Publishing and Marketing 07: A Reviewer’s Self-Examination

A few days ago I came across a review of Mark Lawrence’s second Broken Empire novel, King of Thorns (link), which is up for nomination for the David Gemmell Legend Awards in the Legend category. The Legend Award is given to the Best Novel of the previous year. On Twitter and Facebook, I talked about how that review justified all my reasons and fears for not reading further into this series after my experiences with the first novel, Prince of Thorns (review).

My tweets eventually spawned off a discussion about negative reviews, which led into the review that forms the basis and reason for this entire post.  In January last year, reviewer Liz Bourke wrote about Michael J. Sullivan’s first Riyria Revelations novel, Theft of Swords (link). This review was brought to my attention by a friend on Twitter who had taken exception to the way that Liz Bourke took potshots at the author and his editors at Orbit Books.

Going through the review and the comments thread, some things become apparent to me as to the intent of the review, the tone it is written in, and what, ultimately, were the reactions. However, what really ended up happening was that it all sparked off some self-examination about negative reviews. And that’s what this post is all about.

So welcome to another Publishing and Marketing blogpost.

Monthly Report – January 2013

This is quite a bit late, and I apologise for the delay. Lots of things going on this month, and not all of it good, so things have been off-schedule for a while.

In my blogpost titled “2013 – What Now? Some Resolutions Maybe?” I mentioned that I was not going to set myself any individual project word-count goals, and that my big aim would be to do 450,000 words for the whole year. January, on the whole, wasn’t all that great since there were two trips to India involved (one coming back in the first week, and another going there in the last week), so that crimped by writing quite a bit, not to mention that my slump and procrastination continued.

Try as I might, I can’t fix this stupid procrastination. There’s always something that comes up, that totally screws with my writing moment and I end up doing nothing. I have no idea how to get it sorted. The reading progresses great, just not the writing.

Eh, whatever. It’s still better than doing absolutely nothing for a whole month! So here’s how my writing and reading in January went down.

The State of Reviewing

WARNING: This post involves what may be perceived as ranting, complaining and tantrum-throwing and whatever else some people might think. It is not meant to be any of those; simply a comment on the reviewing blog-o-sphere and some of my frustrations with it.