So this guy requests a review for his self-published horror novel from an fairly large, but hobbyist, movie and book review site. The reviewer thinks the book is shit, puts this in the nicest terms possible, but the site founder still gives the author the courtesy of sending him an email saying the review is probably not what he hoped for, but “don’t be discouraged, keep writing, people have different likes and dislikes and you don’t have to read the review if you don’t want to”.
He goes absolutely ballistic in an essay length email about how they shouldn’t publish the review if it is bad and how he’s a genius and the book is perfect, which the site then publishes in full, since their submission policy includes “If you’re an asshole, we will publish your emails to us”.
I’ve been following this slow-motion trainwreck, but this is the first time I’ve looked at the Look Inside (it wasn’t available on my phone for whatever reason).
Holy purple prose, Batman! O.o
This guy definitely isn’t doing the vast percentage of respectable self-published authors any favors…
Not sure, but it looks like the book was submitted to the SciFi and Scary site for a review recently. The Goodreads review was posted in late April of this year. No idea why they waited that long to submit it.
I liked the part where he bragged about how his books (written by Dean KLEIN) were shelved right next to Stephen KING’s books, and thought that indicated that the store’s staff regarded his book very highly.
I just read two whole pages of Hell’s Shadows. Holy cow. It may not be the worst prose I’ve ever read, but offhand I can’t recall anything worse. Too bad the paperback is $900 on Amazon.
Yes. There are lots of good self-published authors. And there are lots of successful self-published authors. Whether the two intersect is up to each individual reader, but both exist.
(I’m a decently successful self-published author - to the point where I do it as a full-time job. I would never presume to tell anyone whether I’m any good, though. Once again, that’s up to the readers.)
It’s quite clear the reason why his prose is so bad is his arrogance. He falls in love with his own prose and sees no reason to think about making it better.
I worked in college as a writing tutor, and most students came to me with passable prose and humility, and it was a delight to work with them to polish and improve their work.
But I remember clearly the guy who came to me with something nearly unintelligible–one sentence was something like, “Through the air of the nestled permutations of spring I was to receive harmoniously the meanderings which were birdlike in composition,” only I’m trying really hard to make it as overwrought and stupid as his sentence was and failing. He meant to say, “I heard a bird sing.”
But when I told him that his sentences were hard to understand, he sneered and explained to me that it was his poetic style.
Nothing I did persuaded him that his writing was awful, and he left in disgust.
to Fifth Shades of Gray :eek: .