Fixing Amazon with 6th Grade Math

I've read a number of posts over the last month or so where people complain about how pretty much everything on Amazon has a 4 or 5 star rating despite how good a book actually is. A lot of people are giving up on the rating system, and actually wading through all the reviews to find out if a book is good or not. Without an effective means for people to sort out what books are good, the reading public will abandon mid-listers and especially those Indy/Self-pub writers for whatever the New York Times or Oprah recommends.

But I say I still have faith in crowd sourcing...even if people are far too generous with their ratings. And I say lets bring some simple 6th grade math to the rescue.

First, we need to understand that the problem is people who give a 5 star rating to pretty much everything they read and only give a 4 star if they hated it...you know, don't want to hurt the author's feelings. I don't suggest trying to change the people who are giving the review; however, what I do suggest though is that we start to weight the reviews from each reviewer based on their history.

This is what I'm talking about: Say Mary Sue rates literally everything she reads 5 stars because she is in awe of anybody who puts pen to paper. Right now, she would tend to skew books up towards 5 stars, when in reality, 5 stars is essentially "average" for her. What I propose Amazon should do is take that info and weight Mary Sue's ratings so that when she gives say my book (whenever I get one published) a 5 star rating, Amazon actually computes it as a 3 star review.

The same thing would go for Dick Cheney when he is on Amazon giving everybody a 1 star review, then goes and reviews my book (Again giving it 1 star even though it may have reached in and touched him where his heart may have been.) Amazon treats that review as a 3 star as well.

Now if Joe Smith is running around giving 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 star reviews pretty evenly, well then when he gives my book a 5 (or 1) star rating, it actually registers as that.

This is not a new idea either. Hotornot.com has used this same basic idea for the last probably 10 years. And when you go there (yes, admit it, you visit that site from time to time) you'll notice that there is a pretty good range of ratings that everybody falls under, and never will you see somebody with a 9.0 or above rating that makes  you want to gag. Amazon on the other hand generally has a range of 4 stars to 5 stars with plenty of 5 star (average) train wreck books that would give you a migraine just trying to get past the first chapter.

Amazon, it's time you broke out your 6th grade math books and apply some of those principles of weighted averages to your ratings system.

What do you think? Is the ratings skew on Amazon a problem? Why or why not? What do you think can be done?

Be a Rockstar!

You're a writer, so you're probably not wearing leather pants up on a stage in front of thousands of adoring crowds as the pyrotechnics blast off, filling the arena with the haze only spent benzine fuel could create while you do your work. (I you are, well that's awesome and I want to be you.) No. You're probably sitting in your office, living room, library, or coffee shop pecking away at your keyboard...alone. So how do you become a rockstar, and why?


Rockstars are generally really good at their craft. (And yes, this can be anything...not just music anymore. A Rockstar is somebody that is really good at what they do, and they have the personality that makes it fun to be witness to their genius. They are flamboyant and even a little arrogant. They make difficult things look easy and smile when they are done like they know you're amazed.


A rockstar is a surgeon who performs delicate brain surgery while whistling "Yankee Doodle" and when they are done, they say 'it was nothing.' 


A rockstar is an athlete who makes the opposition look like fools, and when they win, their celebration is elaborate and planned, because they knew they would win.


A rockstar is a writer who spins tales of intrigue that memorize their audience while they goof off in the media (or social media) but yet they never say anything dumb...they're just fun.


What you don't see though is the surgeon spending long hours in the library or skills lab, the athlete pushing their body to the limit, or the writer sitting at they keyboard typing out lines and lines of text even when they don't want to.


A rockstar is brilliant and arrogant in the public eye, but privately, they are mad perfectionists making sure their skills are the best in the world, and they won't settle for less. They work harder than anybody else, but they don't let the world see.


Why do you want to be a rockstar and not just a 'brilliant writer?' People love rockstars and their personalities, and they sell a lot of their work. And wouldn't that be nice if you were able to sell tons of copies of your book and actually quit your dayjob? A brilliant writer might write great books, but just like a brilliant musician, if nobody reads/listens to them, does it really matter?


If a brilliant book gets published in the middle of the forest, but nobody is around to read it, is the book really brilliant?


So how do you do this? How do you become a rockstar? YOU WORK YOUR ASS OFF IN PERFECTING YOUR CRAFT. You type at your keyboard until your fingers are arthritic and then you take some Alieve and keep going. You read voraciously in and out of your genre. Fiction and Non-fiction and you become the best damn writer you can be. And once you do that, you keep doing it day in and day out.


But you must also take some time out of your day to polish your rockstar image. Get on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, or your blog and smirk at the world as if you barely work at all. Poke fun of the latest Franzen novel and even belittle some of your own work by brushing off praise. Even pretend like you don't need or want it. Or perhaps you go Muhammad Ali and and proclaim yourself the greatest writer of all time...even if you don't know it yet.


"I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was." Muhammad Ali


Once you are oozing with confidence because you're convinced yourself that you truly are a bad-ass , and you mix that with the hard work you have put into your craft...you just might become a rockstar and the greatest writer of all time.


(This was a very fun post to write, and plus, it gave me an excuse to put up a picture of Judas Priest)

Anachronistic Dialogue in Fantasy

This Friday I wrote a short piece of fantasy flash fiction where a number of commenters raised an interesting issue. They noted that my dialogue pulled them out of the story because it was too modern. But, at the same time we can't be using period authentic dialogue and still get our point across. Now, with fantasy you have a little more leeway because the period the story is based off is a little more ambiguous, but even writers of historical fiction can't be 100% true to the language.


Imagine a historical fiction about the signing of the Magna Carta (assuming they talk in English vs. Latin.) Now you can argue that even the Old English that they would use is a completely different language, but in the end, our modern English is evolved from that, just so that our modern 21st century English is evolved from 17th century English. Not only are the definitions of the words different, but the metaphors will make absolutely no sense to the modern reader. This is probably why even the Canterbury tales (late 1300's and technically Middle English) is published often with the original text and a modern translation along with it.


So, unless you are one of those stubborn purists, I've probably convinced you that dialogue for fantasy and even historical fiction needs to be modernized. But that does not give writers a licence (if they want people to read what they write) to have the dialogue of their fantasy roughly based on the middle ages to include, "Dude, I'm trying to celebrate and chill, but you're harshing my buzz. What's going on?" This is where we now get to the interesting point of this article. We can't take modern dialogue and stick it in the story, but you also can't be authentic. What are you to do?


First, that example ("Dude, I'm trying to celebrate and chill, but you're harshing my buzz. What's going on?") is my rough, modern translation of this line from Chaucer, "What fold been ye, that at myn hom-comynge perturben so my feste with criynge?" Neither works, but we can do better, right?


The first problem with my version (if this was going into a fantasy of historical fiction piece) is obviously the slang. "Dude, chill, and harshing my buzz." We need to take that out and replace it with something perhaps a little more appropriate. How about:


"Sir, I'm trying to celebrate and relax, but your spirit is without cheer. What's going on?"


Now there's an interesting thing here as well. I've got some contractions in there. I'm sure people back in the day used them just as we do today, but there seems to be a prejudice in our media (movies, plays, books, etc.) about the people back in the day speaking in nice, crisp, proper English...without contractions. And especially somebody would would bother addressing anybody as 'sir.' So, taking those out, we have:


"Sir, I am trying to celebrate and relax, but your spirit is without cheer. What is going on?"


I'm still not happy with "What is going on?" and I think there needs to be a better way. It still sounds too modern (even though, as we saw from Chaucer, everything about my sentence is 'modern.'). So what I'm going to do is just take a phrase that, again, would make no sense in the 14th century, and see what happens:


"Sir, I am trying to celebrate and relax, but your spirit is without cheer. Please, tell me what is the matter?"


All I did was take a phrase that is not used all that often and put it in there instead. This and the other things I put in there alert the reader to know that this is definitely not taking place right this day, because just about nobody they encounter on a daily basis talks like that. From there you are free to use the setting to give your reader a more accurate sense of time.


You don't really want to create authentic period dialogue, but instead what you want is transparent dialogue that gets the character voice across and keeps the plot moving forward. Don't use it for creating setting, let your descriptions do that.


So in summary, what I would recommend at this moment would be the following:


1) Get rid of all slang (contemporary or otherwise unless it is native to the period you are working with)


2) Understand that formality and manners can be useful for some characters to highlight that we are not in our modern time period


3) Use uncommon phrases that seemingly transcend time to allow your setting to pin point the time period.


4) Don't use the 'thee, thou, thine' stuff unless you know what you are doing and the rest of your dialogue is going to be very close to authentic. And even the, I feel it takes away from the clarity and becomes less than transparent.


Hopefully my little rant was helpful, and props go to those who pointed out this issue of anachronistic dialogue in my flash. Without you, I never would have sat down to think about this. Thanks.


What do you think? How should dialogue be handled in Fantasy (and Historical Fiction.)

Now that I'm stabby...

I have recently been hanging out on twitter with the #stabbylove crowd, and I love them. They promote a no-bullshit sensibility when it comes to giving feedback. It's meant to be helpful so we all become better writers, but we won't trade praises just to stroke our egos. (Flying Spaghetti Monster knows I've got a big enough ego as it is)


Today they have graciously invited me to their Stabby Writers Triberr, and I hope this proves to be mutually beneficial to everybody.


So in that spirit, I would like to remind everybody that reads my blog, that you can let me know just how you feel about a piece I wrote. I won't get mad and do something childish like unfollow you on twitter or something goofy. Instead, I would probably sit up and take notice, perhaps even interact with you more often.


I encourage all of you to show me some #stabbylove now and in the future.