There Are No Magic Numbers
Reviews, Release Season, and the Uncontrollability, Unquantifiability of It All
There is a certain irony to writing this post at the same time I’ve been watching the new Brandon Sanderson kickstarter hit 5 million and just keep on going in three hours. But I planned to write about this and so I’m going to write it anyway! (That said, if you want to give me 5 million, I’ll write DOUBLE the secret novels. I kid! But, obviously, if you’ve got the spare million, I’ll make the time. Five million does seem like a magical number, the kind I can’t quite wrap my head around.) (It’ll probably be close to 10 when I hit send.)
And there’s an irony to writing about book things at all when this Gen Xer, like so many others, grew up obsessed with the specter of nuclear war and the many ways it could destroy us and there happens to be a tyrant invader tossing around threats related to his country’s nuclear stockpile. But my newsletter isn’t going to impact whether that happens and I have to hope that all the analysts who say it isn’t likely to come to that, that it’s all bluster, are correct. My thoughts are with the people of Ukraine and everyone forced into this unnecessary, awful conflict. I hope and pray for a peaceful resolution. And to my trans friends, trans people, and trans kids everywhere, and especially those of you in Texas, I stand with you as always.
But not sending newsletters because too much actual hellscape is happening is a pattern it’s easy for me to fall into, so here we go.
I have a book coming out in a month or so, The Date from Hell, which wraps up the story I began in Not Your Average Hot Guy. I wrote these books in the only way anyone can write a romcom apocalypse—with my whole, slightly (highly?) absurd heart, and very much with the hope that they would be an escape and bring readers joy. Note that I did not say “guilty pleasures," because I don’t believe in feeling guilty about your pleasures, unless you’re, you know, murdering people. Certainly reading a book that makes you happy isn’t anything to feel guilty about. And yet. AND YET, the term lives on.
Anyway, there are two basic kinds of reviews that you get as an author. No, not good and bad, but: reader reviews and trade reviews.
Reader reviews are the obvious, the reviews you might leave on goodreads or amazon or B&N or anywhere else like a blog or social media or etcetera, after reading a book. They are important, because they come from you, the reader. The person we write our books for, our most important collaborators (because I fully believe that reading is a collaborative act, you bring you with you to the page).
Trade reviews are from professional publications that review books. The main ones are Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews (notoriously cranky), Booklist, and Library Journal (or School Library Journal), but there are others too. These are important because they are for people who help get our books to readers: librarians, booksellers, teachers, et cetera. They are also by readers, obviously, but with the aim of informing those people who work in the book trade.
I got a couple of nice ones last week, including a STARRED REVIEW — which means, hey, this journal says this is a really good one, not to miss, in essence — from Booklist. I’ve gotten a couple of starred reviews in the past, but this is my first for one of my non IP-based books (like Lois Lane) and it’s for the second in a series. So it’s very happy-making.
Kirkus also gave The Date from Hell a typically grudging, but overall good review with a great pull quote: “Fans of supernatural romps will enjoy Bond’s latest otherworldly adventure."
And I feel like because I shared that praise, I now must also share my absolute favorite one-star review of one of my books as a tithe.
(Please feel free to share your favorite one-star reviews in the comments — for your books or for classics.)
Reviews are just another thing that authors have zero control over — nor should we. It’s probably way healthier not to read them, but the flesh is weak. And it’s good (maybe?) to know what’s out there. Within reason. Within what you can stand. (If you are going to be moved to tweet at or attack the reviewer, then please, PLEASE, have your best friend take your devices until the urge passes. PLEASE. DON’T.)
Anytime you have a book coming out, it’s a tender season anyway. We tell people to grow a thick skin and we have to as best we can…while also staying somehow vulnerable so we can bring that vulnerability to the page. Our books are not US. But they are our books, and so extremely meaningful to us, even beyond being the way we might buy cat and dog and people food. We hope so many things for our books and — again — have so little control over their fates. In some ways, this is probably good, since if we did control it, we probably would spend way too much time on that and then not write the next book and telling stories is the work. BUT, as control freaks who create entire fictional universes in which we are the final word, it is not easy to put your book out into the winds of the fates and sit back to watch and see how high it blows.
It also feels like it has to fly or fail immediately, that there’s no time… I remember Jason Reynolds — the great! — telling me before he became practically a household name, when we were sitting next to each other signing occasionally for readers at a festival, that one of his editors told him she doesn’t decide how a book has done until it’s been a year. That is probably healthy, my darlings. But we want to know how it did that first week, first month, because we’ve internalized that’s what matters most. That whether a book “hits the list” is the only marker of success. (And that’s all part of the phenomenon I’m going to talk about next!)
Part of the problem is that we have so relatively little data available to us! We attempt to read the leaves left in the dregs of our tenth cup of tea during release week.
There is a point to this, I promise. Christopher and I have been having a weekly zoom call with some writer friends ever since the pandemic started. We’ve maybe missed a holiday week in all that time. It’s been really lovely. We talk about little things and cheer when things like starred reviews happen, but we also have philosophical discussions and share stories and talk about so many larger things. Karen Joy Fowler is one of the people who attends — and also one of my favorite writers and humans (her new book BOOTH is out next week! GET IT) — and she mentioned in passing an Ezra Klein podcast episode I had just started, but not committed to yet, so of course I listened to it after. It’s this episode with C. Thi Nguyen, on the gamification of our lives, and whether that’s resulting in measuring things in ways that aren’t helpful to us.
Here’s part of the summary from the NYT:
According to the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, games and gamified systems are everywhere in modern life. Social media applies the lure of a points-based scoring system to the complex act of communication. Fitness apps convert the joy and beauty of physical motion into a set of statistics you can monitor. The grades you received in school flatten the qualitative richness of education into a numerical competition. If you’ve ever consulted the U.S. News & World Report college rankings database, you’ve witnessed the leaderboard approach to university admissions.
[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]
In Nguyen’s book, “Games: Agency as Art,” a core insight is that we’re not simply playing these games — they are playing us, too.
Yeah, I’m totally going to do that thing that is a cliche part of presentations, but for clarity’s sake, let’s define gamification — or rather look at M-W’s definition: “Process of adding games or gamelike elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation.”
Could it be that choosing one or three or five stars to describe how we feel about books is just substituting game elements for the complexity of a reading experience? These ratings feel extremely far from, say…
But, for me, as a reader, this vast explosion of stars is way more what I feel when I read a book I love — whether it’s the overtly joyful kind or a serious book that makes me feel joy in a different way.
NOW, this isn’t to say rating systems aren’t helpful just because they are an example of gamification. Please, please keep leaving reviews. They’re important and they matter. But, as is so often said, they’re not for authors. We usually mean that in a small way, but it’s true in a big way too.
Alas, they happen to be among the only data we authors have easy access to. (Again, get someone to TAKE AWAY YOUR DEVICES if you can’t deal with them. Block goodreads.)
The whole point of the Klein podcast’s conversation is that sometimes those readily accessible, simple metrics (star ratings, big river rankings, orange banners, did you hit the list, at what number, for how many weeks — and we all know that authors will internalize not doing this as a failure, even when no one at a publisher expected it) can take on the brightness of an actual star and eclipse something, any, everything it might be way better for us to pay attention to in any given moment. One example they give is teaching and looking at GPAs versus being at the front of a classroom and seeing a single student light on fire at a new idea.
Why belabor all this? Mostly, I’m trying to remind myself that there are lots of different things that speak to the fates of a certain book, not just the most easily commodified and easy for us to find. I usually say that after my first few books, the thing I decided is that once I’d seen one review where a reader seemed to have read the book I meant to write, I’d take that as a win — I did my job, at least for that person.
Whenever I stray from this kind of focus, it’s me who feels buffeted by the winds of fate. And I’ve got another book to write. And another after that. Maybe that one person metric isn’t helpful for you, but I think it’s worth it for all of us to find and define a few more personal markers of success or, if not success, then achievement. The external metrics — reviews, rankings, sales — will all still be there and there will be plenty of people looking at those. Finding more personal ones can be a counterweight; it’s something we can control in a world where so much is simply in the way the wind blows.
Ultimately, the absolute best thing for a book or an author, and everyone in books will tell you this, is word of mouth. At the simplest, most basic level, that’s just telling another person about a book you read. And that’s something that can happen online or offline. Within view or in secret.
Publishing is a long game. Or perhaps a long con. Figure out what keeps you in it.
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BOOK STUFF
Now would be a wonderful time to get Not Your Average Hot Guy, if you haven’t, and/or to preorder The Date from Hell, collectively known as the Match Made in Hell series.
Not Your Average Hot Guy (OUT NOW!)
The Date from Hell (APRIL 5!)
I’ll be doing an IN-PERSON! launch event at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington on April 6, so you can get signed copies from there. (I’ll have a couple other promotional things too; details to come.)
Remember, you can go paid at any time to support this newsletter or share it and encourage others to sign up for free! I’ll be back Thursday with more Top Shelf Recs.
Here's an excerpt from my favorite 1-star review: "The only good part of this book is the first couple pages, showing how this book is organized and how to install tools. The rest of the book seems like it was written when the author was high or drunk." I was not! Maybe I was tired...you try writing a book!
A million? Oh r/books is going to have a field day. Ugh. Anyhow, my favorite review is for Moby Dick:"How can a book about the ocean be so dry."