Tagged: books
The Best and Worst of August
In case you’re not familiar with my “The Best and Worst of…” series, here’s the deal: every month I reflect on my statistics and tell you the top 5 most viewed posts and the top 5 least viewed posts—the best and worst of that month. So what was popular and what wasn’t in August? Well, here are the top 5 articles and reviews (site announcements are not counted) for August:
1. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
3. The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome
4. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Although school doesn’t start until September 4 here in Saskatchewan, in some places in America (where most of my traffic is from) it has already been in session for a few weeks. This is why all of my top posts seem to be from students doing homework research for novel study as all four of the books listed here are typical novel study novels.
School being back in session is also why my overall traffic is up from 4, 350 views in July (when everyone is on vacation) to 4, 846 in August (a larger spike than I predicted). It helps that I broke a personal record for views per day, which now stands at 305. That doesn’t sound like much and really, it isn’t, but it smashed my old record of 246 views in one day. The weirdest part of that record? It was broken on a Thursday, which is traditionally one of my worst days for traffic, aside from Sundays.
Well, enough about views per day, let’s bring on the five worst posts of August!
1. The Bad Queen by Carolyn Meyer
2. YA Release Dates to Look Forward to
3. Emperor: The Field of Swords by Conn Iggulden
4. Some Thoughts on the YA Genre
5. Isabel: Jewel of Castilla by Carolyn Meyer
I’m not surprised at all to see two Carolyn Meyer books on the bottom 5 because despite being a great historical fiction writer, her popularity has waned over the years. ‘Ya Release Dates to Look Forward to’ is no surprise either because most of the dates listed are now irrelevant as the books have been released by now!
‘Some Thoughts on the YA Genre’ is sort of misleading at #4 because although it didn’t gather many views here on my blog, Mark over at The Masquerade Crew used it as a syndicated post and soon my timeline was flooded with people tweeting about it. I assume that at least half of the people tweeting about it actually read it, so that’s more than enough to put it out of the bottom 5.
Well, that’s it for August! My overall traffic is up now and I expect it to spike again as pretty much all schools will be in session at the end of the long weekend. September will also feature more guest posting than usual because Caleb from 20four12 and I have worked out an arrangement that sees us guest posting for each other every other Friday. My first post for him will be on September 7, then he will post for me on the 14th and so on and so forth.
If you’re looking to guest post for The Mad Reviewer, please read this article. I look forward to hearing from you soon!
Book Reviewing Criteria
[UPDATE 29/01/13: It breaks my heart to say this, but The Mad Reviewer is no longer accepting submissions for review. If you’ve contacted me as of 2:04pm CT, I’ll still process your request. However, I am not accepting any new submissions. Check back in 1-2 months and we’ll see if I’m open for business.]
Since I started accepting book review requests from authors, I’ve had a surprisingly large response. As much as I would like to, there aren’t nearly enough hours in a day to read all of them. Therefore, in order to get a review, you must follow the instructions and guidelines below or I will reject your request.
What I Review
- Teen-targeted self-help
- All of the major YA genres: romance, fantasy, sci-fi, historical, realistic, etc.
- Nonfiction teens would be interested in.
- Self-published fiction that fits the above guidelines.
What I WILL NOT Review
- Erotica. Not interested, people.
- Spiritual fiction. I will not touch religion on this blog.
- Poetry. Unless you’re Dante, Homer or Virgil.
- Short stories (unless they’re in an anthology).
- Any unpublished work.
So your book fits the criteria, great! What do you do next?
1. You must contact me via the Contact page here on my blog.
2. I check my email three times per day, so I expect you to at check it at least once. I don’t like waiting around for an author’s reply for days.
3. You must have a blog and/or official website as well as membership to 2 or more social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Fark, Reddit, etc. If I have to take time out of my day to read and review your book, you had better take the time to publicize my review, but only if it’s good. I certainly don’t expect you to publicize a bad review.
4. When you contact me, you must be able to provide me a free copy either in PDF or paperback. I personally prefer physical copies of books, but I know shipping to Canada can be costly.
5. When you give me a free copy of your book, it does not guarantee you a good review. I give full disclosure in a review when an author has contacted me to prevent any conflicts of interest. I review all of the books I read honestly and if you don’t like it, don’t bother wasting my time.
6. You may mention if you want to do a giveaway or interview, but you must wait until I publish your review before we actually go through with it. I’m not going to do a giveaway for a book I didn’t like. You must also have a sizable enough social network to promote it through so I can actually get more than 5 entries. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of my time and your money.
I reserve the right to accept or refuse your request on a case-by-case basis. I also reserve the right to call you out publicly on my blog if I feel you have mistreated me (as in name-calling, excessive snarkiness or anything that could be called ‘cyber bullying’). When you submit your novel to me, you are acknowledging that if you are rude to me that you may become the subject of one of my articles and/or that your words may be included at the bottom of my review of your book for all to see. These guidelines are in effect as of November 27, 2012 and are not retroactive.
My Classic Collection
This isn’t the best of all pictures, I know. However, it does reveal my pitiful classic collection. So far I’m reading Dante’s Divine Comedy aloud to my little sister, I finished The Prince and I’m working on Paradise Lost. Next on my list to tackle is Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and then Homer’s Iliad.
This is my personal collection and is rather misleading seeing as we have a lot of classic books in the family collection. I haven’t really read many of them, mostly because the bulk of the reading I do now is YA for my blog, but I have been slowly working my way through all the classics everyone says you have to read.
I’m rather enjoying reading Dante aloud because right now we’re on the first book in The Divine Comedy, The Inferno, which is obviously the most famous one. When read aloud, it is quite powerful poetry with a lot of heavy imagery. The only problem is trying to explain to my little sister what the carnal sinners did… Continue reading
Should Reviewers Give Bad Reviews?
To my surprise, I discovered a debate about the ethics of bad reviews. It involved much blustering, ad hominem attacks and ridiculously obscure literary references, so here are the simplified arguments:
For: People have the right to voice their opinions.
Against: Reviewers should keep bad reviews to themselves because they hurt authors, especially new authors.
Now, the argument I came across mostly applied to national newspaper reviewers giving bad reviews to new poetry, but sort of degenerated to encompass all bad reviews by anyone, including bloggers. That’s why I’ve chosen to write my own opinion on the topic, not only to get rid of the ridiculous rhetoric, but bring a little sanity to the debate. Here we go…
First off, attempting to censor the internet is like trying to forbid a teenager from seeing their girlfriend/boyfriend—it only heightens the appeal. Secondly, we need to talk semantics. ‘Bad review’ is generally a misnomer because in nine out of ten reviews with that label, the reviewer has found at least one good thing to say about the book. ‘Bad review’ usually implies that the reviewer simply hated it and wants to completely trash the book and the author, which is far from the truth. A review with honest, thoughtful criticism is better than a review where the reviewer praises the book to the heavens while lying through their teeth.
And let’s not kid ourselves here. Would you trust a reviewer that only gave 4 and 5 star reviews? To me, that says they’re either lying or they love every book they read, even the ones that are truly bad.
I’m not going to apologize for giving 1 and 2 star reviews. I’m not even going to apologize for the 0.5 star review I gave once. Why? Because I wrote my honest feelings about those books and I like to think I had genuinely constructive criticism. If I didn’t publish reviews on books I didn’t like, not only would I have less content, I’d be selling myself. When I started my blog, I promised to tell only the truth about books and I have. I am not about to censor myself because one bad review might prejudice my admittedly small following against an author. And frankly, I don’t think many other bloggers would.
I don’t see many issues in black and white, but this is one of the rare cases where I do. You’re either completely for free speech or against it. You either want bloggers to put their honest opinions out there, or you want to silence them—well, parts of them. Again, let’s be honest with ourselves: Are our egos so inflated that we actually think one bad review by a blogger will ruin a new writer’s chance at gaining a following?
Of course not. One bad review is not going to hurt authors. In fact, sometimes I read reviews where the reviewer hated the book and went on to buy it because the premise actually sounded good to me. I know a lot of people who are the same. Yes, a lot of bad reviews will harm a new book, but in that case I have something thoroughly cold-hearted to say. If your book is getting a large amount of bad reviews (70% or more), it was probably meant to fail.
So what do you guys think? Should book reviewers keep it to themselves if they didn’t like a book?
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
Image Courtesy Of Goodreads
Synopsis: Beyond the Village of Wall lies the enchanting and mystical land of Faerie, where all beings live and breathe magic. Tristran Thorn, a young boy from the village is hopelessly in love with the beautiful Victoria Forester and would do anything for her; including crossing the wall to fetch the fallen star she so desires. As Tristran ventures into the land of Faerie, he will encounter strange and beautiful creatures. Will he find the fallen star and bring it back to the village? Will he be able to make it out of Faerie in one piece?
Cover Gushing Worthiness: The cover of Stardust is beautiful with a doubt. The colours used in the cover of the edition I read (pictured in this review), along with the ivy like designs gives it a magical and whimsical feel.
May Contain Minor Spoilers