When I order a book from the Big 6, I don’t know that I’m getting a great book, but I do feel comfortable thinking it’s the best that particular book could be.
Jeff Clough 3 July 2012
About Reviewing
How did you get started?
I’m a writer myself and I think one of the best ways to learn the craft is to read books you love (or hate) with a critical eye. That’s not always easy to do, especially when the story is so good it keeps sweeping you along. I wrote my first review as an experiment, to see if trying to produce a written critique could help me learn. It did, so I’ve stuck with it.
How do you review a book? Is it a read first, and then make notes, or do you make notes as you go along?
I read the book first, like any other reader might, then I move onto something else. I actually do my best to think about it as little as possible for a day or two before trying to write anything. I figure, right or wrong, anything that sticks in my head after that is probably worth writing about. So far, that seems to be working.
What are you looking for?
I want a good time. I think great novels always educate in some way, but I think most people (myself included) read fiction to be entertained. In terms of specifics, I’m a sucker for great characters. I’ve read some novels with pretty silly stories, but the characters were so believable and fun I was willing to throw logic to the wind just to hang out with them for three hundred pages.
If a book has a great plot, great characters, but the grammar is less than perfect, how do you deal with that?
Oh man, if you give me great characters and a great story, I’m willing to forgive all but the most brutal torture of the English language. I’m reading a novel now written by an author who’s in love with adverbs and stuffs her dialog tags full of them. Everyone is whispering breathlessly, smiling sheepishly and rubbing their eyes tiredly. That’s the least of this author’s problems, but the main character would be first on the guest list of any party I’d throw. And the story shows a lot of promise, even though I’m only thirty pages in.
That’s not to say I believe grammar and composition isn’t important. I think the book I’m reading would be a lot better if the author ditched the more hideous constructs and smoothed out the wrinkles, but with a great character and the promise of an interesting story, the book’s still good.
How long does it take you to get through, say, an eighty thousand-word book?
If I like what I’m reading, two days. Three at the outside. One of the first signs a book is headed for a bad review is if it starts looking at home on my side table and I haven’t hit the halfway point.
How did you come up with your rating system, and could you explain more about the rating system?
I don’t actually have a rating system. At least, not one that involves stars or points. Any detailed opinion about a novel has its fair share of nuance, and I just don’t think I can boil something like that down to a number. Others do and I don’t hold that against them at all. They’ve found a may to make it work for them, so they’re one up on me. I just can’t do it in my own reviews.
What advice could you give to authors looking to get their books reviewed?
Before you send a reviewer your book, read their review policy and follow it. If you don’t, you run the risk of your book not even being considered.
I’m a really laid-back guy and I love speaking with and reading new authors. It’s the best part of being a reviewer. That said, my Kindle pitches a fit nine out of ten times I try to feed it a PDF. I’m sure there’s a setting I need to tweak or some little thing I can do to fix it, but for now my policy states that I don’t accept PDFs at this time. And yet once a week, some author sends me a PDF of their book looking for a review. Now that I’m getting three to five books each week from people who do read my policy, it’s not hard to figure out which book isn’t getting read.
Do you get readers emailing you and thanking you for a review?
I do from time to time. I also get the occasional email from someone saying “my thoughts exactly.” It’s somewhat rare in my experience, but it does happen.
My advice to authors on getting a “bad” review (hasten to add that might mean a perfectly honest, well written, fair review – just bad from the author’s point of view) is to take what you can from it and move on. Under no circumstances to “argue” with the reviewer – would you agree with that?
I’d agree that being rude or confrontational with a reviewer is something an author should avoid. That sort of thing isn’t going to make them like your book any better, and the author’s almost certain to come out looking worse for their trouble.
At the same time, though, if I wrote a review where I called an author’s dialog wooden or awkward, and the author wrote me asking for specifics, I’d be happy to reply. Likewise if they asked me why I seem ready to propose marriage to one of their characters. To me, that sort of thing isn’t arguing, but it might look that way to some people.
About Reading
We talk a lot about writing here on the blog, and possibly not enough about reading, which is after all why we’re all here. Why do you think people love reading. We’re seeing lots of statistics that say reading as a past-time is dying – do you think that’s the case?
I can’t speak to those statistics–other than to say that if they’re an accurate description of reality I think we’re all doomed–but I can tell you why I love reading. A great book, written by someone who knows how to pull you in and tell a good story, gives me this strange hybrid of release and creative outlet. The best sort of novel is the kind that makes the reader meet the writer half-way: the author paints the broad strokes of a scene and the reader fills in the rest. It’s why the characters we can relate to are always the most memorable, and why two lines of poetry can tap into your soul and drive you to tears.
You can’t get that from a movie or a television show. You can only get that experience in a medium that lets your imagination and passions run wild even as it fences you in. Unless something else comes along with that kind of balance, books are it.
About Writing
What are the most common mistakes that you see authors making?
Rushing. More than anything, this is the most common mistake I see today. I think self-publishing is great and print on demand has a real chance of changing the literary world for the better. But I see too many authors who appear to believe self-publishing gives them license to take a reader’s money and give them a sloppy product in return.
I’m not even talking about books where it was clear no editors were harmed during their making. I’m talking about books that read like a first draft complete with typos on every page and stories that are only barely coherent. What’s worse is that some of these books could have been good. Sometimes you can see the writer had a hold of something interesting and might have pulled it off if he or she had taken more time and gotten a content editor to look at the work.
We’re told that the first page, paragraph, chapter, is absolutely key in making or breaking a book. Agents typically request only the first five pages of a novel, what do you think about that; if a book hasn’t grabbed you by the first five pages, do you put it down?
My own cut off is fifty pages. No matter how bad I think the first five are, I stick it out to fifty. Again, I don’t want to criticize how anyone else does it, but whenever I pick up a book I think of the author and my own experience of writing. “This took someone a long time to put together,” I think. “They labored every day for weeks, maybe months on this. That alone deserves some respect and you can give this person fifty pages of your time.”
That said, I usually know within the first five or ten pages if I’ll still be around to see page fifty-one.
There has been a lot of talk recently about Agency pricing and Apple and the Big 6, what are your thoughts on that?
I’ve haven’t been following those discussions as closely as I should, so I don’t feel comfortable offering an opinion.
Is there anything you will not review?
I tend to shy away from non-fiction and books with a clear religious message. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with them, they’re just not my cup of tea. I also get the occasional request to review a romance, spy novel or political thriller. I read so little of those genres I don’t feel able to give them a proper review so I say thanks but no thanks and wish them luck.
About Publishing
What do you think of the oft quoted comment that the “slush-pile has moved online”?
I actually haven’t run into that quote before. In my experience, and at those places I’ve sought to submit my own work, few editors and agents are accepting emailed submissions. They are either asking for print, or are asking for submissions to be posted via an online form after registering on their site.
From what I understand, it’s a question of the numbers. In the past, it was expensive and time consuming for an author to query a dozen agents with a even a few printed chapters. Now, you can query hundreds with a single BCC’d email message and an attachment.
So if anything, I almost see a pressure against the online slush pile. But then I’m new to this stuff so what do I know?
Do you think attitudes are changing with respect to Indie or self-published titles?
I think DIY in general is becoming a more viable and respected means of publishing with every passing month. And I think more and more readers are willing to give an indie or self-published author a shot whereas even a year ago it might have been a tough sell.
Even still, I think serious quality concerns continue to exist and that will at least slow its advance on traditional publishing. When I order a book from the Big 6, I don’t know that I’m getting a great book, but I do feel comfortable thinking it’s the best that particular book could be. In the indie world, there are a lot of near misses, books that could have been good but didn’t get the editorial attention they needed.
The silver lining there is that indie authors seem to be getting that now and in the last year there’s been a rise in the number of authors hiring editors out of pocket to help with their books. If that trend continues, I think the next few years are going to be a great time to be a reader.
Do you have any ideas or comments on how the industry can “filter” good from bad, asides from reviews?
I think reviews, ratings and word of mouth can actually do the job of filtering quite well. I think the real challenge facing the industry is not so much how to filter books based on quality, but how to get each book in front of the audience that wants it. I mean, what good is a five star rating when only five people will ever know your book is out there?
Right now, the indie market is like a million people trying to shout over each other in the middle of a hurricane. There needs to be a way to quiet the din and help readers find new books and authors. The recommendation engines on sites like Amazon are still pretty awful and act much more like a vehicle for advertising as opposed to a means of discovery. I’d like to see something emerge that does for books what Pandora has done for music.
End of Interview:
You can see Jeff’s reviews by visiting the review section of his website, Maynedon.
