Re: writers rant

On 8/7/2014 2:10 PM, Sibyl Smirl wrote:
> Okay, I guess I'm free from the guideline not to say anything negative.
> I'm feeling negative at the moment.
>
> I'm just finishing (78%) a Kindle Cozy Fantasy (ghosts) Feline (LOTS of
> cats) Mystery, "A Spirited Tail", Leighann Dobbs. It's got _all_ the
> factors to make this kind of series book a runaway success! Not just
> the aforementioned, but the detective is a middle-aged female bookstore
> owner, with a misspent youth as a crime reporter, and a cop boyfriend
> who won't tell her anything (or much, anyway) about his cases, with whom
> she's occasionally frolicking in bed, but doesn't know him very well,
> and wonders whether she's "falling for him". Oh, and her sister is the
> Police Chief (who wants her OUT of Police Business), and her sidekick
> experiments with herbal teas, occasionally with disastrous results, or
> opposite results to those she intended, but is forever confident about
> getting the personality alteration she wants, and sneaking them into
> someone's tea without asking them whether they want their personality
> altered. The protagonist also occasionally converses with ghosts, and
> has two, Franklin Pierce and Robert Frost, regularly haunting her
> bookshop. "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog" was a piker, with only three
> sure-fire reader-attractants! (oh, there's also a bereaved Golden
> Retriever)
>
> This detective, and the young cub cop, and an elderly woman who knew the
> "mysterious stranger" (female) character way back when, can none of them
> figure out why, in the course of fifty years, a woman might change her
> surname! (Well, I might be maligning the elderly woman: she just says,
> "A different name? How odd!"). Personally, I don't find it either odd
> or inexplicable. The usual reason why women have different surnames
> than those they had fifty years ago seems fairly obvious to me! Of
> course, one of my cousins changed her surname five times in fifty years.
> I myself wear a different name than I had at nineteen.
>
> She uses the word "snuck" (which Mark Twain also used, but in his case
> he was humorously pointing out the ignorance of the character speaking).
>
> And the capstone of irritations: this detective has not Clue One about
> the use of apostrophes!
>
> Maybe I should put the above, suitably edited, on Amazon.com as a review.
>


Was it self-published? Has all the earmarks. (Basically not being a
sound enough mystery to attract one of the big publisher and add to that
lack of knowledge of punctuation and it just really sounds like a
self-published deal.

Frankly, I don't feel reviews should be about
grammar/spelling/punctuation but about the content of the book. YMMMV,
but I do know from fellow publishing people and author friends that they
appreciate the content reviews far more. The punctuation stuff can
easily come down to typos if it's a professionally published work (no
book is without a typo, after all) and sometimes readers don't get some
of the stuff authors try to do with grammar choices. (Sometimes we in
the publishing biz don't get it either and we try to change it. I can't
think of any examples though, but know it's happened.)


--
Jen
___________
"You cheated."
"Pirate."

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