If you needed a reminder of just how different people are take a look at any book on Amazon with a number of reviews – even Shakespeare’s sonnets. There you will find the entire gamut of people’s perceptions as reviews. The Last Observer, my paranormal novella, has quite a lot of reviews as well and I was just going through them on Amazon and Goodreads to see what people thought. There are 25 reviews on Amazon.com and it has an average of 4.4 out of five which I will happily take all day. The book has 17 5-star reviews, 4 four-star, 2 3-star and 2 one-star reviews and no two-star reviews as yet. But consider some of the comments….
We have this on the one hand – “This book was a blast to read! With 114 pages of pure mind bending content, my restless modern soundbite trained brain was totally engaged for the two nights I read it. I have to admit I was upset that bedtime on a work night came at page 65 because I wanted to continue the story.”
And yet this on the other – “This is Vasey’s first book. It should have never made it out of his word processing application. You know how hundreds of thousands of little girls go to dance school, and eventually they have a recital? Well the sad truth is that 99 percent of them are terrible dancers and no one would want to pay to see them perform. Similarly, one must have the wisdom to be able to discern if a book is ready to publish. This one was not.”
OK. Wow – two very extreme opinions. The latter reviewer even goes so far as to suggest “But seeing eight 5-star reviews, the low cost of the Kindle edition, and the fact that this was in my “recommended” stream tricked me into buying this horrendous waste of zeroes and ones.”
Meanwhile another reviewer has this to say …”Vasey is swift and clean in his writing, both in the scene descriptions and dialogue, making The Last Observer a book that comes in at under 120 pages and can be read in an hour or two. That said, a small part of me would love to see the dialogue in Chapter Twenty – Zeltan Speaks performed by Al Pacino just as he did his famous defense of the human condition as Satan in the movie version of The Devil’s Advocate. If you liked that scene, you’ll enjoy this strikingly honest appraisal of modern magic.”
Do you get my drift? For one person I cannot write at all and the book is so bad it should never have been published and yet for another my writing is swift and clean….
Another reviewer says .. “I gave Mr. Vasey’s book a 5 star rating. The reason is simple. It reads well on many levels.” while yet another has this to say “Interesting premise, if not particularly original, but the writing is incredibly awkward and I could not get past that.”
Finally consider this review – “Some of his other pieces are also primarily fluff, but they were fluff in a more cerebral fashion.” A reader’s comment about me? Why No, it’s about William Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet!!!
To be honest, I rarely read reviews of my books anymore. The fact is some people love what I write and others hate it and wish I would stop already LOL! Luckily, the latter are a small minority compared to the former and I have no intention of stopping putting out books and writing. People are simply different and I often think a review says as much about the person writing it as it does about the book being reviewed. In the end, if the books find a market, a readership, and people enjoy them then that is what it all about. I do not pretend to be Shakespeare nor even one of those serious high-brow writers that win serious book prizes but barely sell a book. I write because I want to and I can and I fully recognize these days that each book will have a broad range of reactions from the readers.
Why not write a review of one of my books? They are important in the total scale of things. You could even pick up a Kindle copy of the Last Observer and decide for yourself…..
