You Can't Put Lipstick On A Pig

A while ago, in this very blog, I made an offer to review books for other authors.

​It was intended as an act of solidarity to undermine the leaches that are preying on the writing community by offering dubious quality services in exchange for even more dubious quality benefits - and all at a price.
 
I should have thought it through a little bit more.
 
It isn’t the work involved. If I was worried about that I would never have made the offer in the first place. No, it is that there are so very many poorly written books out there and when you make an offer to review books you have to read them first.
 
The problem is quantity versus quality. There are more people writing books today than ever before. When Covid struck (and a recession earlier in the century), writing a book would seem like good way to generate a new income. The cost of entry into the market is as low as the price of a pencil and a notepad, though a computer of some sort makes life much easier. The truth is that very few authors make enough money to live on, but very few of these new authors would actually know that.

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When satellite, cable and free to air digital TV came along I made a personal prediction that the quantity it offered would come at the cost of quality. It is a prediction that came true.

While there are good quality programmes on some channels, once you get away from the big name providers you are into a world of repeats, reality TV and pseudo reality. Most of it fits neatly under the heading of "junk TV".
 
The same applies to writing. Quantity comes at the expense of quality. Anyone who can write 80,000 words (it is frequently a lot less) can click on the “upload” button on Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, Lulu et al and hey presto, they’re a published author.
 
Now, don’t get me wrong. I have read a lot of very good books by Indie authors and those published by small, online publishing houses. I’ve even reviewed some of them in this blog. They deserve better than the publishing industry gives, simply because the big publishers, hand in glove with literary agents, have such a strangle hold on the industry, which means that the majority of authors never have a fighting chance of hitting the big time.

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No, the problem is that so many people think that they can write a book when, really, they can’t.
 
Before I go any further, I’m not going to mention any authors or book titles by name. It isn’t fair that I damage their prospects for sales by bad mouthing them in a blog. I’m not a big believer in karma, but I also don’t want to run the risk of retaliation.
 
Let's face it, when it comes to sabotage, these authors have done such a great job themselves.
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I’m not talking about the “nearly” books that a half decent editor could help the author to lick into shape. The underlying talent in those books shines through and as an author myself I’m willing to tolerate the sentences that don’t quite come across as well as they might, the bit of dialogue that is a little bit clunky or the loose end in the plot that isn’t quite tidied away. All authors know we would write those books differently, but the point is that they aren’t our books, so the author has the right to tell their story the way they want.

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What I’m talking about is the book that should never have been written in the first place. The “it seemed like a good idea at the time” books that had no chance of ever making it to a satisfactory ending.

These are the books filled with characters that are so badly written that to describe them as one dimensional is to ascribe one dimension too many. The books so lacking in emotion that you would think that the world was filled with emotionless robots rather than with real people.
 
It is the latter which bothers me the most. Readers engage with characters they care about. They will want to read about them. They will want to turn the page to find out if they succeed or fail, love or lose, live or die. Readers care about them because they can identify with them and they identify with them because they understand them. So why couldn’t I identify with any of the characters in these poor novels?
 
Basically it was because the authors told me so little about the characters. Oh, we get plenty of physical descriptions, to be sure. I was also given plenty of plot to read about, some of which was inventive, but much of which had been done before. To make me want to read on, I needed something to care about, and wasn’t given it. I ended up questioning my reason for reading the books. Why should I care about these characters? I don’t know them; I feel nothing for them.

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 OK, they may be dangling above a fiery pit, just about to get burnt to a crisp, but do I care? Not really. The authors gave me no reason to care. They are just names on a bit of paper (or letters on the screen of an e-reader). They mean nothing to me because the authors haven’t told me anything about them to make me care.

Like the guy on the left, they're just a caricature.
 
When I think back over all the books I have ever read that I really enjoyed, the common factor is that they had strong protagonists. I don’t mean strong in the “wading through fire to rescue the damsel in distress” type of strong. I mean emotionally strong. Their authors made me feel every pang of emotion that you would expect a real person to feel.

​This is what worries me about the authors who are writing such poor books. Are they not people too? Do they not love? Do they not feel fear? Do they not feel happy or sad? To read their books you would think that the answer was a resounding “no”.
 
If someone can’t write about emotions then I would suggest that they shouldn’t be an author, because to be an author you have to live with emotion every time you sit down to write. I don’t know about other authors, but when I stop writing at the end of the day I sometimes feel as though I’ve been through an emotional mangle; crushed and wrung out. If I can’t make myself laugh or cry then how am I ever going to make my readers laugh or cry? If I can’t make myself worry about what will happen to my characters, how can I expect my readers to worry about them?

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Another problem that I have encountered in recent books is a lack of drama. Drama comes from conflict and if there isn’t any conflict in the story there will never be a story worth reading. Even romantic stories have a conflict at their heart. It is the conflict that prevents the romantically entwined characters from being happy together, at least not until they have resolved the conflict so that they can live happily ever after.
 
This means that the characters must have something meaningful happen to them early in the story. Something that will expose their emotional state and tell me who they are, deep down inside.
 
I have to say that some of the books I refer to have garnered 5 star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, which is rather worrying. Either the readers who posted those reviews are less critical than me, or the reviews aren’t genuine. I am well aware that not every reader will enjoy every book to the same degree. One person’s 5 star read may be another reader’s 4 or even 3 star. But I can’t believe that 20 or 30 people gave 5 stars to the book I would struggle to award 1 star. It defies logic.

I think the problem for some authors is the market testing of their books. They ask friends or family to read them, rather than asking for criticism from somebody independent. However well-read friends and family may be, at heart they want to be seen to be supportive of the author, so they say nice things about the book even if it hasn’t got many redeeming features. Consequently, the author gets a false sense of the real quality of their work and they publish based on that. They may get away with it once and sell a few copies, but no one will be returning to read the sequel.
 
In the meantime, if you have written a book that you think is better than the ones I have talked about above, I’d be happy to review it for you. I really, really would like to be able to post a 4 or 5 star review for someone.
 
And if you think I’m an arrogant know-it-all who wouldn’t recognise a good book if it jumped up and bit me on the nose, then you can say as much when you read one of my books and post a review of it. You can find out more about my books by clicking on the “Books” tab at the top of this page.

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