M.C. Norris's Blog

The Top 5 Reasons You Didn’t Post an Amazon Book Review
(and why you must)

You’re a fan of that author, but you still haven’t posted that Amazon review of their book. Worse, that author might happen to be a friend or a family member. Ugh. You suffer a twinge of guilt whenever the subject of their writing comes up in conversation. You’ve seen their posts on Facebook. You know what they need, but you already bought a copy of their book—wasn’t that being supportive? You’ve shared a couple of their statuses, “liked” a few of their posts, maybe you even wrote a review for that first book of theirs, but now they’ve written another one. Just when you thought you were off the hook, another book, another Facebook post, another request for an Amazon reviews … but you figure that by now, they’re probably getting enough support from who knows how many other people. Your absence in their effort isn’t really missed, right?

So, you sweep your friend the author under the rug for another day, another week, because in all seriousness, you’re kind of done with it …

Hey, this is America. You need to learn to stand on your own two feet. The marketplace will determine if they’re talented enough to succeed. They don’t miss your reviews, and you’ve got your own life to manage. Tonight you’ve got that thing, and tomorrow is that other thing, last weekend was nuts, this weekend looks even worse, work has just been insane, holiday madness, down with the flu, the fridge is empty and …

Shush!

Take a deep breath. Your friend the author understands.

No one—I mean no one—feels a greater burden of that guilt to write reviews for books (that you’d probably not ordinarily read, to be perfectly honest) than your friend the author does. Oh, it’s true. Your friend the author is under constant pressure from other authors, on top of everything else, to do the exact same favors for them that your friend was so embarrassed to ask of you.

Here are the top five possible reasons why you didn’t do it:

1. I’m not a reader.

Your friend is an author, but you don’t read. What a conundrum. You haven’t read a book since high school. You’d rather watch something on TV. Your attention deficit is so bad that you can barely make it through a few pages of a book before your mind is spinning around all of the other things you’d rather be doing. Reading sucks. It’s hard work. It doesn’t even …

Hey-hey-hey!

There you go again. Relaaaax. Sit your monkey-ass down into Uncle Mike’s comfy ol’ Learnin’ Chair.

Don’t read the entire book.

Seriously. Just read as much as you’re able. A sample is oftentimes sufficient to post an honest review—if the review is for your friend or family member. Do food critics eat every bite on every plate that is dropped in front of them? Do wine critics quaff every last drop from an uncorked bottle? The fun ones do, but most just sample the wares. They ingest just enough of what’s being offered to form an intelligent opinion on whether or not its creator has some inkling of talent.

To clarify, we are not advocating slimy schemes where bogus reviews are sequestered from strangers who didn’t even read the book. This is your friend, your family member, who is struggling to build a fan base amongst readers who will never even see their book so long as it remains invisible on Amazon. Reviews make a book visible to its proper target audience through a ranking system. Without an established fan base, new writers must rely on you—their family and friends—to achieve visibility in the eyes of those folks most likely to enjoy the sort of book that your friend wrote. Even if the genre is not your cup of tea, one review from you will make an immediate difference in the ranking that I guarantee your friend is obsessively tracking, every single day.

2. I wouldn’t even know what to write.

“Great descriptions! Felt like I was in the scene.”
“Interesting characters. They seemed so real to me.”
“Awesome setting. I’ve always wondered about prehistoric Patagonia.”

Wow. Three reviews in ten seconds. Is that some sort of a record? But seriously, how easy was that?

Do you know what the difference is between a review of a couple sentences and a gushing four-page essay? Absolutely nothing. Not from a rankings perspective. Bear in mind that many of those “most helpful” reviews that dissect a book from cover to cover are being posted by other authors and bloggers, people with an agenda, people whose reputation in writing must be upheld every time that their fingertips hit the keyboard. Your friend does not care if your review is two sentences in length. A review is a review, and they all hold equal weight in the ranking system. Your friend will love to see yours appear there.

It’s a shark tank on Amazon. Somewhere out there is a critic who is days away from smashing your friend right in the face with a terrible, scathing review. Be there. Your friend needs you.

3. I don’t know how to post an Amazon review.

That’s all?

- Go to www.amazon.com
- Make sure you’re logged in to your account; it should display your name in the top-right corner, and your account information in the top bar.
- Search for the book, or the author.
- Once you’ve pulled up the book, scroll down past the first block of reviews until you’ve located the “post your own amazon review” tab, and click on it.
- If you’re using a smart phone and you can’t find that tab, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, where it says “view full site.” Click that tab, and a new and larger window will pop open that contains much more information. Then, scroll down past the first block of reviews to find that “post your own amazon review” tab, and click on it.
- Don’t forget to click the stars to give it a star ranking!

4. To be honest, I really don’t enjoy my friend’s writing.

Don’t be embarrassed. Most of us are pretty picky. Do you dislike your friend’s writing, or do you dislike *what* they’re writing? Do they lack talent, or do you not care for their chosen genre, or their writing style?

Here’s the thing: if their book just plain stinks; if there’s nothing redeeming about it; if it’s so without merit that you believe the world would actually be a better place without this book in it … then you probably shouldn’t write a review for them. Instead, be honest and tell them (if they inquire) that you really didn’t care for it. If they’re really your friend, they’ll get over it. If they can’t take some harsh criticism, I’m sorry, but they didn’t have the stomach for what it takes to be an author before they ever sat down to write their shitty book.

However, consider an alternate perspective, in which your dislike of their book may stem from the fact that you don’t like their genre of horror, romance, westerns, or whatever it is that your friend likes to write. If that’s perhaps the case, then for the sake of your friend, make an attempt to separate your eye for talent from the genre or style that you find distasteful. Try making it through one chapter. You might not find yourself a rabid new fan of your friend’s steampunk erotica, but do they have a talent for dialogue, character development, lurid narratives? Keep in mind that there may be a crowd of potential fans of your friend’s weird writing who need your review in order for them to see the book appear as a recommendation.

Try to look for some positives, and remember, your friend is always improving, every time that they sit down in front of the keyboard.

5. I just don’t have time.

By now, you’ve seen how quickly and easily a review can be posted. In the time that it’s taken you to read this drivel, you could just have easily posted a quick Amazon review for your friend.

Why are you still sitting there? Quit reading. Go post that review!

Hey, you’re back! See how easy that was? Don’t you feel better, less guilty, more connected? Do you feel like you’re maybe a little bit better of a friend?

That’s because you are, and now your friend knows it : )

Just like you, your friend is juggling work, relationships, parenthood, home ownership, and any number of obligations and inconveniences, but at the end of the day, when you’re settling in for one blessed hour of relaxation before retiring, think about your friend the author. They are just clocking-in to their second job of writing. They’re writing their own stuff, working on promotional crap, and trying to keep up with posting all of those Amazon reviews and critiques for their author colleagues. Your friend is exhausted, but instead of relaxing, retiring to bed, they’re now fighting for a second wind to keep those creative cogs spinning well past the midnight hour. This is your friend’s nightly routine. When they’ve spent every last drop of their creative juices, when they’re literally hallucinating at the keyboard, the last thing your friend the author is going to do before shutting down their computer is to stop by Amazon and check their rankings.

Be there.

You should be there tonight to bring a smile to their face in the closing seconds of their very long day. They don’t like to ask you for favors, even though they know that these favors will mean the difference between success and failure in the mountain that they’re trying to climb.

Take five minutes. Help them down their difficult road toward a lifelong dream.

The Hobbit finale, through its 2.5 hours of clanging steel, tumbling heads, and lingering close-ups on quavering faces, did reveal a few solid truths about everyday life on Middle Earth:

1) Gravity is relative to the orientation of one's moral compass.

2) If you're a dwarf, wrangling some erotic action from the elf community is actually within the realm of possibility so long as you happen to lack 100% of the facial characteristics that pretty much define your species.

3) Elves are the true Kings of the Impossible (sorry, Flash). No physical feats are too outlandish. When you're not scampering over the helmeted heads of enemies, climbing falling rocks like a ladder to higher ground, or unleashing a dozen arrows per second every time you draw your bow, then chances are you're either leaping atop the back of some ginormous abomination, or grabbing a pair of swooping legs to steer the doomed creature toward mass destruction before schlonking an arrow through its prefrontal cortex.

All in all, I thought the trilogy was a fantastic ride. Kudos to Peter Jackson for embracing a challenge seemingly impossible even to elves by delivering LOTK and the Hobbit to the big screen. I loved those books. As a child, I'll bet I played those vinyl records ten-thousand times, moving the needle backward again and again to hear the voice of Smaug reverberating through the black cloth of a 70's speaker. What a shame that Tolkien couldn't be around to enjoy the impact of his legacy.

It was one week before Christmas. I was in third grade. Seemingly out of nowhere, the teacher asked for a show of hands to determine how many students in the class still believed in Santa Claus. I vividly remember my anxiety mounting as I looked one way, and then another, to see that no other hands were wavering in the air but my own. I recall some grins, and even a few snickers. The teacher smiled wryly at me. “Michael,” she inquired, “why do you still believe in Santa Claus?”


Slowly, I lowered my hand. “Because I talked to him on the phone.”


As a parent, my father was a bit of a creative deviant who perhaps enjoyed partaking in holiday trickery more than the children being tricked. It was all in good fun, but my dad couldn’t have known the looming ramifications when he enlisted his buddy to play the role of Santa Claus on the other end of the phone in hope of talking me out of a particular gift on which my heart had been set.


It was the Bat Cave.


Back in the 70’s, there were no such things as “action figures.” We had dolls. Super heroes and G.I. Joes were all eight-inch dolls with removable clothing and even realistic hair that was sometimes glued to their squish-able heads, which was an unfortunate feature for the G.I. Joe from the Sea Wolf toy set, whose bristly hair and beard fell out in patches after a few weeks of nightly immersion in a bathtub, where he was pitted against a menacing rubber squid that circled his flooded submarine. At the time, the campy Adam West version of Batman was still wildly popular, as well as the animated Hanna Barbara productions that aired on Saturday mornings, such as Batman and the Superfriends. The year when the Bat Cave playset appeared on the scene was probably around 1979, and I was probably around seven or eight-years-old. To the best of my recollection, the Bat Cave playset was a plastic base with molded computers and stalagmites that served as a foundation for a cardboard backdrop that was a printed screenshot of the actual Bat Cave, as it was portrayed on one of those popular shows. For years, I’d been using cardboard boxes and Styrofoam packaging to create temporary models of Bat Caves that I’d store beneath my bed until such time as my mother grew tired of them and threw them out. I was ready for the real deal. The Bat Cave playset was finally available, and it was all that I wanted for Christmas.


Now, I’m not sure whether this particular item was overpriced, constructed of poor quality, or a combination of both, but my dad hated it. He couldn’t stand the idea of buying it. Every time that I’d bring it up, my dad would retort that it was nothing but a cardboard piece of crap, and that he could make me a much better Bat Cave than that. My dad was quite a craftsman, but I must admit, I had my doubts about his ability to craft anything remotely more awesome than the playset that was being advertised on the back of every comic book being printed that Christmas season. In fact, I couldn’t imagine settling for anything less, until the night when my dad suggested we call the North Pole, and I could hear it from Santa himself.


Wha-wha?


Was such a thing even possible? Why, in all my eight-years, had my dad been holding out on an option to actually call Santa Claus and speak directly to the man himself? I was stunned, and it all happened so suddenly that I’d scarcely time to react before he’d picked up the beige, goosenecked rotary phone on my grandparent’s counter, and he dialed up the North Pole before handing the phone right over to me. I didn’t know what to say, but as it turned out I didn’t need to say anything, because the next thing I knew the voice of Santa Claus was booming right in my ear. He of course knew exactly who I was, and why I’d called, without my ever having to explain myself. It was a shot of pure, undiluted 190-proof Christmas magic, rushing through every whorl of my brain. Star-struck, I could only nod my head in some semblance of understanding as Santa corroborated exactly what my dad had been telling me for months, that the Bat Cave was nothing but a cardboard piece of junk that was so poorly designed that his elves had actually halted the production line for that item, and they were in the process of doing a total recall. Santa then suggested, with an almost frightening intuition, that I might ought to ask my dad to make me a better Bat Cave than the one that was being so falsely advertised.


Christmas morning of 1979 arrived. I remember the astringent smell of fresh paint emanating from a large, dome-shaped package that was almost too heavy and awkward for a boy to lift from beneath the sappy branches of the real Christmas tree. When I tore away the colorful wrapping paper, I gawped down at a homemade Bat Cave, jig-sawed entirely out of ¾” plywood, and painted a dark, chocolate brown. Even divorced of its wrapping paper it was almost too heavy to carry. I had to slide it into the clear, with its splintered edges snagging at and tearing at the shag carpeting. There was no way that it was going to fit on my bedroom shelf, nor would it slide under my bed, being so large and ungainly. No, it was obvious from the moment I laid eyes on it that this plywood playset would have to be stored out in the garage, where I could play in a realistically cold and lightless environment that mirrored the inhospitable conditions of an actual cave.


The old man had really put some work into it. A huge black and gold Batman symbol blazed from the center of a great arched panel that served as the backboard. Screwed to the lower sidewalls, which remained forever tacky beneath their coats of brown paint, were ranks of imagined computers that the old man had fashioned from the dusty guts of old telephones and radios. My Bat Cave was the toyland equivalent of Eddie Murphy’s homemade McDonald’s burger, with all of the chunky onions and peppers hanging out of it, and it was no small irony that it had been created by the same man who would forever retell the tale of the wounded look in his own mother’s eyes when he’d once opened a package thirty-some years earlier to stare down in utter horror at a homemade version of the western shirt he’d wanted, sewn from material patterned with cute little skunks. Wisely, I remembered the lesson from this familiar anecdote, and I opted to break that cycle of lifelong regret that my dad tried to initiate in that fateful moment when he’d held aloft his skunky cowboy shirt on Christmas morning, frowned at his mama, and wrinkled his nose. Rather than showing any sign of disappointment, I thanked the old man, hefted the enormous abomination by its splintered edges, and staggered beneath the weight of its stupendous bulk into the frigid garage, where I would play with my superhero dolls beneath the mindless glare of a couple of half-frozen cats named Simon and Kuma.


Trickery and deceit. That’s my family tradition. In the same vein as my old man, when he handed me the phone to talk directly to Santa, or when he’d point at the flashing red light of an airliner plying Christmas Eve’s starry skies, and he’d assure me that it was none other than the blinking nose of Rudolph, I have made every effort to trick and deceive my own children, not just at Christmas, but at every occasion. The Tooth Fairy left not just coins beneath pillows at our house, but elaborate letters to the children, explaining how their teeth were ground into powder as a sort of nostrum to save the life of an ailing Toadstool King. Leprechauns weren’t just celebrated on Saint Patrick’s Day, they were hunted, trapped, and even feared, as they would always manage to escape the clever traps we’d set for them and leave, in their wakes of rage, subsequent paths of destruction all around the house.


When I revisit the memory of glancing uneasily around that 3rd Grade classroom, with my skinny arm wavering alone in the air, what I feel is love and pride. I love the fact that I was the last kid in my grade to release my hold on my beliefs; I love my dad, and all the trouble that he went through to build me a Bat Cave that was no doubt immeasurably better (and lasting) quality than the cardboard piece of junk that was being advertised in every comic book printed in the fall of 1979, and I’m proud to be a part of that family tradition of trickery that not only inspires, but galvanizes the magic of childhood.