Celebrating Independent Authors
Google is ubiquitous. There’s no getting around it. What’s worse, Google tracks EVERYTHING! How extensive is Google’s tracking? They’re tracking you even when you think they aren’t. With cookies, filter bubbles, IP addresses, fingerprinting, flash cookies, HTML storage, and other tools; Google uses your information more than you do.
.
And it’s not like us writer types ever search for anything weird. Continue reading “Achieving Online Search Privacy”
One of my recent posts concerned a very public tantrum from an author unhappy that a book blogger didn’t like her book. In the comments of that post Lynne Cantwell theorized that reviewers were subjected to a lot of bad author behavior that never went public. She’s right. I’ll be quick to add that in my recent experience bad behavior is the exception, even when giving a negative review. I’ve had several authors email to say they’d had their book re-edited or proofed again, neglected to send me an updated copy, and that getting dinged on the review for a less than stellar job on the version we received was justified. I’ve had authors email to say my complaints were valid and they were using my feedback to up their game in the future. Authors who do their homework have figured out that a public fight with a reviewer never turns out well.
However, as Lynne posited, this doesn’t mean authors no longer react in inappropriate ways to bad reviews. This post is the story of one such recent experience of mine. Continue reading “More on Author Behavior”
Yes, that’s right – another badly behaving author. Before I go further, if you want the gory details, hop off and read this post at the Cabin Goddess. Just don’t follow links forever and forget to come back. For the tl;dr crowd, the twitter version is: reviewer writes one star review, author goes ballistic and threatens a lawsuit.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. It won’t be the last. I could regurgitate the normal talking points (author never comes out looking good, a review is only one person’s opinion, raising a stink only draws more attention, this isn’t just indies), but you’ve heard it all before and most (hopefully all) of you know better than to react this way to a bad review. However, in reading through the account linked above a couple things jumped out at me that were unique, at least in my experience. I thought they might be worth discussing for the potential lessons to be learned. Continue reading “Another Badly Behaving Author”
I am a social media experiment. No, Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t plastered electrodes to my head to test my brainwaves while I look at adorable, spelling-deficient baby animals on Facebook, although his calls are getting more insistent and frankly, a little disturbing. I think somewhere in the depths of his underground California lair, he’s training newborn badgers to sing Justin Bieber tunes. But I could be wrong. Since I read it on Wikipedia. Continue reading “An Experiment of One…Hundred Thousand”