TVland

Ah, yes... The sun always shines on TV. Or, at least, it used to.
I'm sure no one watching Game of Thrones, right now, has any belief in this anymore.
Because TV has changed.
No longer is it an idealized land of make-believe where everything works out in the end, the bad guys are defeated, and the hero gets the girl. Or, you know, whatever version of that you believe in.
And, yes, I'm pretty sure TV did used to be that way.
Thinking back through all of the old shows I used to watch when I was a kid, stuff from the 50s and 60s, I can't think of any shows that didn't always turn out right in the end. Well, except, maybe, Gilligan's Island, because they never did get off of that thing (not until years later when they made the TV movie to get them back home again), but, then, that was the point of that show, right? Within that context, though, everything always turned out fine.

At some point, reality began to work itself into TV shows (and other media, too (I'm, of course, tempted to talk about Marvel Comics and their breaking of the CCA in 1971)) but, really, I blame the 90s. Maybe, even, I blame MTV and The Real World, not that The Real World had anything to do with reality, but I think reality television changed the way things work. Not in a good way.

It gave us Trump (#fakepresident).
More importantly (to this discussion, at any rate), it gave us his obsession with ratings.
And, man, is he obsessed with ratings. His own ratings.
Which is not new information but, you know, sometimes you know things but don't quite grok them (yeah, if you don't understand the term, go read my review of Stranger in a Strange Land, then read the book), and I recently grokked something that scared the shit out of me:
To Trump (#fakepresident), this is all just TV. The things he does, the firing people and the chaos and everything else, are because those are the things you do to keep your viewers. To keep people watching you. It's that whole "all publicity is good publicity" thing.

I suppose I could break this all down and go point by point, but I don't think I need to do that and am not feeling compelled to do so. All of this came upon me because I was listening to one of his associates, someone who has been with him for decades, describing his "style," this style that he's had for, well, decades. A style he developed because of his reality show, evidently, and I had one of those... moments. An "Oh, shit! He thinks the presidency is TV!" moment. It's just to keep eyes on him and keep him in the news and people talking about him.

So, you know, if we end up in an actual war, say, with Iran or China, just know that it's because war is good for ratings.

Fuck this shit.
The sun has gone down.

An Attack Against the Consciousness of Humanity (or The Angst of Reviewing) (an IWSG post)

Having been the recipient of multiple author tantrums as a result of reviews they didn't like, you'd think I wouldn't be surprised anymore by this kind of behavior. Amazingly, sometimes the meltdowns are so extraordinary that even I'm surprised. Not long after the whole Dilloway Incident was "resolved," a friend emailed me to point me at another author, another indie author, having an even more explosive tantrum about a negative review.

It seems that a reviewer had called his book "pretentious," and he didn't take very kindly to that. Well, he didn't take kindly to the whole thing, especially the 1-star rating, but that particular word, pretentious, seemed to draw particular ire. He called her an idiot who just didn't understand his book. In fact, he called her a lot of things. And, then, he called a lot of people a lot of things as people came to her defense and her right to have not liked his book. He called so many people so many things that goodreads eventually pulled his profile and his books from the site. [They are back, now, which makes me curious as to whether they put them back or if he just made a new profile.]

As the comment thread got longer, he lashed out at pretty much everyone, even people who tried to defend his right to be upset about receiving the negative review. In all of the flailing and raging, two things stood out to me:
1. He said (and I wish I could just go pull the quote but it appears his comments have been removed from the comment thread) that anyone who would give his book a 1-star rating was not anyone whom he would want reading his book to begin with.
2. Giving his book a 1-star rating was an "attack against the consciousness of humanity." [That quote I saved at the time, because it was so outrageous that I didn't want to forget it.] You know, because his book is all deep and meaningful and shhhtuff.

He went on from there to talk about how people who give his books bad ratings, or any indie book, are killing the soul of the world. Personally, I'd say that is a little more than pretentious. All of his comments were like that, lofty and pretentious, so, if his novel was anything similar to his comments, she was probably accurate in calling the book pretentious. [Incidentally, the "misunderstood artist" is one off the asshole archetypes that Aaron James identifies in his book Assholes. This guy who was just "defending" his book fit the definition like a glove. "You just don't understand me!"]

The thing that gets me in all of this is the whole "target audience" idea. The "you didn't like my book, so you're not my target audience and shouldn't have been reading it in the first place" idea.
BULLSHIT!
Unless you, as an author (or any kind of artist), are personally going to hand out copies of your work only to people of your own choosing, people you somehow just know will like it, you don't get to pull that whole "you're not my target audience" crap.

You put your work out for the public, and you live with the results. Period.
Or you don't put it out there.

You want to know what I think is an attack against the consciousness of humanity (and is killing the soul of the world)? All the crap being shoveled out into the marketplace, mostly by, yes, indie authors. Crap that we are then expected to admire and praise.
"Oh, look at the little poopy!"
"It's such a cute little poopy!"
"Just look at the texture and that smell! So exquisite!"
I'm sorry (no, I'm not), but that stuff just hurts my brain. Just, please, call it what it is:
"Dude, that's a pile of shit."

Okay, so, maybe, don't be so crude, but the weight of pretense surrounding indie authors and how good their books are is... well,  it's overwhelming.

And, you know, unlike most of you (almost all, in fact), I've tried. Because I'm an indie author and I want people to take a chance with my books, I've tried to do what I think is the right thing and support other indie authors by buying and reading their books. But I think I've hit my limit.

So far, with only a few exceptions, I have powered through even the worst books because I haven't felt like I should review a book I couldn't finish; however, I've come to believe there is some validity (more than just "some") in saying, "This book was so bad that I couldn't finish it." And, so, this latest indie book that I'm reading is so bad that I can't finish it. But that's not what did it. No, it was not just that it was a "bad book" that was the proverbial straw that killed the camel.

What was it then? Well, when I got to the part where my eyes fell out because I couldn't believe what I was reading (and having your eyes fall out just hurts, okay), I went over to Amazon (after laboriously cleaning the carpet fuzz off of my orbs and working them back into my head) to check the reviews of the book. There were a lot of reviews, close to 100, and more than 90% of them are 4- and 5-star ratings, with only one of them being under a 3. My first thought was, "Maybe, it's just me." But, then, I started reading the reviews and all of the reviews (all the ones I read, and I read seven or eight of the 5-star rated reviews) were... The reviews were not "good" reviews. They were not 5-star rating reviews. They were reviews that said things like:
"The beginning of this book was really hard to get through but it got better."
"I had a hard time accepting the insta-love."
"The characters seemed flat."
And, see, the reviews were all from names I recognize as author bloggers. Clearly, it was a case of not wanting to give someone they knew a bad rating.

That's just wrong. There's no other way around it: It's wrong. It's lying to readers who come in and see something like 70 4- and 5-star ratings and think they are buying something that's quality work when it's obviously not. Just because it is the author's "best effort" doesn't mean it's good or quality material or worth having on the market.

So, yeah, I'm pretty much done with indie authors except for those (very) few that I have found I already like. I'll be putting up a tab (hey, it might be there already as you read this, but it's not there while I'm writing it) pointing out the indie books that I think are worth your time; beyond that, I won't be sifting through other indie books trying to support other indie authors who
1. aren't doing anything themselves to support other indie authors (and)
2. aren't putting out anything worth reading, anyway.

However, if you want to run the risk of having me review your book, I will take requests. (I'll put up a tab for that, too (which may also already be there.)

Look, what I'm saying here is this:
It is not an "attack against the consciousness of humanity" to give a book a bad review (unless you're just doing it to be mean or spiteful). What is an attack against the consciousness of humanity is to lie in a review just to make someone feel good or to keep from hurting someone's feelings. Reviews are not for authors; they're for readers. You are doing an injustice to those readers when you don't tell the truth because you're worried about how the author is going to take it. You're also doing an injustice to the author, but that's a whole other topic (and one I've already talked about (not that I haven't talked about all of this before, anyway)).

This has been brought to you in part by the IWSG.

The Amazon Slant

As many have said, we live in a very divisive culture. I'm not sure if it's always been this way, but it's certainly that way right now. Left or Right. Black or White. Liberal or Conservative. Right or Wrong. On side or the other with no room for anyone to be in between. No room for ambiguity. No room for indecision. We're just not comfortable with it.

I'm sure that at least some of this attitude has been adopted from the press, since controversy sells. People getting along is not a story; that doesn't happen till they take up sides and start throwing bricks at each other. If you want to sell things, it's a good tactic.

And Amazon knows this.

I don't know how many of you pay attention to the rating systems on the various sites on which you may be rating things, but they are not all the same. In fact, most of them go something like this:
5 -- I loved it!
4 -- I really liked it.
3 -- I liked it.
2 -- I didn't like it.
1 -- I hated it!
Goodreads has a more positive slant on it:
2 -- It was okay.
1 -- I didn't like it.
There's no room for hate there.
Basically, though, most sites offer "like" as the default giving you much more room to rate things positively than negatively. If you're paying attention. What this means is that most sites have a "top heavy" rating system that's geared toward generating positive ratings and reviews.

Looking at Goodreads more closely, what we have is a system that is designed to get ratings of 3, 4, and 5. 2s should be virtually non-existent, leaving 1s as the only real option for an actual negative review or rating.

Why do I say 2s should be non-existent? Because most people most of the time do not have an actual "it was okay" reaction to things. They like things or they don't like things. There are very few "I could take it or leave it"s.

Which is what makes Amazon's rating system so interesting. It has that "it was okay" right in the middle.
5 -- I love it
4 -- I like it
3 -- It's okay
2 -- I don't like it
1 -- I hate it
So, when you look at Amazon reviews, you get high numbers on both ends and almost non-existent numbers in the middle, because the system is designed that way. It wants to pit the 1s against the 5s, because that's what draws attention to products.

As someone who does a fair amount of reviews on Amazon, I have seen a lot of this confrontation first hand. For instance, there is a strong group of Marvel-haters out there. So, if a post a review for a Marvel movie, it is sure to immediately get "unhelpful" votes (my review for Guardians of the Galaxy didn't receive the normal deluge of negative votes when I posted, although, still, the first vote was negative).

What it boils down to is that Amazon doesn't want ambiguous ratings or reviews. Amazon wants "I loved this!" or "I hated this!" When you can shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, it was okay, I guess," no one is going to want to take a look at the product. Whatever the product. I love or a hate, though, will get some attention.

And what's my point with all of this?
The first thing is this: When you're rating things, make sure you pay attention to the rating system you're using. Just to give you an example, I was rating/reviewing some things recently, and I was on Goodreads leaving my stuff there. The particular story I was dealing with got a 3 on Goodreads because "I liked it." When I switched over to Amazon, I was sort of on autopilot, and I gave the story a 3 there, too, which was not accurate. On Amazon, I needed to leave a 4. It was a couple of days before I noticed what I'd done and went back and fixed it. It's just something to be aware of.

The other thing is... well, I'm not sure. I mean, I am sure, but I'm not sure (I'd give that a 3). If you're looking at selling things (like books), it seems that a way to do that is to generate some love/hate around it. That's what Amazon seems to think at any rate. And I've seen that work in actual practice. I don't know, exactly, how I would say to go about doing this, but there probably are ways. For one thing, though, as authors, it may not be in our best interests to be getting all upset about reviews on the negative end of the spectrum. I mean, it's never in our best interest to act out over negative reviews, but it might be even more than that. I think the real key is to learn how to exploit the reviews on either end of the rating scale and make them work in our favor. I'm just not sure how, yet.