The Critique Crap-tastrophe

By: Kimberly Hitchens is the founder and owner of Booknook.biz, an ebook production company that has produced more than 2,000 books for over 1,000 Indy authors and imprints.

Hi, Guys!

Sadly, this week I'm not only slammed, but I've managed to aggravate the Dreaded Frozen Shoulder again, so I can't handle a full-blown blog post.  But I've been saved (hallelujah!) through the good auspices of author G.L. Drummond, (not a Booknook.biz client), who blogs at "Feral Intensity."  This week, Gayla (G.L. Drummond) interrupted a multi-part series she was running on book marketing to discuss a particularly disturbing thread that we saw at the KDP Forums.  The thread itself is here:    CLICK HERE TO VIEW THREAD. 

Here's the thread the author started:

"Happily Annoucing Two Great Books! Opinions Wanted! "

...and this is her first post:

"Take a look and your opinions are welcome! The 1st, Tangled Hearts, is a wonderful romance. The 2nd, Skylark Blues, is a story about Air Force Basic Military Training. Everyone that has been in the military should read.
Waiting to hear your thoughts,"

About 8 or so pages later, when all of us were so gobsmacked by this author's incredibly rude and offensive retorts to the feedback she had requested, Gayla couldn't take it any longer, and decided to blog about it, for the same reason I'm pointing you newcomers to that blog:  Please, please, please:  if you're a new author, and you've posted your first book, sans the benefit of an editor, or beta readers, or a critique group, and the type of feeback that this woman received is the type of feedback that YOU receive:  whatever you do, don't react as this woman did.  Every single possible thing she did was wrong, culminating in this doozy to a forum full of authors, some of them top-sellers:

“Well, all of you are a waste of my time. I need to find a more intelligent group of real authors to have a sound discussion with.”

My Book is TOO Wonderful!  Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah Nyah!

Gayla's blog posting about this is to be found here:   CLICK HERE to read the blog post.  I can't say what she said any better than she did--so I'm simply linking to her blog.  For those of you who are new authors, you may also find her series  on Book Marketing worthwhile.  (For those of you who were fans of the early Anita Blake, Vampire Executioner series, before it became so porn-tastic that it was no longer readable, you might also really like Gayla's book, "Arcane Solutions," which I thought was fun.)

Sorry to be so brief--but that's all the typing I have in me this Monday night, February 18th, 2013.  I hope I'll be far more fascinating next time, but in this instance, I think Gayla said everything I would have said--but better.  ;-)

#### 

Thanks, and see you next time!

Funny Face Creative Commons image used by permission by Petr Kratochvil.