No Bad Publicity

If you're an author, you're probably not reading this. If you are an author reading this, you can quit now, because you've already seen it.

This is what Internet marketing is all about, in a twisted kind of way. Independent book publishers/authors are all salivating after that killer review, but this woman got more than she bargained for. Jacqueline Howett sent her book, The Greek Seaman, to Big Al's Books and Pals for a review. And that's what she got, and it wasn't particularly bad. But "Big Al" did point out technical flaws in her writing, which led to this firestorm. Now more people know about Jacqueline's book than she could ever have hoped for, and maybe some of them will even buy it.

But more will probably buy this. It's a real measure of our current media culture that you can make a fool of yourself, and someone will be making a profit off you before you can get up off the floor. Big Al is also suffering from the aftermath. Which didn't stop me from sending him a request to review "The Job," because let's face it, a lot more people know of his blog now than they did a week ago. But his sudden fame has surely brought on an onslaught of review requests, so I don't expect to hear from him. But given the size headache he no doubt has now, he might benefit from reading "The Job" anyway.

In other news, Sample Sunday is coming up again. This week I'll be featuring a chapter from "Wars of the Aoten," once again based on St. Celibart statistics, the most popular chapter. If you're on Twitter, just search for #samplesunday, and click the links that authors have tweeted. If you like their writing, then retweet their links to your followers. Help out an indie.