do you a world of good.