In my novel Son of Thunder, the second book in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, a lifetime of discovery was employed. I like that term instead of research, which is used incorrectly by many authors. The historical data is already out there, even though historians hardly do research to find it either. Writers, especially authors of historical fiction, like to say they had to do a lot of “research” for their novels. Nope. They do a lot of discovery of what’s out there.

Maybe I make too much of this semantic nuance, but scientists are the ones who do real research. They collect data, and they create and test theories. As an ex-scientist, I’m qualified to state that this process greatly differs from discovering facts used in my fiction. The processes aren’t the same at all. The only thing I needed to “discover” as a scientist was whether I was duplicating something another scientist had done before. I had to discover a lot of history for Son of Thunder; I did no research.

Almost every novel I’ve written has some associated discovery time. My first, Full Medical (2006), the first book in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” required a lot of discovery. I’m an ex-physicist, not a geneticist. Where did I do my discovery for that novel? In many places, digging up current facts about the cloning process (I might be wrong, but I think they’re still current, making the book into an “evergreen book”). I used the internet and articles from scientific journals; I was often led to the latter by Science News, which indicates at the end of each article where you can find more details about the subject of the article. (I’m in good company here. Isaac Asimov was a biochemist and as specialized in his discipline as much as I was in mine. He used Science News to go beyond the constraints of his discipline; so do I.)

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The most glaring difference between traditional and self-publishing resides in the delays ubiquitous in the former. As a mongrel (both a traditionally and self-published author), I have the experience to support my opinion: Traditional publishing is painfully slow! Some might argue with me (especially the publishers!), countering with something like, “Well, Steve, there are a lot of books, and each author’s work goes into a long queue.” Yes, that’s true. But if a self-published author isn’t 100% DIY (they should contract out editing, formatting, and cover art at the very least), there are still queues among those offering those services. The difference still remains. It’s due to the bureaucracy involved in traditional publishing.

For a traditional publisher, a book is produced by a committee formed from the publisher’s staff members. Each step in the process is handled by a few people, and the managing editor washes his hands of the process once they start the book through the gantlet, i.e. no one really guides a book through that publishing gantlet. In self-publishing, the author guides the book through to publication. As the most interested party for getting their book published, they can keep on top of things. Traditional means hands off; self- means hands on. And the differences in results are quite significant.

I’ve had traditionally published books take as long as two years after a contract was signed. (Even more if we count the time between submission and contract; for the author, that’s often a long duration too.) I’ve had self-published books take as little as two months between finished MS and publication (which reinforces the point that I should count the time between submission, i.e. finished MS, and contract, for traditional publishing). Traditional moves like a snail crawling in molasses; self-publishing can move at lightning speed.

Another reason for delays is that so many publishers don’t want authors to concurrently submit queries for an MS. When they often say at the same time that authors must give them six months to reply, how many months does this stupid policy add to the process? Agents do this too, only the run-around publishers give them adds to the run-around they give their clients. To avoid these added delays, authors should query small presses who don’t require submissions by agents and allow concurrent queries, but all the delays mentioned above are still there.

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While Margaret Atwood would lump both of these genres under her catch-all category “Speculative Fiction,” they’re really very different, even though a bookstore might ignorantly shelve them in the same section. Sci-fi peers into the realm of the possible and is often an extrapolation of current science and technology; fantasy peers into the realm of magic and the impossible and generally ignores all science and technology. Many scientists read sci-fi but eschew fantasy; many authors who are ex-scientists write in many genres but usually not fantasy.

I personally think many authors who write fantasy are often just lazy at best (they don’t want to learn the science) and anti-science at worst (they hate science). The good ones at least make sure their fantasy universes have a consistent set of rules, and sometimes their stories can be literary masterpieces; the bad ones don’t seem to care. (J. K Rowling fails miserably at consistency, and her work is filled with deus ex machina situations as a result.) Many young writers don’t like science or understand it, so they’d rather invent an impossible tale that stirs up emotions and excludes logic and reason. It’s better to do both: create a story that celebrates humanity with its interesting mix of both emotions and logic and reason…even if it’s a fantasy story.

Of course, the boundary between sci-fi and fantasy is fuzzy. Always has been. One can even see them overlap in one novel. For sci-fi, it often comes down to how well the extrapolation of current science and technology is done. The farther one moves into futuristic settings, the more the science seems like magic. Clarke said that any really advanced technology can seem like magic for that reason. Just think of the cellphone, that little rectangular device that seems like a human appendage now, and how it would seem to a caveman. Hell, even in the original Star Trek, “communicators” seemed so futuristic, yet they’re ubiquitous today; and some of Bones’ diagnostic devices are incorporated in Apple watches!

Fantasy doesn’t even bother to explain how things work. You might want a wand like Harry Potter’s, but Rowling can’t tell you how to make one or how it works without a bunch of fantastic mumbo-jumbo verbiage. And good luck in getting one…or finding that train station in London. Really?

I’ve heard people complain that sci-fi is pure escapism. Maybe. It shares that quality with most fiction. We often read to experience things we can’t experience in everyday life. And that escapist criticism applies in spades with fantasy, where mythical creatures and absurd situations abound.

I don’t know where the border between sci-fi and fantasy lies. I just know I can determine if a novel is mostly sci-fi (some have fantasy elements) or if it’s mostly fantasy (some pretend to be more science-oriented). I like to read the former but not the latter, in general. Your reading choices might be different.

I do know that I don’t like online or brick-and-mortar bookstores to conflate sci-fi and fantasy—they should know better. I also know they both shouldn’t be considered part of speculative fiction, which is such a large category that it’s completely meaningless.

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Comments are always welcome.

“Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries.” This mystery/suspense/thriller trilogy follows the adventures of ex-USN Master-at-Arms Mary Jo Melendez. InMuddlin’ Through, she leaves the Navy and gets a new job working in security in a company that makes MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”), mechanized warriors for a secret Pentagon project. The MECHs are stolen, and Mary Jo is framed for her sister and brother-in-law’s murders. After some time in prison, she escapes and begins an odyssey to clear her name, but a secret government group is after her; they want her to get the MECHs back. In Silicon Slummin’…and Just Getting’ By, she starts a new life in Silicon Valley, this time as security head for a computer games outfit. Two teams, one US and the other Russian, now want the MECHs, and they think she knows where they are. And she also is pursued by a stalker. An autistic kid helps her. In Goin’ the Extra Mile, she now has Chinese agents after her. They kidnap her family, and she has to go to Beijing to save them.

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” Mason Cooley. Here’s lots of reading entertainment available on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lending and library services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker&Taylor’s, Gardners, etc.). Enjoy!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

To show how illogical book taxonomy is, horror is often considered part of speculative fiction. Most of it isn’t sci-fi, which I think Ms. Atwood equates to speculative fiction in her mind, so there is a question of how to classify it. And it often has a lot in common with fantasy, but even non-fiction can contain a lot of horror. We often think of Stephen King as the horror-master, but Misery is a fairly standard thriller, albeit containing a lot of horror…especially for authors! And is it always speculative? Does that word just mean “imaginative”? If it does, “speculative” isn’t needed in “speculative fiction” because all fiction is a product of an author’s imagination…and therefore imaginative!

But I digress. The question today is whether horror should be a subcategory of speculative fiction. Let’s dig deeper. First, let’s analyze this question: Is horror horrible? My theory is that we’ve become blasé about horror. Real life is often more horrible than anything Stephen King can imagine or write. And what authors sometimes do in the horror genre now, looking to horrify readers more than the other authors, often seems campy and laughable. King’s Misery is a good thriller story; it’s not in the horror genre, but it portrays how life can become horrible. His It is just a bad story unless we take is as YA, in which case It becomes a parody of child abuse and kids’ fear of clowns.

Perhaps the problem is to distinguish between horrifying and terrifying. Books in the horror genre are perhaps best when they’re also terrifying. That’s what distinguishes Misery from It; the former is terrifying because it seems real—as Clancy said, fiction must seem real to be of value; the latter is just clownish horror, pardon the pun. This happens a lot, and King isn’t the only guilty author. Monsters, vampires, werewolves? I don’t find them terrifying, but they’re the clownish staples of many horror books and movies.

Maybe I’m inured to horror and more terrified by what occurs in real life, even if it’s described in fiction. For a long time, the most terrifying movie I’d ever seen was Alien. It has a monster more monstrous than the one in It, a much better monster because it didn’t make me laugh at the campiness. King’s monster is just a humorous parody. Most of his stories are laughable fantasies in that sense, completely out of touch with reality. They’re well written, I suppose, and much better than stories about vampires and werewolves, which I can’t even begin to consider real creatures.

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Margaret Atwood likes to use “speculative fiction” as a catch-all category for her work and others’, everything from paranormal stories to hard sci-fi. Somewhere in that broad category you’ll find fantasy too. I prefer to be a bit more refined in my taxonomy—that’s “refined” in the sense of a more precise categorization of what a story is about. There’s nothing refined about a zombie in the sense of “refined gentleman”! Speculative fiction is just too general. Apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, ghost stories, zombie stories, fantasy, psi-fi—Ms. Atwood would cram all those into her speculative fiction genre. And probably make those who must shelve books in brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries go completely insane!

Genres, subgenres, and sub-subgenres are needed within speculative fiction. And don’t forget all the cross-genres—how would Ms. Atwood handle A.B. Carolan’s YA sci-fi mysteries? YA, sci-fi, and mystery are all major genres, and A.B.’s Mind Games could be classified as psi-fi too.

Of course, Margaret isn’t to blame for all this confusion and chaos. She has a following. Between them and the anti-cultural appropriation crowd, it often seems like a war between authors. Can someone wave the white flag, please?

Why don’t we just put everything into the categories of fiction and non-fiction? All fiction is speculative by definition, after all…i.e. not real. Nope, that doesn’t work either. What does one do with historical fiction? A lot of that type of novel isn’t fiction. For example, my Son of Thunder, which I classify as a mystery/thriller, could also be classified as historical fiction—a fictional tale is woven into real history, although some of the history is filled in a bit. (It could also be classified as Christian lit, which is another catch-all genre like speculative fiction.)

The Dewey decimal system was invented to help sort out this chaos. (I’m dating myself. I’m not sure millennials know what that system is. They tend to do their “research,” i.e. search for background material, on the internet now.) It just created more chaos, but it makes computer sorting and cataloging easier, even with non-fiction books, assuming the number given to a book makes some sense. It and all other single-item taxonomy systems fail with books.

A book is better categorized using key words. YA, sci-fi, and mystery can be key words. So can hard sci-fi, psi-fi, fantasy, cyber and steam punk, and so forth. But who determines the key words? This is like all data-retrieval efforts: they succeed only to the extent that the humans categorizing the data are competent.

In answering that question, the book’s publisher has a thorny problem, and the solutions often don’t smell like roses. For self-published books, the author might be the publisher, but, even in that case, and certainly for traditionally published books, the problem still exists. Take Amazon, for example. Their search algorithms use key words (smart move), but only the publisher can set them (dumb move). The author usually knows best what key words apply (or can figure it out easily enough by comparing the book to already existing books), but most publishers often fail miserably because the publishing execs and their minions determining the key words don’t read the books they publish. Readers have to fall back on title and author, the first a poor guide to content and the second useless if the author writes in many genres.

This is definitely detrimental to browsing, especially if that depends on a computer. By shelving in brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries often works against browsing too—I’ve found Rembrandt’s Angel among the art books at B&N! (I’m guessing that the knucklehead doing the shelving completely focused on Rembrandt in the title.)

To their credit, though, people doing the shelving, and even publishers, pay no attention to Atwood. I for one have never seen her category Speculative Fiction when I’m buying books. But I’ll give her credit: Readers could find Rembrandt’s Angel a lot better if it were shelved under that category. They would only find it by accident at that B&N.

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Comments are always welcome.

The creation of ITUIP. The “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” my celebration of and homage to Asimov’s Foundation series, tracks how the Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets (ITUIP…pronounced “eye-tweep”) came into existence, and a lot more. In Survivors of the Chaos, you’ll travel from a dystopian Earth dominated by multinational corporations and policed by their mercenaries, to a starship’s arrival at the distant planet New Haven in the 82 Eridani star system. In Sing a Zamba Galactica, you’ll begin with first encounter at New Haven and end with humanity saving Swarm, a strange collective intelligence. In Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, you’ll meet a psychotic human industrialist who wants to control all of Near-Earth space—he’s my version of Asimov’s Mule…and a lot scarier!

I’m proud of The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection and its extrapolation from current to futuristic science. Here’s what Pulitzer-nominated author David W. Menefee said about the first novel: “Readers steeped in current literature will appreciate the brevity of scenes that burst in front of you with a blinding flash of startling detail and then exit as quickly as a comet streaking through the night sky…ensnares you aboard a mental roller coaster catapulting over the hills and valleys of a world gone mad…a disquieted galaxy peppered with a roster of characters that would make a casting director envious, highly detailed space scenes, and an inspiring plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat.”

Many centuries of the galaxy’s future history await you in this ebook bundle of all three novels. Only $5.99 at Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor’s, Gardners, etc.), this bargain bundle will give you many hours of reading entertainment.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Readers of this blog know I binged on Faith Martin’s Jenny Starling series, seven Brit-mystery novels (lots of time to read during this pandemic, and reading a novel is much more interesting than any computer game). I reviewed that entire series recently (maybe a first among reviewers?). I started on her Hillary Greene series, which contains twelve books at last count, but I stopped after reading seven. What happened? I found out that binge-reading series can cause fatigue. I got tired of old Hillary and her hang-ups; the books seemed too similar; and the themes, if present, seemed too tame. Ms. Martin doesn’t hold the record for causing my series fatigue. I couldn’t even get beyond A in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series.

In general, readers can tire of series. Of course, the main problem with a series of novels is that it is a series. Authors must work hard to make each novel stand alone and allow the reader to jump into the series at any point. In each novel, there can be references to events in previous novels, but these should only be “little rewards” for the series’ dedicated followers. In other words, they could be deleted without affecting the reading of each novel. The Jenny Starling series does a good job of this; the Hillary Greene series, not so much, because the plots of one book often depend too much on what happened to the DI in earlier books, making each novel too much like an episode from a soap opera.

Considering that I have a long-standing tradition of following my own advice, I was surprised when a Goodreads reviewer stopped reading my novel Son of Thunder because he hadn’t realized it was a novel in a series. The surprise was partly due to the fact that I’d had independent verification that I follow my own advice well: A reviewer of a Chen and Castilblanco novel stated just the opposite, saying that I should teach a course on how to make a series book in a series stand alone.

That GR reviewer is entitled to his opinion, of course—reading appreciation is so subjective—but I wish he’d tried a bit harder. Or read the first book, Rembrandt’s Angel, if he felt the need. Maybe his loss? And, from my experience, he’s not the only reviewer who doesn’t want to jump in mid-series. (I’m suspicious of reviewers’ requests for books in the series previous to the one I’m asking them to review. While I value every review I get and send a blanket thanks to all the reviewers–as a reviewer myself, I know reviewing is time-consuming–I don’t think reviews help all that much. See last week’s post.)

I wish I knew all the causes for series fatigue in readers, including myself. That would give me a better list of things to avoid as a writer. Moreover, it would help me answer some questions: Why did I start to drag my heels with #6 in the Chen and Castilblanco series? I thought I’d ended my malaise with #7, but when I finished it, I decided I needed to take a break from that series.

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This organization should change its name. In spite of all the nice platitudes on its website, it’s not a union for authors. It doesn’t represent the majority of authors at all. What it has become is a tool the Big Five publishing conglomerates and their authors use to rant against self-publishing and independent small presses, the former being those who feel threatened by the latter (they’ve got theirs, so they don’t want any competition). It’s a bit like those old range wars between farmers and cattle ranchers or sheep ranches and cattle ranches. I can’t come up with an appropriate name for this group. Maybe EPAC? Yeah, that’s it: Endangered Publishers and Authors Club. Well, EPAC doesn’t control this blog, and, as a mongrel (both self- and traditionally published), I’m certain I know what’s wrong with publishing today: We authors, the creators, are smacked around far too much, and EPAC does nothing whatsoever to protect us.

Sure, in their glib platitudes, the Guild professes to work to minimize that “smacking around.” Dunno. Maybe they do for those already established authors who want more power to push the Big Five and their agents around for better contracts, but their presence I’ve seen in entirely different. And I don’t know what their problem is. Big Five conglomerates and the old formulaic mares and stallions in their stables have successively trampled on small-press authors for a long time, with the addition of self-published authors to their hit list only occurring in the last twenty-five years or so, corresponding to the advent of digital publishing. They have attempted to propagate the myths that their enemies produce badly written and badly edited books that don’t have the quality of Big Five books. (I rarely read the latter!)

Many Big Five authors are generally vocal about that (for example, James Patterson, the inventor of the book-writing assembly line—ever wonder why he needs Bill Clinton?). Of course, they’re all wrong. Now most self-published and small press books are better quality than Big Five book, from the former’s snazzy covers (some Big Five covers look like PowerPoint slides, others just cheap) to everything inside. Moreover, the Big Five has a bevy of sycophants like Kirkus and the NY Times Book Review to propagate these myths. Why do they need the Guild?

Agents bow to the Guild too, because most of them are just gatekeepers for the Big Five (even though neither they nor the Big Five acquisition editors can tell what MS will become a successful book any more than anyone else!). I’m turned off when a literary agency responds to a reasonable question by referring me to the Guild. In their defense, literary agents, by their own choosing (maybe to continue their parasitic existence?) have become the ham slices in a sandwich—the Big Five are one slice of bread, the Guild the other, and it’s all about keeping the bread coming. (Yeah, I know: that’s a mangled metaphor. But it’s all about bread, i.e. greed. Promoting creativity is far down the list of motivators for the Big Five.)

The Guild still pretends to be something like a union for all authors. I wish! Authors have no representation. Period. Publishers depend on authors, but the standard 15 or 20% royalties are a joke, especially when most publishers do very little to earn that 80 to 85%! I suppose some starry-eyed newbie authors still think they’ll help in marketing. Forget about it! Those full-page NY Times ads and TV promos for books are only for the old, dependable, but formulaic mares and stallions in the publishers’ stables. New authors get zilch for help in marketing…assuming they can even manage to get a publishing contract. Most traditional publishers expect their authors to do all the marketing to earn those meager royalties. And authors shouldn’t think self-publishing is the answer either. Amazon and Smashwords really don’t care if you’re successful. They make plenty of money from your paying for your book formatting and your ads. Amazon, for the most part, has forgotten they got their start from selling books. They love to sell toilet bowl cleaners, though.

The Guild is always on the wrong side of these issues. They go against any author who tries to buck the system! They can’t help authors in general, because they have a long tradition of not doing so…and have forgotten that without authors, publishing is nothing. Most all the dinosaurs in the EPAC are heading for extinction, though. I hope I live long enough to see it.

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Comments are always welcome!

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” In this series, the reader will meet Esther Brookstone, ex-MI6 spy and Scotland Yard inspector working out of the Art and Antiques Division, and Bastiann van Coevorden, Interpol agent, who are twenty-first versions of the famous sleuths Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, except that Esther is a bit more nimble and sexy and Bastiann a bit less flamboyant. In Rembrandt’s Angel, Esther becomes obsessed with recovering a painting stolen by Nazis in WWII. In Son of Thunder, her obsession is to find St. John the Divine’s tomb. In both novels, Bastiann tries to keep her on an even keel. Available in print and .mobi (Kindle) ebook format at Amazon and the publisher, Penmore Press, and in all ebook formats at Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lending and library services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker & Thomas, Gardners, etc.). Novel #3 is in the works.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I’m an avid reader, mostly of ebooks, so I’m wondering, what’s with the combos? Ebooks are combined with audiobooks, and print book/ebook or audiobook pairings are common now. Can some reader of this blog tell me why a reader would ever want to buy such combos?

I can imagine audiobooks being useful for a commuter or jogger who can “multitask.” Whether such people are actually “reading” anything complex that way is questionable. Maybe they need the ebook or print version to go back and understand what they heard-read?

The ebook/print combos are even more a mystery. If the author signed the print version and the reader wants him to die early and increase the value of the investment, maybe it makes sense—the reader can read the ebook immediately and keep the print version pristine! But one major positive for ebooks for me is that they only take up room on my Kindle and not my sagging bookshelves. (Print books produced that nefarious effect long before ebooks and audiobooks—have you ever seen how thick Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler’s Gravitation is?). I only read print books now when someone gives me one. They kill forests!

My mongrel paranoia (as an author who is both traditionally and self-published) makes me think the print/ebook combos are just a Big Five conspiracy to get ebook readers to buy print, both of which are super-expensive compared to books not published by Big Five publishing conglomerates. To support that paranoid thought, I’ve often also seen Big Five offerings of an accompanying ebook version that’s more competitively priced than the separate ebook, which is often priced nearly as high as the print version when sold alone to protect the latter, where they make the most money.

I just don’t see how these combos are attractive to consumers. I ignore them. Now ebook bundles, those are usually bargains! Consider my ebook bundle, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. While each novel can stand alone (and originally did!), the reader can have all three lengthy sci-fi novels in one ebook bundle for about half the cost of a Big Five ebook! I’m all for that! I won’t ever go beyond a trilogy (maybe the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” or the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” is next?); all seven Chen and Castilblanco books would be unwieldy together in one ebook bundle, as would many long series (can you imagine Grafton’s entire alphabet series in one ebook?).

How do you prefer to “read”? Do you consider an audiobook even reading material? Do you have a use for combos? Let me know. I might adjust my formats accordingly. Forget audiobooks, though. They’re just too expensive to produce, even for my small press publishers, primarily because a good narrator is required. (I wouldn’t mind having sound effects, though. That would avoid the pfft! I use to indicate a shot from a gun with a silencer!)

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Comments are always welcome.

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Survivors of the Chaos takes the reader from a dystopian Earth dominated by mega-corporations and controlled by their mercenaries, to the 82 Eridani star system. Sing a Zamba Galactica starts with first contact with friendly ETs and the invasion of Earth by unfriendly ones, and ends with Humans saving that collective intelligence known as Swarm. In Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, Humans and ETs combat a psycho-industrialist who dreams of being the absolute ruler of Near Earth space. Exciting sci-fi that’s bundled in a three-novel package for your enjoyment. Available on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lending and library services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker & Thomas, Gardners, etc.).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

This is an important question for all authors (for readers, see below). Another one is: Who writes reviews? The two questions are linked, of course, and both need to be answered.

I’ve always offered a free ebook in exchange for an honest review (print books are costly, especially for outside the US), and I thank all those good people who respond to that offer, whether directly or via NetGalley. But do those reviewers get more out of it than I do? That’s not a question reflecting a selfish quid-pro-quo philosophy. It’s only an admission that I don’t have any metrics. How do we measure whether reviews matter?

Sales figures aren’t real measures because of the time delays involved. Moreover, I’ve never seen any proof that reviews help improve them. Marketing gurus make unsubstantiated claims like, “Reviews sell books.” Huh? No, online and brick-and-mortar bookstores sell books. One can’t even say, “Reviews help sell books.” I have yet to read or hear one guru offer direct proof of that. Most books sell by word-of-mouth (person X tells family member or friend Y that some book is a great read) or at book events where the author meets and talks to readers.

And all a review does is give one person’s opinion. Most of the ones on Amazon, which is that only online bookstore many authors and marketing gurus think about, to their detriment, a little more than an unqualified thumb-up or down. Amazon has devalued their reviews so much that they ask would-be reviewers to indicate their star-ranking before even writing the review! Think about it: You rank the book and then scramble to justify that ranking in the review you write. Completely backwards!

While I’m tempted to be a bit more complete in my own reviews, I usually don’t go into how an author handles the key writing skills. I’m certainly qualified to do so. My reviews are still usually longer than other reviewers’, especially those on Amazon, so I suspect the average reader would get bored with all the details even if I added them. (It used to be that Amazon knee-capped me at five hundred words, but I’ve slipped some reviews by that are more verbose.) But do reviews matter?

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…I often don’t. Of course, because the NY Times is part of the NYC publishing elites, dominated by the Big Five publishing conglomerates, the newspaper coddles and caters to those publishers and ignores most everything and everyone else. I sometimes peruse the NY Times Book Review to see which books to ignore (because they generally don’t entertain or enlighten me—that’s what you get from companies who are arrogant and too big); I rarely read it, though (if we still had birds as pets, a better use would be found at the bottom of the bird cage).

But it’s not only the Times editors and reviewers or Big Five conglomerate that irk me. I don’t like to be told what to read. Period. I ignore that hyped phrase “Everyone’s reading X,” or use it as a guide to what I should not read. I “discover” my own reading material. I’m also a smart consumer and value my time and money. I want to make sure my reading time isn’t wasted. I’ve learned it too often is with books from the Big Five, especially those lauded by the NY Times’s editors and reviewers associated with the Review.

So…what do I read? Books just about in every fiction genre, with the exception of bodice rippers and cozies (those are subgenres of the romance and mystery genres, although the first could also be erotica too). Lots of non-fiction books too, ones I personally choose because they interest me, not because they have a lot of hype (the latter makes me choosier—I ignore any and all ad campaigns). I recognize that reading choices are subjective; all appreciation of art is. You can make your choices; I’ll make mine. And I assure you, what you choose won’t influence me one bit (although I might say it does just to be nice).

I’m a weird chap, so our choices probably wouldn’t overlap much. I prefer books that stretch my mind with important themes or unusual plots (even better, make that “or” an “and” and I might be hooked). I find that in some recently published books (including my own, of course); I “discover” that more in “evergreen books,” ones that are as fresh and current as the day they were published (like most of mine) and happened to miss. Even as a speed-reader, I can only read so many books, so I know the number of good evergreen books is always increasing even if the number of quality current books is decreasing. I’ll always have plenty of reading material that the NY Times mostly ignores; those books won’t waste my time.

Is this attitude arrogant? Possibly. As a writer, I’m qualified to determine whether a book is worth my time, so I don’t need much help from anyone else. While I sometimes change my mind about a book’s worth after starting it, the book’s blurb and a “peek inside” are indicators that usually work well enough for me, i.e. my own browsing in either an online or brick-and-mortar bookstore or in a public library works just fine. I’m not in the habit of consulting third-party opinions, including reviewers and editors associated with the Times’s Review.

And isn’t it the epitome of arrogance, exhibited by the Times’s reviewers and many others, to tell people what they should read? I learned ago that doesn’t work for me (even before I became a full-time writer). I don’t write reviews with that in mind. I’m only providing an information service because nearly every book I read and review is one that the NY Times has ignored. And the Times’s reviews don’t provide useful information. Their reviewers are as egotistical as their restaurant reviewers.

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Comments are always welcome.

Rogue Planet. A murdered king’s son fights to free his people from an oppressive religious tyranny. An epic military and romantic sci-fi novel with Game-of-Thrones and Star Wars fantasy elements awaits you. Set in the same universe as The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection and A. B. Carolan’s sci-fi mysteries for young adults, this book is available at Amazon in print and ebook versions, and at Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lending and library services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker&Taylor, Gardners, etc.).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!