This is the kind of crap authors have to put up with

Warning. I’m going to rant, and there will be bad words. This post has a trigger warning for stupid people who put up stupid reviews on Amazon and the easily butt hurt.

So I was poking around Amazon reading my reviews. What can I say? I’m a glutton for punishment. I wanted to see what the reviews were like for the fiction I’d done for Privateer Press. (normally I have really good reviews, and then a handful of haters who whine about my politics and try to punish me with bad reviews). I checked Instuments of War  35 five stars, 7 four stars, 2 three stars, and this little gem: http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&Operation=GetAdHtml&ID=OneJS&OneJS=1&source=ss&ref=ss_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=monshuntnati-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00C77NL0A&asins=B00C77NL0A&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true&MarketPlace=US0 of 1 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars i have not bought nor read this book, March 9, 2014


By
BORK56



This review is from: Instruments of War (Warlock Sagas) (Kindle Edition)
come on people; you’re paying 5 bucks for a short story. So long as people continue to pay, then publishers, authors, and amazon will continue to gouge. The costs for an e-book are negligible; pennies per copy. On an $8.00 paperback the author, publisher, and seller split about $4.00, sometimes less, sometimes a lot less. On an e-book it except a flat fee (about $200.00) to convert it to the format there are no costs. Anytime you spend $8 to $10 to $16 for an e-book; you are being gouged and when I saw a short story being sold for $5.00 I had to speak up. I am a fan of larry correia and buy a lot of his books; but come on people don’t be chumps.

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I know authors aren’t supposed to respond to reviews. That is supposed to lower us or something. Us artistic types are supposed to be all sorts of aloof, but this is so freaking stupid that I’ve got to comment on it. Here is my reply.


Damn this pisses me off. Where the hell does anybody named fucking Bork get off calling my readers chumps?


Holy shit. Are you kidding me? You left a 2 star review on a book you did not read so that you could get all preachy about the supposed costs of publication. Shut up, you cheap ass bastard.


First off, it isn’t a “short story”. It is a novella. It is 30,000 words. That is 1/2 to 1/3 of a novel in most genres. That is actually anywhere from 3 to 30 “short stories”.  Do you bitch about all YA books because they only average 80K but cost the same as my 150k-200k fantasy novels? No? Then shut up, hypocrite.


Is it more expensive than most of my books by the word? Yep. Since those ebooks are usually $8. Whoop de friggin’ do. I don’t set the prices on those either.


Second, the size doesn’t actually matter, because you admited that you DIDN’T ACTUALLY READ THE BOOK. You know, the thing that you are supposed to be rating the quality there of. For all you could know it could be the most mind blowing 80 pages ever written and in really tiny print to boot, but you couldn’t get off your cheap, self righteous ass long enough to find out.


(for the record, it isn’t the best thing ever, but it was fun enough that most people who aren’t whiny little bitches didn’t mind spending $5 for it!)


Next, the MASSIVE cost is $5. That’s FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS. That is the cost of a mediocre hamburger. Most of us who aren’t cheap ass bastards leave bigger tips than that for our mediocre hamburgers. I can’t even imagine what a shitty tipper Bork is.


And this isn’t a bash on poor people who struggle to come up with $5. Been there, done that, ate a whole lot of Ramen noodle. I’ve been dirt poor and a reader. That’s what libraries are for. Only if you get your books from a library you can’t really bitch about the cost in your pointless preachy reviews now, can you?


But that’s not the important thing about why this is such a shitty, pointless, obnoxious, annoying review. Oh no… The best part is how you are daring to lecture people about how they are enjoying themselves wrong. 


The majority of the people who bought this gave it good reviews. They seemed to think it was worth the $5 they threw at it. They felt they got their $5 worth…. In fact some of the 4 stars were because they liked the book but thought it was a bit expensive. Groovy. At least they read it! Most people will read this book over a couple of hours. Speed readers will read through it faster, so they are paying between $2 and $5 an hour to be entertained. Do you leave shitty reviews about every single movie shown in a movie theater because those work out to $7 an hour or more? Way more if you buy popcorn, but we know you’re too damned cheap to buy popcorn and you’d rather pick strays out of the other seats.


Heaven help us if Bork ever discovers golf…


Bork is like the annoying little shits who write complaint letters to Top Gear because they review awesome cars that most of us will never be able to afford. Shut up. Nobody likes you or your hand wringing. We want to see the Stig spin doughnuts in a car that cost more than our house.


Oh, but all the good reviews are wrong, because you spat out some gibberish about how much YOU THINK books should cost. Fanfuckingtastic. You should go write a bunch of books and make a successfull living at it pricing them however you want. Oh, but you don’t. Then here is a nice warm cup of shut the hell up. You should go Occupy Some Street while you tell people how much is FAIR for their labor.


Newsflash, dipshit. I’m not the one who set the cost. The publisher set the cost. In that whole little screed you put up you are comparing the costs of hack self publishing (which believe me, I’m not bashing, because that’s how I got started) to the publishing costs of an IP, with actual staff, and actual artists, and the fact that they had to pay me up front. I don’t know what you get paid per hour to ejaculate pigs or WTF ever it is you do for a living, but us NYT bestsellers like to GET PAID.


There’s a $200 fee to translate a book into ebook format, you say? Why, I didn’t know that was all there was to it! Never mind the fact that somebody with my resume doesn’t even show up for somebody else’s IP unless they throw a large pile of money at us, or in this case, bribe me with minis. :)  Only Bork is missing the point even harder on the econ side of things that he’s calling you all chumps for not understanding, since he’s talking about the costs of converting a book from hard to e publish… Only this was e publish only from the beginning so there wasn’t a hard cover or mass market to recoup any of the advance costs… But what do I know? I just do this writing thing for a living


I hate, hate, HATE reviews like this on Amazon, where it is some dipshit commenting on their woes as opposed to reviewing the actual product. “I didn’t like the color of the box the book was shipped in. ONE STAR!” “I bought this book that is clearly not in the genre I like, so it gets ONE STAR for not being in the genre I wanted because I’m too fucking stupid to read the back cover blurb!” On and on. Holy shit, there should be an IQ test before people are allowed to use the internet, because you are really pissing off the rest of us who don’t sleep in helmets.


Authors simply love having our average ranking pulled down for bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual book. “I do/don’t like sci-fi. This book has/doesn’t have sci-fi in it. ONE STAR!” “I don’t like whales. Whales are stupid and fat and so is Herman Melville! Moby Dick gets ONE STAR!”


But hey, he gave me TWO WHOLE STARS because he is a fan. (I bet he won’t be after he reads this). Well thank goodness, it wasn’t one star! That was mighty white of him to be so merciful. Also, he doesn’t read a lot of my books like he claims, because I’d be surprised if he could figure out how to operate one without injuring himself.


You know what would have been a fair one or two star review? Somebody who actually READ THE STORY but thought it wasn’t worth the price. That would at least make sense.


Us retired accountants love to have ignorant types lecture us on pricing and basic economics. Do I think $5 is the right price? Hell if I know. It isn’t my place to cost it. I’m not the publishing house. I don’t know their fixed costs, their projections, their marketing plan, and neither does some jackass on the internet. My job is to write the most entertaining story possible and let the market decide if the entertainment value is worth the money. Since they’ve not lowered the price, I’m assuming the market can bear it.


You know what else is too expensive? Everything that I’m too cheap to purchase, that’s what! ONE STAR!


The eARC for Monster Hunter Nemesis came out today. It is FIFTEEN DOLLARS! And it isn’t even proof read! But hundreds of people are super happy to download it three months early. Shit, Bork, you better hurry over to Baen’s Webscriptions and dazzle those people with your brilliance and let them all know that they are chumps. If you don’t they might enjoy themselves wrong or something.