Write a bad review or forget the whole thing?
A short time ago, I downloaded a free novel from Amazon. I came across it in a Goodreads group discussion. The author was celebrating a soon to be released 2nd novel in the series by giving the first novel away free for a short time. It looked like a promising read in the Fantasy genre with good cover art, and an intriguing outline. Unfortunately it didn’t live up to the promise.
I started it a few days ago, and the first thing I questioned was why the author was stating with backstory instead of jumping right into the action. I let it pass. I have been reading a lot recently about ‘first lines’ and ‘first paragraphs’, so I just put it down to my own current bias, and carried on.
The second thing I noticed was the commas. Now, I am certainly not a punctuation guru. I also am a new author. I struggle with grammar, punctuation, and tense, but I tend to research things I don’t understand, practice the correct forms, and try to get it ingrained into my writing.
For the use of commas, I use the FANBOYS acronym (look it up if you don’t understand what I mean). It doesn’t cover all instances, but it is a good starting point. Obviously, this author used a different approach. In fact it looked very much like my first novel before I had it edited. Perhaps I am not sophisticated enough to understand what the author did, or maybe there is a stream of thinking that says comas are used only to signify pauses, or maybe the author took a page from one of the old or current masters, and figured what was good for the goose—and so on. Unfortunately, the common wisdom tells young authors that they can’t get away with creative punctuation until they are classed as one of the masters. As a reader I can live with creative coma use, so I carried on reading chapter 1 (actually I believe I was only on page 3 at this point).Perhaps the first two problems honed my error awareness sense because that is exactly what happened. I started finding the odd sentence that was obviously wrong – incomplete, wrong words, that type of thing. Irritating, but I finished the chapter anyway thinking, very poor or no editing.
At this point I thought I would look to see what reviewers had said about the novel. I checked Amazon and Goodreads. The novel has many reviews in both places. All of them talk about how wonderful it is. I found one on Amazon that gave the book a 4 star rating instead of five stars because of the problems I was seeing, but the reviewer said the problems weren’t enough to degrade the book further.
With so many positive reviews, and almost a perfect 5 star rating, I returned to reading with hope for better things to come. From what I had read so far, the story line was promising. It wasn’t using characterizations from Tolkien or Howard, and aside from the problems already stated I was enjoying the writing.
Again, my hopes were dashed. I found numerous errors an editor would have picked up on. I think I found four or five in the first few pages of chapter 2. Here is an example:“He agreed to return once the size of the force, if that wasn’t an exaggeration, would truly be,”
I gave up, and deleted the book from my device, but it has been bothering me for days now. How can there be so many rave reviews for a first novel that clearly has not been edited. It is a rare first novel that is a masterpiece, but with proper feedback this one had great promise. Why didn’t any of the reviewers – except for the one -- mention the errors? For me, I don’t want to be the one dissenter in the crowd of applauders. When I run into these types of errors, I prefer to send an email detailing them, and keep them out of the review process, but I am talking about those few errors that are missed by even the best editor - not something of this scale. Should I write a bad review that catalogues these problems, or should I just forget it.
I started it a few days ago, and the first thing I questioned was why the author was stating with backstory instead of jumping right into the action. I let it pass. I have been reading a lot recently about ‘first lines’ and ‘first paragraphs’, so I just put it down to my own current bias, and carried on.
The second thing I noticed was the commas. Now, I am certainly not a punctuation guru. I also am a new author. I struggle with grammar, punctuation, and tense, but I tend to research things I don’t understand, practice the correct forms, and try to get it ingrained into my writing.
For the use of commas, I use the FANBOYS acronym (look it up if you don’t understand what I mean). It doesn’t cover all instances, but it is a good starting point. Obviously, this author used a different approach. In fact it looked very much like my first novel before I had it edited. Perhaps I am not sophisticated enough to understand what the author did, or maybe there is a stream of thinking that says comas are used only to signify pauses, or maybe the author took a page from one of the old or current masters, and figured what was good for the goose—and so on. Unfortunately, the common wisdom tells young authors that they can’t get away with creative punctuation until they are classed as one of the masters. As a reader I can live with creative coma use, so I carried on reading chapter 1 (actually I believe I was only on page 3 at this point).Perhaps the first two problems honed my error awareness sense because that is exactly what happened. I started finding the odd sentence that was obviously wrong – incomplete, wrong words, that type of thing. Irritating, but I finished the chapter anyway thinking, very poor or no editing.
At this point I thought I would look to see what reviewers had said about the novel. I checked Amazon and Goodreads. The novel has many reviews in both places. All of them talk about how wonderful it is. I found one on Amazon that gave the book a 4 star rating instead of five stars because of the problems I was seeing, but the reviewer said the problems weren’t enough to degrade the book further.
With so many positive reviews, and almost a perfect 5 star rating, I returned to reading with hope for better things to come. From what I had read so far, the story line was promising. It wasn’t using characterizations from Tolkien or Howard, and aside from the problems already stated I was enjoying the writing.
Again, my hopes were dashed. I found numerous errors an editor would have picked up on. I think I found four or five in the first few pages of chapter 2. Here is an example:“He agreed to return once the size of the force, if that wasn’t an exaggeration, would truly be,”
I gave up, and deleted the book from my device, but it has been bothering me for days now. How can there be so many rave reviews for a first novel that clearly has not been edited. It is a rare first novel that is a masterpiece, but with proper feedback this one had great promise. Why didn’t any of the reviewers – except for the one -- mention the errors? For me, I don’t want to be the one dissenter in the crowd of applauders. When I run into these types of errors, I prefer to send an email detailing them, and keep them out of the review process, but I am talking about those few errors that are missed by even the best editor - not something of this scale. Should I write a bad review that catalogues these problems, or should I just forget it.
No comments have been added yet.
