UK Sales Continue to Be Excellent

Sales in the UK are still great, even though To Honor You Call Us has slipped from #1, 1, and 2 in its various categories to #3, 3, and 3.  Apparently, lots of people are taking the plunge enticed by the new lower price.  I’m getting very encouraging fan mail from that part of the world as well, indicating that the book is appealing to readers across the pond.  There is only one fly in the ointment–the book just got a one star review on Amazon’s UK site.  Sometimes, I wonder what possesses people to write stuff like this. It’s so vile, I’m goiing to let you read it in its entirety:

[One Star] Unreadable, 3 April 2014


By 
Time Traveller

 This review is from: To Honor You Call Us (Man of War, Book 1) (Kindle Edition)

Too badly written for the plot to be relevant imho. The author’s struggles with sentence construction made me wince. There are an awful lot of bad, cheap books on Kindle ime – especially in genre fiction – and often plenty of underserved five star ratings for them alas.

Now, I know that I am not the greatest prose stylist in the history of the English Language, but I’ve never struggled with sentence construction.  I would be very interested in seeing which sentences he thinks are badly constructed, especially since the text was worked over by half a dozen professional editors, including Michael Shohl, one of the best in the business.   And, to call it “unreadable” is nothing short of an outright lie.  Anyone who thinks a book that sold 10,000 copies in self publication even before it was professionally edited, and then got picked up by a major publisher, is “unreadable” is full of shit.  If he can’t read it, then he’s too illiterate to be writing online reviews.

By the way, none of the professionals who have read this book ever said anything about it being badly written.  Some of them had other issues, but none with the basic writing.  Maybe this guy just doesn’t get that he doesn’t know anything about English Composition.  Who knows?  In any event, it’s just a shame that people who are considering whether to buy this book will be confronted with the worthless opinions of this despicable troll as the most recent review, at least for a while.

Those of you who found the prose something other than “unreadable” might wish to lodge comments in response to this review.  Here’s the permalink to where you can find it.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3K1E0MG0C4EBS/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00DQUKZMY