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And just to clarify. I didn’t mean to say bad reviews should never be posted. Of course they should! But bad reviews by people who go in already hating it are no good to me. If I like something and someone outright says I don’t like this then goes into a bad review it just makes me assume they weren’t the target audience to begin with and I look for other reviews.
I don’t think this woman was Anne’s target audience to begin with so the fact she didn’t like it doesn’t surprise me. Of course she didn’t. She went into the novel looking for everything bad and picked it apart. I’ve been told time and time again on these boards not to let people read your work if they don’t like the genre to begin with because they’ll just hate it and be of no use to you. I found her review offensive. I don’t think either side acted with grace. I’m not at all surprised it exploded.
I was just surprised at the responses here on this board.
Okay well, I don’t ever take the opinion of ONE bad article without the full story. I wasn’t defending the nasty posts. I was asking why everyone takes the word of one article without checking into the facts. I never said it wasn’t acceptable to post that review. It’s her blog. She can post whatever she wants and no people don’t have to like it. I’m not on either side here. It just amazes me how quickly everyone takes sides instead of looking at it objectively.
However I saw no evidence that Anne encouraged her readers to go attack this woman. She certainly didn’t act gracefully but to put the full blame on the author when the blogger wasn’t much better doesn’t seem right to me. Obviously others disagree.
As for getting death threats regularly, no I don’t. But when you post outright hate about something a lot of other people like you’re going to get nasty replies. My blogs have no readers but my close friends and I still manage to have them found in web searches by people who just want to post to argue with me for no other reason to argue and be nasty.
I am not a fan of Anne. I haven’t seen her actual posts. I’m certainly not defending her. I’ve seen people paraphrasing that nasty comment all over but I’ve seen just as many of her fans coming out to defend her and say she didn’t incite this. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
I’m really not sure where I said personal nasty attacks were okay.
Is it just me? I can’t find anywhere where Anne Rice did anything that people are claiming she did here. According to everything I’ve been able to find Anne posted the link to the review and calmly asked for comments from her fans like she does with every review good or bad. I saw one comment that Anne may or may not have made that was a little bit snide maybe but nothing that I’d expect from the responses here. Granted I didn’t have time to wade through the millions of comments but what I did see didn’t seem that bad. The article here is slanted to make it sound like she sent her followers on a witch hunt but her fans have posted many times to the contrary saying Anne did nothing but ask for commentary on a review (not for commentators to go post ON the review) like she always does. Am I missing a huge part of the story?
From what I can piece together from reading this article, the blogger’s posts and the commentary on both: The reviewer doesn’t like that kind of story to begin with which led to her posting a rather harsh review as it normally does when people go into something already not liking it. Anne posted the link to the review (which again she apparently posts all links to all reviews) and asked for commentary but for some reason this particular review is being blown out of proportion. Such is the way of the internet?
I’m curious why Anne’s being thought of as a horrible person and the blogger is being defended here when so many people here on these boards have posted about the critiques they’ve gotten from people who hated their work and how detrimental it was? Does everyone here go and read books of genres they don’t care for and post reviews about how much they hated it and what trash it was? Maybe I’m alone in that I’d only write reviews for genres and story types that I actually like to read.
To me the blogger’s review was rather gleeful about cutting up the book because the writing in the book was so bad. Of course she got negative commentary for that. I get death threats on my blog for less than that.
I’m just curious why on a writer’s board everyone is so quick to jump on the author but there’s no commentary on the reviewer posting a harsh review for a book she had no possible way of liking going in. For instance I don’t like Chick Lit so any review I did of one of those would be already harshly slanted because I go into it hating it already.
One also has to be careful how they decide to write for the readers/audience in my opinion.
When I put my first novel up for critique I was new to all of this and I really wanted to please my readers. I tried to please everyone and I ended up with a story that was no longer mine but it was written by committee almost. And it didn’t make sense any more. No one liked it and I personally hated it because I’d lost the story I wanted to write by trying to please other people. It was stuffed in a drawer and even though the original storyline I think is still good and I love it I would have to completely toss years of revisions and start over from scratch. I haven’t found the will to do that. So for me there’s definitely a point where write for the readers is extremely bad advice.
I do keep markets in mind. I know the trilogy I’m writing right now is probably going to only attract a small niche of readers. I’d be happy with that though. So I think you also need to decide how many readers it is important to you to attract. Since I’m all right with just a few and not planning to get rich off this trilogy it will stay mostly how I want it to be and I won’t worry so much about readers. I’m planning to Indy publish it. If I were trying to secure a place at a large publisher or if I wanted a large following I wouldn’t even be writing this trilogy I’d be writing something that is more acceptable to a larger audience.
Interesting, thanks for the link.
I was using that to judge mine too, comparing them to movie content and what it would be rated, regardless of the character age. So I told my librarian friend about the novel I wrote that I would think would be too graphic and she still said it would likely go in YA even though the things in it to me would make it R rated if it were a movie.
The thing about Game of Thrones is it had no ‘main’ character and a lot of the characters are adult. If the story had been -just- Dany and Drogo (the child bride and the barbarian) my friend is confident it would be in the YA section despite the sex and all the other concerns with child brides. So that’s really what is disturbing me she said there’s no holds barred in the YA section anymore.
I think the most confusing thing is when comparing to movies we have horror and all sorts of horrific stories involving young characters and they’re rated R and clearly for adults but most adults skip books that have younger characters and write them off as children’s tales. That’s what I’m not understanding why someone could watch an R rated movie about a young character and consider it adult but not a book.
And then the line blurs further if you have more than one character. If the lead character is young then it goes into YA as far as my friend’s library is concerned. But if there’s several leads and only a few are young like Game of Thrones that goes into Adult. Then if it’s a smaller mix, one young lead and a couple adults or vice versa it depends. So while this is all fascinating to me and I had no idea about it I’m finding it very frustrating to pin down.
Thanks.
I was more considering the age they were considered adults. 18 wasn’t the legal adult age then, a lot of women were married off at 12-13 for instance, there wasn’t really a ‘teen’ age, you were a child or you were an adult as far as I can remember. To be honest though I haven’t kept up on research for a while it just got set in my head that those were the appropriate age frames.
I’m in my 30s and I really don’t pay any attention to the age of the characters when I read, it’s how they act and how they’re written that’s important to me as a reader. I can’t stand whiny teens but I recently read a novel with a young man in it that was autistic and he was far more fascinating than the two adult characters that were with him. So to find out there is a definite line for most other readers of what they will read as far as age and what they won’t really surprised me. I had never even thought it would be a factor unless it was incredibly important to the story what age they were. It also made me wonder if I should start looking around in the YA section for fantasy novels since I’m sure I’m not the only author that chose that age group in that genre.
I have what I personally feel is an extremely graphic disturbing novel that I wrote that had a young protagonist in it. The thought of handing this over to my young nephews to read disturbs me. I don’t write with that audience in mind. I write situations geared for adult readers who could handle more graphic or disturbing content so I guess in the end the characters are acting like adults. So I personally will be bumping the ages up on all my characters because the only reason it mattered that they were younger was I felt it was unrealistic for them to be older in that setting. Since the overwhelming response has been no one will read about them if they’re younger except kids I would prefer didn’t read them that seems to be my only choice. I don’t mind if teens are surfing the adult fiction and pick up my books; I certainly did that a lot when I was that age. But the problem of adults not giving my work a chance because the character is a certain age is something I don’t want to risk. I certainly don’t think I have the secret ingredient that made adults flood to Harry Potter or Hunger Games or Twilight.
So…my friend who is a librarian said the youngest protagonists in adult fiction are generally around 22 years old and anything under that could be classified as YA regardless of content or genre. Even in Fantasy novels she said a lot of them that were clearly written for adults are stuck in the YA section because they have characters that are 17-18 years old.
Does anyone here write or read historical fiction where the ages for adults would be considered much lower than modern day? How would you handle that then? As someone who used to read everything I could get my hands on of non-fiction about the Medieval period making characters wait around until they’re 22 to be in an adult story doesn’t seem realistic to me even on a fantasy world. But the overwhelming response I’ve been getting is that if they’re any younger than that people write it off as YA (which makes me a little terrified as to what could be lurking in YA that was never meant to be there).
I like that explanation. I write a lot of dark Fantasy lately, or Fantasy with Horror elements so the thought of being shoved in YA just because my character is 15 instead of 20 was a little worrying. Or losing readers because people see oh this is about a teen it must be YA. Out of the five people I asked today 4 said they would think a teen/child protag meant the book was for kids. But I didn’t ask about genre I just asked in general so they may or may not be avid fantasy readers or the other genres where younger protags grow up/mature much faster.
I could make them a bit older if I must but then it bothers me personally as an author because the world they’re in would have meant they matured faster and were facing adult issues much sooner than someone today might be.
As someone who has a very hard time with the color green I can say the bold helped a LOT for me. I couldn’t read the first post without squinting for a long time at it. I could read the bold a lot easier. Blue is a much better color for me but I wonder if there’s people who have trouble with blue like I do with green? Generally for me the darker the color is the easier I can read it.
I think it’d be a great series or story or sitcom or something! Every episode could have different characters and their authors.. 😆
Would dead characters look for authors that bring characters back to life? “Oh, look! This one raises ghosts from the dead!” Or do they not truly die but take on different roles like actors in a movie and go to another author when one kills them?
It’s positive I’m male. 😆 But since I write male characters almost exclusively that could be a good thing I suppose!
I actually can’t find the link to Preditors and Editors on the new site anywhere. Anyway they’re right check here:
ESPECIALLY read this page to know how to avoid scam publishers:
http://pred-ed.com/pubwarn.htm
Publish America is horrible news you can read their huge page on them here:
http://pred-ed.com/pebpublisham.htmI couldn’t find the other one you’re interested in a quick search (all I had time for) but I’d be sure to check both on their site and the others they recommend to see if there’s anything about them anywhere.
I’ve only seen clips of the show because I don’t have HBO and not a huge fan of the nudity. So can’t really comment on that part.
I also used to be a huge fan of the book series. Until A Feast For Crows. So I’d recommend the first three (well the first two, three wasn’t my favorite) but yeah that one just killed it for me I haven’t even bothered to read the one after that.
I almost gave up on writing once.
Then I read a book that was so incredible and that hit me so hard that I was rocked to my core. I got it then very clearly. I can’t even explain why that book hit me that way but it did. I realized that if I don’t write whoever needs the book I’m writing that would like it that much will never see it.
It might not help in situations like that. But it could very well help someone trying to escape a terrible situation of a different sort that uses books to escape the real world they can’t face. There are a lot of bad situations that having a good imagination and escaping into books are a way of keeping sane. So you might not help the ones you wish you could reach right now but I will never again sit there and think that I won’t ever reach anyone that needs it.
(Now I just need to give myself the same pep talk every day).
