Other Than That, Ms. Reviewer, How Did You Like the Book?
Positive book reviews are essential to the success of a book. The more five star reviews you receive on sites such as Amazon or Good Reads, the more credible you become. Furthermore, it is a good idea to submit your book to reviewing sites. I submitted my book, I'd Rather Kill Myself Thank Be A Lawyer: How Anyone Can Find Happiness, to a couple of sites and have included links to the reviews at the end of this post.
Both reviews offer high praise, noting the honesty and humor. They both thought the content was well structured. I am super proud of that, as well as the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.
What I am not quite as proud of is that I think the first reviewer, writing for OnLineBookClub.org, was distracted by the editing. I can’t be sure but she did write,
” What I liked least about the book was the editing. There were quite a few errors in the book, so I don’t believe it was professionally edited.”
My second clue was when she ended the review with:
”I give this book 3 out of 4 stars. With some additional editing, I would give it a perfect score.
Looking on the bright side, at least she did not say, “the best thing about the book was the bad editing. “
For your enjoyment (and amusement) links to the reviews are at the conclusion of this blog post.
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We all make mistakes. My book is about making mistakes and figuring out how to correct them. Understanding mistakes creates opportunities to improve. I view mistakes as lessons learned.
Using that criteria, I learned many lessons from publishing the book, particularly about editing. Writing a book, especially one that is self-published, presents unique opportunities for mistakes. In fact, it can be a mistake mine-field, especially for someone like me, who is not a master of punctuation, spelling or typing. I am actually the opposite. An idiot. The result is my book contains a variety of editing issues.
Ironically, my book was both proofread several times by various scholarly friends and then professionally edited. That was not the mistake. The mistake was that I ended up inputting the final corrections into the Kindle Desktop Publishing app myself and flubbed a bunch of things. The details are not important and clearly it was not the correct strategy, but I went to all the trouble to write it over eight years and then, in my eagerness to publish, I rushed the end, skipped a step and voila.
Lesson learned. Plus, I now have a title for my next book: “This book was Professionally Edited.”
Of course, some lessons, even when learned, are not over. Some mistakes take on a life of their own. They are like bad seafood. You eat it once but it keeps repeating. Mistakes made in a book are public and in writing for the remainder of time.
My strategy, in a situation such as this is to lean in, to enjoy the praise, accept the criticism and move on to trying to help people see their happiness.
The review can be found at:
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