Play fair with your book reviews

I’m steaming with frustration … why? … because of a person who wrote a ’1 Star,’ obviously negative review, about one of our books … but then, was it really a negative review?! If not, why is it only 1 Star? You decide.  Now that I have my own blog, on my own website, I think I am entitled to post my own opinion!!

This person starts her review with … “Started off really well, but the main problem I had was with the Lead Character” … she goes on to say that nothing bad/negative happens to this character clarifying later that it is after a certain point in the story. Perhaps she isn’t aware that some people don’t buck the system and are positive thinkers especially when they’ve already had some rough experiences. I would have hoped that she would have given the rest of the series (only 2 more books) an opportunity to change her mind before possibly damaging our reputation.

I appreciate the other reviewers who have added their more kinder comments by way of trying to negate the other with a higher number of ‘stars.’ If a reader wishes to read a book where horrid things happen to the characters … THEN FIND ANOTHER AUTHOR, Robert is not for you!

You have to appreciate our books for the stories of the characters, not the bad things that happen to them (and yes, there are bad/challenging events which do take place in our books). Robert writes adventure novels though, not horror stories.

I suppose this reviewer will judge all our books by her misguided opinion of one book and never try another of our 10 novels! Oh well, you can’t win them all and thank goodness we have thousands of fans that love our books. I can’t help but wonder if she even paid for this book (we recently had a promo giveaway).

Does this person realize, or even care, how much damage she can do by writing such a review? I wonder how many readers have/will pass up our books because of this review? I felt she could have at least given us ’3 stars’ seeing as she admitted she liked it at first … and after all she was only complaining about one character. Dare I surmise that she might possibly have enjoyed the other characters and their stories (many of which are true) but didn’t bother to mention that in her critique!

I happen to know that fortunately there are still a large number of readers out there who like to read about a variety of characters, some of them ‘nice,’ or this series and, our books in general, couldn’t have been so popular. Just because a large portion of the characters and, all of the history, locations, events and businesses are real, this series is still fiction.