The Nameless Horror

I shared S. G. Collins’ ‘moon hoax not’ on Twitter yesterday, but it deserves preserving here.

As the title suggests, Snakes On A Plane-style, here is a thing with monsters for you (not, sadly, a Billy McPugh sequel though). Virginia Day Zero is completely free, gratis, etc. and you can go and get it and read it and all that malarkey direct from me as a Kindle/epub zip, from Kobo, or from Smashwords in all formats (the epub is the same bar the required SW title page, but the others are auto-converted from a .doc - which, on a Mac without MS Office, turns out to be a total cocking nightmare. If it’s a Kindle .mobi you want, I’d download from my site because the formatting is slightly better since it’s hand-carved).

As the title suggests, it’s set in the same universe and at the same time - that time being the end of the world - as Day Zero. In fact, in the first draft of that book it formed an independent sub-story showing some of what was going on outside Philly. It was excised in editing, and so here it is, free of its shackles, and very spanky and neat. Neither story spoils/aids the other, reading one will do no harm to the other, nor is either necessary to the other. Independent. Completely. FWIW, this one has more of a backwoodsy, King-ish sort of vibe to it, whereas DZ has a lot more set pieces and action. Ish.

Enough! Story infodump!

Murph and Rory Caulfield are two regular kids in the small town of Coombs in rural Virginia. When their uncle goes to fetch the local sheriff after finding “something bad” on his farm, the boys go to check it out for themselves. What they find is more than just bad, though - it could kill them and everyone they know.

The race is on now. First to escape, then to find out what’s happened to their family and their town. If they can do that, they can think about finding a safe place to hole up away from the horrors that pursue them.

But day zero is here, and maybe there are no safe places. Not any more.

There you go.

Cover pic, incidentally, is ‘Lonely nights wear on' by Gill Garrett (cc by).

(And yes, it is on Amazon, but it’ll cost money there until it filters through SW to B&N and iBooks and I can flag it for price-matching down to zero. Avoid that for now.)

(And yes, I’m still working on the last writer’s cut of the old Penguin books. The last one is a total bastard of a thing, but I am getting there.)

(And in the meantime I’m also working on careful planning for another thing for my agent. Because I’m overloaded with free time, what with having two kids and my wife back to work.)

(Quad-paragraph parenthesis chain, mothertruckers.)

Part of me thinks there’s no point nitpicking at this load of old toss from the HuffPo, but the other part of me knows it should be getting on with some work, so here we are.

So, then:

• No review should be anonymous. Reviewers must give their full name and email address. This will give authors and publishers a chance to authenticate or challenge the reviewer if he or she so chooses, and bring an imposter to the attention of Amazon. After all, the author is fully transparent, so why not his or her critic.

No review is anonymous, nor have they been for years since Amazon did away with anonymous reviews. Every review now has a name. One, I assume, tied to an email address.

I assume Adler’s confusing “anonymous” with “using a name other than your real one”, and what a barrier having an email address will be to keeping people on the straight and narrow, eh?

I can register an email address in the name of any of my three horrible cats and then swear blind, in the guise of that cat, that I really am them and, yes, my review of that Mouseketeers DVD criticising its inedibility and depressingly wipe-clean vomit-proof surface was genuine. I can do this because an email address isn’t worth piss.

Secondly, I don’t know I’d want to enforce real names/email addresses on reviewers in a world where people can go apeshit at a poor review of a kettle they’re fond of, but YMMV here.

The reviewer should volunteer his or her age in general categories and gender. This would, of course be helpful to an author and publishers to have some approximate knowledge of the reader.

This isn’t actually a terribly bad suggestion - assuming it’s voluntary - but the idea that the author or publisher should be the main ones to benefit from the data for what’s supposed to be a guide to other customers is a bit weird. A review system that, once you’d logged in, showed you, the customer browsing a product, its top reviews/ratings based on people closest to you in age/gender (as well as a link to all the others), might be a bit more nuanced. Of course, it’d also have to take into account everyone’s geographical and social background to be genuinely useful, etc. etc., but it might be a bit more helpful than the mysterious “relevancy” by which so many places default-sorts search results.

Of course, then you’d get people who didn’t want to volunteer that information finding their reviews down-ranked or buried, and that might be seen as making a “voluntary” option more of a compulsory one if they wanted to be taken seriously, and that would be a whole different can of worms.

No review should be less or more than 100 words. A serious reviewer should not merely “vote” his or her opinion but, at the very least, offer a brief explanation.

Reviews of exactly 100 words, then? These are bound to be of much greater value! I’m now going to offer a brief, considered explanation of this suggestion and its benefits in precisely 100 words:

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Point made, moving on!

Eliminate the star system. It is far too subjective and can be abused, and give a false impression of quality of the work or encourage rejection without it being read. An intelligent reader searching for a book should make his or her judgment the same way that they would pick a book at a library or a brick and mortar bookstore.

I can confidently state that this will never, ever happen. Coincidentally, this is also the only suggestion I’d agree with entirely. Amazon (and everywhere else) is riddled with one-star I SAW A TRAILER AND THIS WILL BE SHIT reviews of things not even released yet that at least doing away with a 1-5 ratings system would stop such bollocks fudging the averages. YouTube did it, way back when, switching to simple like/dislike options in addition to comments. Even if all Amazon (and everywhere else) did was do the same (and they now include the likes at least), I’d applaud it.

Never going to happen, though.

Sidenote:

Gone are the days when a handful of established and respected literary critics were solicited to seriously review books and offer opinions that might influence readers on their choices. This is not to say that there aren’t intelligent and experienced reviewers currently pursuing their craft, but their opinions are offered in a fractionalized arena where there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of circles of influence.

Boo fucking hoo, to be frank. A handful of established and respected literary critics knew - and still know - their trade, but the idea that coverage is now shallower (in terms of individual readership) but broader (in terms of covering more than a relative handful of books) can only be a good thing. Especially if it allows more reviewers, in blogs or zines online, the chance to be taken seriously by publishers and writers alike.

Sidenote 2:

Adler’s bio is self-provided (it’s longer on IMDb and comes from his own publishing label). Always take anything with a pinch of salt from someone who describes their own writing as “masterful”. Kudos to him for still coming out swinging at nearly 86, but still.

If you continue to give fake reviews in return for fake reviews, eventually the only way to spot a good book will be because it has no reviews.

I wrote a terrible book when I was starting out, and gave it to someone, and they said it was terrible and laughed in my face. That’s how it should be.

I shouldn’t have killed that person afterwards, but I served my time.

Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers. The shareholders put up the equity, and instead of owning a claim on a steady stream of fat profits, they get a claim on a mighty engine of consumer surplus. Amazon sells things to people at prices that seem impossible because it actually is impossible to make money that way. And the competitive pressure of needing to square off against Amazon cuts profit margins at other companies, thus benefiting people who don’t even buy anything from Amazon. It’s a truly remarkable American success story.

But if you own a competing firm, you should be terrified. Competition is always scary, but competition against a juggernaut that seems to have permission from its shareholders to not turn any profits is really frightening.

That’s Slate on Amazon’s continuing run of horrible financial results that saw their shares magically rise in value this week.

“It’s much easier to sell goods at cost the way Amazon does than sell goods at a 40 percent margin like Apple,” said Colin Gillis of BGC Partners. “Once you’ve trained your customers to buy at cost, it’s difficult to train them away from it.”

Still, Mr. Gillis said: “Who’s going to undercut Amazon? They’re only making half a cent on every dollar. Who can run a business at less profit?”

And that’s from the NYT.

I know Amazon is expanding to the point where every human on earth buys and sells everything they own through the company, but I also half expect it to put every other company out of business before imploding overnight, leaving behind a barren wasteland, a sort of post-consumer apocalypse, where gangs of ragged survivors trawl the endless drifts of empty cardboard packaging looking for scraps.