I don’t have a huge problem with self-publishing, by and large.  Honestly, I feel like it can be a good outlet for even published authors to explore some stranger avenues, and I don’t hate it on principle.  My main issue with it is that most of it just isn’t very good, though I suppose you could make the same argument of almost anything.  That all said, there are varying degrees of ‘bad’.

I’m not going to name the author in question or the book in question because I’m really not out to get anyone, but I ran into a situation that seemed like such a great object lesson that I felt like I wanted to share it.  My wife likes Goodreads a lot and recently agreed to review someone’s self-published book in return for a free copy.  However, once she received it she found that it was just painful to read and I have to say I kind of agree…no one in the opening chapter ‘says’ anything they ‘explosively curse aloud’ at every turn.  No one ‘realizes’ anything, they (in the case of someone lying in bed) ‘cogitate horizontally’ that someone has arrived.  She wanted to know if, as an author, I would prefer a bad review to no review at all where one had been promised.  I told her that bad reviews come with the good, and not everyone is going to like everything you write, however this review was solicited by a self-published author so I thought I’d check out the author’s other reviews to get a temperature reading.

The author in question writes anonymously, which right off the bat makes me feel like whoever they are they aren’t really confident in their work and don’t have enough skin in the game.  All of the reviews seemed to be solicited except one which was written by some kind of hired ‘promotion specialist’ (I think also the only five star review).  Every positive review was responded to by this same promotion specialist letting the reviewer know that any quibbles they have are addressed in the latest version.  Every bad review pretty much got attacked, the reviewer jumped on by this same promotions specialist, and in most cases personally insulted.  One reviewer went so far as to share an email exchange she had with the author, where she tried to explain to him that she’d rather decline the review than say anything too negative about it, and was told she was a ‘shit’ and should ‘hang herself’.

Now, I can’t say with complete certainty that this author’s hired ‘promotion specialist’ is actually the anonymous author himself/herself, but I suspect that is the case.  My suggestion to my wife was to just delete the book from her Kindle, and forget about it.  Sending a free digital copy of a self-published book cost the author nothing, and leaves her with no obligation to provide the review.  Whoever this author is, they don’t appear to be ready for prime time and don’t appear interested in any sort of constructive feedback, either.  They want their book to be praised as it is, and so let them cast their net and find people willing to do that.

My wife, understandably, found herself a little soured by the whole thing, though, and I doubt she’ll agree to get involved in this sort of thing in the future.

I realize that I don’t need to explain to most authors (self-published or not) why this is all many different kinds of wrong, but if you ever find yourself in need of a reminder as to why it’s best to distance yourself from reviews and remain professional at all times, let this be it.