My Very First 1-Star Review!

From my August Newsletter Update:

 It had to happen sooner or later, right? Someone hated one of my books enough to share it with the world.

I'm kind of surprised it didn't happen sooner. I've been very fortunate in my short writing career to have received mostly positive reviews of my work and constructive criticism from my peers. But I'd been warned by other authors this was coming. A few of them have encouraged me to look on it as a rite of passage--something every "successful" author has to go through.

I mentioned in my last newsletter how the success of Half Human has stimulated interest in my earlier writing. Well, late last month, I noticed a fresh review had appeared on my Amazon product page for the first book I ever published, The Draculata Nest. (See the My Books tab to check it out.) "Cool," I thought--until I read the following ...

JustAnotherOpinion: 1.0 out of 5 stars A Kindle Unlimited Review

Ok, I'm not a touchy feely kind of guy, I know myself and am happy. 24 years in the service has left me with a positive can do attitude.

The MC in this book is a whinny, sniveling loser. If others like reading about this kind of person then good for them. I DO NOT!

Hated the MC! Book NOT Recommended!

Wow. That's kind of a tough pill to swallow. My first reaction to this was, "Hey, of course he's a whiny loser. That's what people love about him! If you don't like reading about touchy feely people, don't!"

My second reaction was, "Okay, what can I learn from this?" (Pretty mature of me, huh? Well, it's the advice I keep getting from my mentors.)

After I thought about it a bit, I started to feel for the reader.  JustAnotherOpinion shouldn't have read the book. He should have known he would be disappointed from the start. So, why did he?

Did he read it on the recommendation of a friend? Not likely--unless he was being punked. The most probable scenario is he was mis-lead by an advertisement and ... uh, oh.

Yikes! This was my fault. I do all my own ads. If I targeted someone who was obviously not in my target audience with a clever ad, I brought this on myself. I started digging and--sure enough--I found ads targeting the Military Fantasy genre!

What was I thinking? (Well, okay, there is a war going on between werewolves and vampires throughout the series, but ...) I promptly--or, as promptly as Amazon KDP Support will allow--removed the entire series from the Military Fantasy category.

See? You can learn from your mistakes. Except--holy cow--it looks like I did the same thing with the Spaceship Huey Adventures series! Guess I better go fix that, too.
 

 

 

 

 

Popular posts from this blog

The Deep-Seated Psychological Reasons I Write About Werewolves

Image
Christmas Day, 2012 5:30 pm    I hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. Myself, I’ve been working on this little blog post off and on for the last four days. It’s been hard to find time, what with all the feasting and family, but I’ve finally got all my obligations and ‘fun’ out of the way, a fresh cup of coffee made with my new French press I got for Christmas, and I’m ready to post! Holiday Giveaway    Several weeks ago I resolved to give a book away each week during the holidays to a lucky reader who left a comment on my blog. So far, I’m way behind. Only one person has left a comment out of all the folks that visit my blog each week. I can’t believe that you guys are willing to buy these things, but I can’t give ‘em away!    I’m starting to develop a complex. No, I already have one. The only thing I can figure is you’re not making it to the end of my long-winded ramblings and therefore not scrolling down far enough to read about the...
Read more

The Old Man and the Bike

Image
I’m the kind of person who can overdo anything and everything, good or bad. I have a long list of addictions to prove it. The acceptance of this about myself has made the last quarter century of my life an almost daily struggle for balance. I’m constantly striving for just the right mix of work, play, intellectual stimulation and down time, that will keep me from tipping the scales too far in any direction. Take writing, for instance. It has proven a mixed blessing. Over the last five years, creating the first three books in the Red Wolf Saga has been an eye-opening, soul enriching, life changing experience for me. It has also become an obsession. Whereas I once filled as much of my free time as I could with writing, my free time has become writing time , and my free time has, well…disappeared. Last weekend, while rearranging some debris in my apartment (what I call cleaning ), I noticed the rusting chain and flattened tires on my bicycle. I suddenly realized it had been nearl...
Read more

The Real Red Wolves

Image
    The term red wolf must have been floating around in my subconscious when I conceived of Clifford Crane, the supernatural werewolf protagonist depicted in my Red Wolf Saga . Crane (you can check out the “My Books” tab), whom I imagine to be a cross between an Irish setter and an eight foot grizzly, bears little resemblance to the coyote-colored canid that once roamed the eastern North American continent in large numbers a few hundred years ago.     But, yes, there are real red wolves! And it wasn’t until I was almost ready to publish The Draculata Nest that I discovered they are living practically in my own back yard.     Like its grey wolf cousin, which already haunted the dreams of European settlers, the red wolves were regarded as everything from a threat to domestic livestock to agents of Satan. The “new Americans” went about systematically destroying the wolves’ natural habitat and hunting it to near extinction. Today, Canis rufus can be f...
Read more