IN THE WRITER/READER DANCE, WHAT DOES THE WRITER LEARN?

PURGATORY has 56 reviews on Amazon with a 4.3* average, and this hasn’t changed for a while.

NETHERWORLD, however, has only 9 reviews on Amazon, but with a 5* average.

It hasn’t been for lack of trying to get more people to read and review, but it puzzles me a bit.

I think NETHERWORLD is better than PURGATORY, in the sense that the first book in a trilogy is (and has to be) a bit of a set-up book, because no one comes in knowing the characters or the locations, and some of the writer’s ‘space’ has to be taken up with defining the universe of the story, making it real in a reader’s mind, and setting up the rules for interaction (how much from the author, vs. how much the reader is expected to contribute from the huge database stored in their head?), rules for grammar and italics and epigraphs and the whole tone.

I deliberately did NOT provide any way to catch up if you started with NETHERWORLD – no clever ways of a narrator reminding readers who a character is, or that we’ve been at this place before and should remember at least the basics about it.

Not because I assumed they would start with PURGATORY, although that works.

But mostly because there is so little space in a packed story for those extras – and I didn’t think I’d NEED to do it, not with my kind of readers, my kind of story.

I was a bit disappointed when a new reader had plans to START with NETHERWORLD, and was going to tell me how that experience went (not an uncommon procedure in the writing world), but she then never really got going for very good reasons having nothing to do with me or my writing, so I never got that piece of natural feedback I had hoped for.

I’m still hoping someone will.

But this FEAR you speak of – what’s that?

That’s where I’m in uncharted territory, and have only my own experience to go by.

I remember, as a kid, reading books I didn’t want to share. As long as no one else knew about the book (I was a kid – probably more naive than most), it was mine. No one else had walked across the pristine snow in clunky boots. No one else knew the characters I had fallen in love with. I didn’t have to talk about it – only remember, and reread, and reposition myself into the milieu, the story, the life of the character I’d identified with.

I’ve probably mentioned my rule before: I have to be able to identify, in books and movies and stories, with at least ONE character – and if I can’t find even one sympathetic character to pretend to be, why would I bother to live that life?

So I was Pip, not Estella, in Great Expectations.

That’s more articulate than I had as a child – but even then I knew I was living a different life than the boring one I had every day.

I didn’t want to lose the book. I didn’t want it to have ended. I didn’t want to have to go back to real life.

I fought (quietly, in my mind) to stay.

The MORE I liked something, the LESS likely I was to share anything about it.

I didn’t go around proclaiming loudly that I had found something great and everyone should read it.

The book blogger who shares and analyzes and comments and judges? Anathema.

Does this apply to reviewing a book I really like?

Dunno.

I review very few books.

Reviewing a book is pulling yourself out of it and trying to analyze it – and I don’t want to do that if I like it.

I don’t want to know that hordes of people like the same book I do – they can like what they like, but I don’t necessarily want to know about it, unless it emerges in a small conversation such as those that happen on blog posts you like enough to comment on at length.

All of this attitude is counterproductive for authors needing reviews

For writers wanting to know if they’ve hit the mark.

For target audiences.

They say you shouldn’t read your reviews.

Excuse me?

I can understand not wanting to read what the people who call your baby ugly say, specifically. But the ones who get it? Those have stuck.

Praise is healing.

The biggest compliment you can get as a writer is a reader who struggles with offering praise – because you’ve unnerved them and broken through their defenses.

Which is why I like to find readers and bloggers and reviewers who DO write about what they like (extroverts?), share it, and hope other people will like the book, too. And ask them specifically. And then hold myself quiet and steady when those good reviews come in. (And ignore the others.)

I didn’t expect this reaction from myself

But I wonder if I’ve elicited it from others.

And the fear would make sense: leaving a public written review where other people can read it is admitting you have been to that book, and have not wanted to come back.

Maybe it’s just an introvert thing.

But it would explain something that ALSO puzzles me: emails giving me that first reaction that tells me I got through to someone – and the promised review never showing up.

I’m afraid I would have done the same.

Or maybe it just didn’t hit as hard as I’m assuming…

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