You wanted to read the book, you were excited to crack it open, you came into it with good faith and anticipation… but you ended up dnf-ing it. Which book and why?
Mine was The Maid by Nita Prose. It was for my book club and looked like a fun murder mystery. Instead I got instant manic-pixie-dream-neurodivergent-girl vibes, and I noped out before the crime scene was even found.
A book self-published by a family member. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad. I had problems in the first paragraph and thought it was me, I could push through bc it was sci-fi. NOPE. Not even the first page.
It changes tenses in the title, and multiple times in the first paragraph. It’s like someone who had no grasp of the English language wrote it, but this family member is as American as they get.
Im gonnna need the title of that book sir
These things are not at all mutually exclusive
Yeah I had a rough go reading a friend’s self pub book. Riddled with grammar and spelling errors on every page, one dimensional characters, poor use of humor in lieu of character development, and just about every urban fantasy cliché you can think of. I finished it and wrote a great review of it because I know my friend has potential, he just needs to grow as a writer. It was hard to push through it though.
He won’t grow that way, though. I hear so often about people lying in reviews, it’s insane. Why not be honest?
Because I don’t want to crush my friend’s confidence when he’s just starting out. I gave him a thorough list of things I’d recommend doing in the future offline. A public review isn’t a place for that criticism.
“An F in English? Bobby, you speak English!”
I’ve done a fair bit of book cover design work for self publishing authors, and tend to skim read to get the gist of what’s going on.
Let’s just say that when you hear of all these people who never hear back from publishers… it’s generally for a good reason. Not that good work doesn’t get missed sometimes, but I do not envy the agents and publishers who have to slog through this drivel to find anything half readable.
I have a creative writing degree (BA). In our classes, we had to review each other’s work, and they would review yours, in turn. Sometimes, the best thing I could think of was " I really appreciate your use of punctuation and/ or the correct spelling throughout."