the Scott Stein

Since I recently blogged about the problem of ridiculous reviews and book blurbs written by the professionals, it's a good time to mention that this is also a problem with the amateurs on amazon.com. See the book-blog's (Debra Hamel) take on bogus amazon reviews here and in her comments to this post here.

In the interest of full disclosure, when I self-published my first novel Lost, back in 2000, before everyone on the planet was publishing their own books, I was unable to get reviewed in Publishers Weekly and similar publications and feared that the book would never find any readers. At the time, I was running the online magazine When Falls the Coliseum, which had quite a few readers, and I sent an announcement to my subscribers "reminding" them that if they liked my novel, they could say so on amazon.com. So most of the reviews on amazon came from people who either knew me, or knew my magazine (a couple were from people I would clearly call friends). They weren't just random readers who happened to love the book--without a marketing budget, the book had no way to be discovered by random readers. Although friends of the author are certainly a biased review source, I think the reviews in this case reflected the reviewers' opinions and do give some sense of what the novel actually is (the reviews of Lost that later appeared in major publications aren't that far off from the ones on amazon). I recognize one of the amazon reviews as written by a former student. This review was not solicited--he reviewed the novel because he wanted to and without my prior knowledge, after he was no longer in my class and I had no power over him. (Anyway, if you are interested in Lost, I prefer that you get it here, not from amazon, but it's a mostly free country, so do what you want.)

With confessions and rationalizations out of the way, I agree with Debra Hamel that having friends review the author's book is deceptive, even though I don't think many authors have nefarious motives--most probably think their books are good, and that it is the publishing and review industry that is preventing readers from learning about them. Still, I would not send friends to amazon for any future books (and did not do so with my second book, When Falls the Coliseum). I'm not sure it's that much worse than the sort of thing that goes on with established authors writing blurbs for their friends' books and reviewing books written by authors who share their agents and so on. In some ways, the latter is worse, because when a review or blurb appears in a newspaper or is signed by a reputable author, readers might have more expectation of an honest, professional evaluation. But that's not to make excuses for the sort of thing that Hamel rightfully criticizes. And on this count I'm also guilty, since the blurbs on the back of Lost are from two writer-friends. Who else was I supposed to get blurbs from? Established authors who don't know you are not likely to write blurbs for a self-published book. I again think in this case that the blurbs accurately describe my first novel, and again are not that far off from the reviews written by strangers that eventually appeared in publications.

I don't think that all of the blurbs did much to generate sales (though the established author blurbs on the back cover did probably help convince bookstores to carry it and publications to review it). Sales of Lost really picked up only when I did bookstore signings or reviews appeared in major publications. I made relatively few sales through amazon. When my self-publishing effort was profiled in New York magazine and Lost was reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer and chosen as a daily pick by BookSense.com, copies started moving. What had been a self-published book that was easy to dismiss or ignore became a real book. Not that anything about the book itself had changed, of course. But it's amazing what recognition by a major publication can do for your credibility.

With my forthcoming novel Mean Martin Manning--my first that is not self-published--I also face review challenges.

One is that the book is published by a maverick independent press that by design avoids traditional bookstores and amazon.com (for reasons explained on the publisher's site), so getting major publications to review it will take effort. They all seem to prefer to review the same books by the same authors (and papers often just reprint reviews that appeared in other publications).

Two is that Mean Martin Manning isn't easy to place into a neat bookstore category and reviewers are probably not accustomed to reviewing anything as openly satirical--I don't know if reviewers approaching books looking for literary titles or thrillers will be ready to take Mean Martin Manning on its own terms.

Three is ideology. The new novel mocks a lot of things that some people take seriously. Some of these people write reviews. I have no idea whether this will come into play when it's review time.

Writers spend all of this pointless emotional energy hoping the book will be reviewed, because without a huge marketing campaign or an appearance on Oprah (my novel couldn't be less appropriate for Oprah), getting reviewed is one of the only ways to reach lots of readers. But getting the reviews then leads to the pointless spending of more energy hoping the reviews will be good. Anyway, when it comes to what readers care about, I'm comfortable that I've done my job. Is the book funny, original, entertaining, interesting, well-written, fresh, about something, all that? That's what really matters to readers. As a writer, that's what really matters to me, too.

At Frank Wilson's blog is a link to a June article by Ruth Franklin about the emptiness of over-the-top book blurbs and book reviews (read the first third of the article). Wilson is the book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. We're lucky to have a book editor in town with the good sense to link to an article like this, even though the paper doesn't publish as many original reviews as I'd like (or as many as he would like, I imagine).

Like many readers, I don't like being lied to by the inside-the-industry shills who take turns reviewing each other's books and share cocktails in Manhattan. I like even less that when someone reads something positive in a review of one of my books, they are apt to dismiss the praise, because according to the reviewers and blurb writers, every book out there is supposedly the funniest and most enlightening thing ever printed. To avoid disappointment, there is only one author's blurbs that you should take seriously--mine. In a 2001 review of my first novel, Lost, the Philadelphia Inquirer said:

There are a million laughs in the big city, as a sharp-eyed writer shows … Stein has a keen eye for the details of our cultural landscape … wonderfully comic … a page-turner … insightful tweaking of city living and modern times.

My new novel, Mean Martin Manning, due out near the end of the year, is far more aggressive, politically incorrect, irreverent, and scathingly satirical than my first novel, and certainly far, far more than most of what you'll find on the new release table at Barnes and Noble. We'll have to wait to see whether it receives excessive praise, faint praise, fiery condemnation (one can hope), or, worst of all, is ignored entirely and not reviewed. The press release announcing the signing of the book deal has been posted by my publisher. The release date of February 2007 is a conservative estimate. It might be in print before the end of the year.