Further Light and Knowledge

I am in the middle of writing a series of five suspense thrillers set in a polygamist enclave, and my publisher has recently been pushing the first three books fairly hard, which is great, but the downside is that a bunch of people who aren't my natural audience picked up the books when they were in the top 10 on Amazon, which has led to some bad reviews. This includes a bunch of offended Mormons. I'd suffered the occasional angry Mormon review over the past year, but in the last few weeks they've grown in intensity. Look at this one that came yesterday. Note how he tries to make himself sound like a dispassionate reader, anxious to defend any slighted religion.



I don't want to link the book here, but you can find it if you go to Amazon and search for The R.ighte.ous, without the periods. But please don't argue with the reviewers in the comments, as this sort of thing opens a can of worms, more often than not.

Wow. Dude, you must have hit close to home.

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The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less. ~ Arthur Miller

I know academic books don't work the same way, and I get absolutely zero income from my book, but I was just talking about the fact that I've gotten some pretty harsh reviews (not Amazon reviews, but published academic reviews). I was talking to a dept chair at a big research university and he said something along the lines of "No one remembers the reviews, in the end." I took comfort.

In this case, it's almost a fascinating study in Mormon psychology. Wow. This has nothing to do with your books, and everything to do with mormon bullshit. IMNSHO

I've read all three of your books, and loved them. I am not as evil an ex-mo as you.

I didn't think the account of the TC added much to the first book. I skipped over most of it, and didn't miss a thing OTOH, for nevermos, maybe it was important information.

IIRC there wasn't much like it in the 2nd and 3rd books. The poor deluded self-pleasuring little murder victim in book two was so pathetic. And I was delighted to see Eliza take a more central role in Book 3. If you kill her off, I'll never forgive you.

And thus ends my critique of your work. Anxiously waiting for book four.

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Ma'am, we don't care what you do with your tractor after you purchase it.

The above on its own is enough to make me want to read it. I only shy away from books if the reviews say things like "the author seems unable to form a complete coherent sentence" or "the typos were enough to make me shoot my cat" (for whatever reason glaringly obvious typos and grammatical errors literally give me headaches) or "Plot? This author apparently thinks this books needs no steenking plot". Dude, I'd take that review, frame it, and hang it on my wall.

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I'm not sorry, I like to get laid. --Mercury

I took roughly 1/3 of my available vacation for the year to chase 12- and 13-year old boys through the woods. --Mcarp

I know this intellectually, and there's also something in art about the fallacy of universal delight. As soon as you try to say something, you're going to offend some people. Even if you say "I love kitties," someone is going to get angry. Others will be bored, or distracted, or won't have enough pre-existing knowledge to understand the context. And of course, I'm not a perfect writer, and was still trying to figure things out when I wrote the first book. I think the plot jumps the shark toward the end.

Here are a couple of others.





And from the second book, just to show that Mormons aren't the only ones who can get offended.

Sounds like someone was embarrassed and uncomfortable to read the temple ceremony outside the temple. It is very weird, but instead of acknowledging this, this reviewer lashes out at the messenger. I love how he uses the word "expose" about the "sacred" (not to be confused with secret) ordinances.

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What other people think about me is none of my business.

Dude, you did this amazing thing, by putting a piece of yourself out there, in a way that most humans don't get to. I have a slim understanding of that, although intellectual creativity is a different kind of animal. My dissertation advisor said something that was really cool to me, about how putting your creation out there for others to interact with is a rare gift, and that the process of reaction and engagement is the goal, not whether or not it's positive or negative.

I'm with you, though. I get sick to my stomach when I think about how one historian treated my book. And it's so hard not to defend myself (I think the historian willfully misread me because of our disciplinary differences in method). I want to be Sally Field at the Oscars, not Barack Obama at a Tea Party gun show. I'm not sure how not to personalize 7 years of my life poured into a book that has been widely misunderstood (or how much of that is my own fault).

@Tibber: Unfortunately, my press (an academic press) was having severe financial problems when my book was being published in the fall of 2009, and forewent proofreading. I cringe as I look at it now, with so many typos and errors all the way through it. I hate errors in books. And my book is full of them because of the damn crashed economy. (I don't know if you know this, but it is nearly impossible for authors to proofread their own work; it really requires an outside reader.)