The Internet is Cruel

I’m referring, of course, to the kerfluffle over on Big Al’s Books and Pals.  If you read book-review blogs you already know about this, because on Monday and Tuesday it blew up, got shared, tweeted, Face-booked and has probably “gone viral” by now. The Guardian UK covered it and there are rumors of a You-Tube video. 

The Big Al website reviews books in electronic format, including a lot of “indie” publishers and self-published (and I confess I don’t quite know what the distinction is there).  Last week Big Al reviewed a book called The Greek Seaman. He said, basically, that he thought the book had an interesting story that many people might enjoy, but that bad grammar, inaccurate punctuation, poor word use and poorly constructed sentences proved distracting and he didn’t think most people would finish it. 

The writer posted a comment arguing with him.  She said she had great reader reviews on Amazon.  In three subsequent posts she copied those comments.  She said that Big Al had ignored her directive to download a different version/format/something of her book from her self-publishing site, and then suggested that he couldn’t understand her writing because she had been raised in England and not America. 

Big Al politely replied with a couple of examples of sentences he found poorly constructed, or distracting. 

She replied again. 

By now a few other commenters had popped up, including one commenting as Anonymous.  The writer decided that this Anonymous was really Big Al in a clever disguise.  It’s unclear why Big Al would need a disguise to comment—please note the name of  the blog—but the writer was convinced.  She questioned Al’s manhood for hiding behind Anonymous, then demanded that Al take down the review. 

Sharks, apparently, can smell blood in the water from a long way away, so now commenters came from everywhere.  The post had 309 comments when I found out about this and clicked on the link.  And how did I find out?  From Facebook. 

The comments go in waves.  First Wave was rather gentle, relatively speaking; chiding the writer for a lack of professionalism, and also saying, “Not everyone’s going to like your book,” and so on.  The internet is cruel, though, and Second Wave comments were cruel too—in part, fairly, because the writer would not stop responding.  By now it was a feeding frenzy.  A bunch of commenters piled into the virtual mini-van and went over to Amazon, posting 62 one-star reviews.  The final iteration of that process saw a smaller group of satirists posting five-star reviews using the same bad grammar, poor punctuation and tortured sentences as the writer. Final Wave commenters were “rescuers” of the writer, telling the Previous Wave posters that they were being mean and were worthless human beings.

If you’re keeping score at home, and I was, it’s:  Big Al-1; writer-0; commenters-0.

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What happened?

Well, one thing that happened was mob rule, a condition that thrives on the internet.  The people who went to Amazon to post bad reviews of a book they hadn’t read were acting the spirit of putting the writer “in her place,” and “teaching her a lesson.” They weren’t defending Big Al, or trying to be a voice of reason. 

Things didn’t start off that badly, though.  Big Al’s original review was fair and said there was an interesting story in the book.  Before I saw some of the sentences he used as examples, I would have said the writer’s first mistake was in responding to the review.  And responding, and responding, and . . .  In fact, that was her second mistake.  Her first mistake was in publishing a book that wasn’t ready yet.

Here’s an example of the kind of sentence Big Al was commenting on: 

“Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”

That is straight out of the book.  It doesn’t make very much sense but you can get an idea what she means.  “Hypnotically” is completely the wrong word there unless Don and Katy are hypnotists, which we think they are not.  There seems to be a word missing—either “while” or “as.” And, you have verb tense disagreement. 

“Don and Katy watched hypnotically (as) Gino place(d) more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”

Even with the wrong word that makes more sense. 

I don’t believe that a format translation or some Kindle-to-Nook thing causes the kind of problem referenced above.  This is a first draft problem.  You catch them, some of them at least, on rewrite.  Here’s the problem; to catch some of them on rewrite, you have to do rewrite.

What the writer who went off on Big Al really needs, (other than to cut back on the caffeine) is an editor. Not every writer needs one.  Some writers like grammar and punctuation, or have friends or family members who are English teachers, librarians, or just very detail oriented.   Some people, however, could really use the detached, detailed scrutiny of a disinterested third party, and this author seems to be one of them.

It is clear from her emotional responses that the story of the Greek Seaman is important to her.  It also seems obvious that it is potentially an interesting story about a type of life most people aren’t familiar with.  I hope the writer will invest in an editor, who will help her fix the mistakes that are obstructing access to her work. 

My personal lesson was this:  I’m going to write down a sentence now and save it.  Someday, when I publish a book and it gets reviewed, and I hate the review, I’m going to retrieve the file I’ve saved and send this response:

“Dear Reviewer;

Thank you for taking the time to review my book.

Sincerely, A Writer.”