Friday, January 21, 2011

Raised By Wolves

Alternate title "Malicious Reviews".

I've talked about dear urrggg before who decided to vent on my book's Nook page because she doesn't know how to use her Nook.  And then she was joined by someone even less capable of connecting to the internet and downloading a book successfully.  Who was then joined by someone who was able to download the book but it took an hour but she did give the book a 5 star review and thank you, whoever you are.  And most definitely yes, I did alert B&N to this issue, they checked and there is no reason on their end or my end why these customers experienced difficulties.

Here's the reality.  No author can control the website customers are downloading from, nor can they magically control the download speed at their house. 

Yesterday we had a winner over at Amazon.  Someone who was raised by wolves, because humans couldn't possibly do that bad a job at it, decided that there were 10 misspelled words per page and made a huge deal over it.  Considering that at least 1 time a month someone gets a refund from Amazon for 1 of my books (mostly I think it's because they hit the buy button instead of the sample) if losing 99 cents is so painful, just ask for a refund.  But no.  A malicious review needs to be posted for the world to see.

After discussing this with my pal, I decided to leave the review there and not ask Amazon to remove it.  This performance of bad temperament deserves to be seen by the entire planet.  It can stay there forever.

Of course my first reaction was wow, the formatting on this thing must have gone haywire during the conversion.  I'm in the process of going back to all the books, converting them into html for Amazon, making sure they are as perfect as I know how to do and then uploading them again.  It's a time consuming process and not at the top of my list of all I must get accomplished each day. 

Imagine my surprise when this book, even in docx, converted perfectly to html, the indents were there and guess what--no misspellings.  So a word to the wise--lay off the drugs.  Your eyes will stop spinning in your head like pinwheels and you'll be able to read simple sentences without thinking "the" is really spelled "teh".

Bodiam by Phillip C, photoshop by me

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