The Quixotic Phenomena Called a Review

By Chester Campbell

Book reviews are an interesting phenomena. They are so subjective that you have to evaluate them with care and and in many cases take them with the proverbial grain of salt. There has been a flood of posts on various blogs and listserves recently about Amazon's treatment of reviews. And much of it derives from the fake review exposes of late.

Many writers have complained of Amazon's recent practice of taking down reviews from their book pages for various reasons. There is a lot of disagreement about what is taking place. Some say the massive retail site has removed reviews by other authors. Some say it doesn't like reviews put  up by friends of the author.

Happily I haven't noticed any reviews removed from my books except for one, Secret of the Scroll, my first published book and the first in my Greg McKenzie mystery series. However, it's easy to see what they did. The novel was originally published in 2002 by Durban House. I parted with the company after my third book and got my rights back. I also got a large supply of books from their inventory, which I used to keep the books on Amazon and sell at various venues.

I ran out of Secret of the Scroll copies this year and got it printed in a second edition by Night Shadows Press. The  inside of the book is virtually identical, but the cover has several changes, one of which I had wished was there from the start. With nothing but the title and artwork of an ancient scroll on the original cover, many people thought it was a religious book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The new cover includes copy identifying the story as an international thriller.

The Amazon page contained around eight reviews submitted back in 2002 and 2003. After the new edition was put up, Amazon gained another batch of reviews when I did three free days for the Kindle edition. Recently I found that the reviews for the 2002 edition had been removed. I thought that was a little picky, but I haven't complained.

Back to my original premise about the subjectivity of reviews, I found it quite interesting to read a few recent reviews for the second Greg McKenzie book, Designed to Kill. Several reviews were added after I ran its Kindle edition free. Here are three that appeared one after the other. First came a 3-star review titled "It's OK":

"In a nutshell, I felt like this story was a little predictable. I figured out early on who the bad guy was. I continued to read it though, hoping that I would be surprised in the end. Sadly, I wasn't."

Under that appeared this 1-star review titled "I Didn't Even Finish It":

"It is rare that a book is so bad, that I don't finish it. I have pushed through some terrible books in the past, but this one was an exception. I didn't like anything about this book. I didn't like the characters. I didn't like the story line. I found it boring, and rambling. This was my first and last Greg McKenzie Mystery."

Following that came this 5-star review titled "Killer out there":

"Greg McKenzie retired and living in Nashville with his wife Jill find themselves as amateur sleuths, after their close friends son is found dead from a head wound in Pensacola Florida, the evidence suggest he committed suicide by a gunshot to his head.
Greg and Jill decide to go to Florida to take a look at the evidence as the family believe he was murdered. So the story begins ranging from Nashville Tenn. to Pensacola Flo. This is an interesting book as it teams up a husband and wife who are retired and in their early 60's. A well thought out and plausable plot that will keep you guessing to the end."

You'd have thought they read different books. Fortunately for my ego, the page contains seven 5 stars, including one from Midwest Book Review that ends with:

"A plot that moves along at a rapid clip with plenty of cliffhangers and well-defined characters. Greg McKenzie and his wife Jill are likeable characters who manage to transform retirement into a series of exciting adventures, all the while dealing with aging bodies and minds. A fine second effort!"

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The Genesis of a Character

A couple of my colleagues here have been talking about characters. They are the building blocks of a story. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes may make for excitement, but it's how people react to such phenomena that we enjoy reading about. I know some authors who tear pictures of people out of magazines and post them near the computer to model for their characters. Others base characteristics of their creations on people they know.

For the most part, I create my characters from scratch, giving them traits and history that blends in with their role in the story. I literally build them as I go, adding to the characters as the story develops (I don't outline or plot the book in advance). When I began writing what became my first published mystery, Secret of the Scroll, book one of five in the Greg McKenzie series, the tale I had in mind required a retiree with investigative experience. Since I had an Air Force background, I decided to make him a former Office of Special Investigations agent. And since I had gotten involved in the new Scottish Society of Middle Tennessee, I gave him a Scottish name and heritage.

As I said, that has been the case with most of the characters who people my books. However, there has been one striking departure. It involved the first novel I wrote when I turned to fiction in earnest back in 1989. That time, also, I needed a man with investigative experience. But in this case he would need a background that would allow him to have worked in the past with a CIA officer. As I thought about it, I had the perfect fit in a former FBI agent I had first met during my days as editor of Nashville Magazine.

I discussed the man whose background formed the basis for my character Burke Hill on this blog last April in The Story Behind the Story. I didn't use his physical characteristics for Hill, and I did a bit of tweaking with his backstory, shifting the timeline and fictionalizing his activities following the dismissal by J. Edgar Hoover. A tale about Burke working with his old CIA buddy in Mexico isn't part of the story related by my ex-FBI friend, but he did tell me about a wild concoction produced by a lab at Dugway Proving Grounds.

Hill is the central figure in my trilogy of Post Cold War political thrillers, which had different literary agents when written in the early nineties and wound up in the manuscript pile on my office floor. The first, Beware the Jabberwock, was finally published this year and is available on Amazon in ebook and paperback. The second, The Poksu Conspiracy, will be in the Kindle Store by the end of this month.

Burke Hill's character is further fictionalized in the second book with the revelation of a son by his first marriage. But the basic story of his FBI career, starting with his job of delivering documents to Hoover's home, follows the account the agent told me in interviews.

The other characters in both books are figments of my imagination. Incidentally, I haven't mentioned the former agent's name, but if you're curious, take a look at the dedication in the print version.

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Starting Over with No. 1

I entered the ranks of published authors in 2002 with Secret of the Scroll, which became the first in my Greg McKenzie mystery series. I had a three-book contract with Durban House Publishing Company, now deceased. They published my first three McKenzie books and then let them go out of print. I bought the publisher's remaining inventory of a couple of hundred books and sold them over the years at non-bookstore venues. A lot of readers want the first book in a series.

With my supply depleted, I turned to my current publisher, Night Shadows Press. As a result, Secret of the Scroll will be available to bookstores in the next few days. The text is identical with the first edition, but there's a new cover, shown here. It closely resembles the original, with the addition of a blurb identifying the book as "An International Thriller, Greg McKenzie Mystery No. 1."

One of the problems I've had since the book first came out is that just glancing at the cover, people presumed it was about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The novel involves a fictional parchment similar to those famous documents, but it's hardly a religious book. It won second place for Thrillers/Horror in the 2003 Bloody Dagger Awards and was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Mystery Book of the Year.

The book has been available for more than a year on Amazon for the Kindle and Smashwords for other e-readers, and it will now be on sale in a new paperback edition for those who like to hold a real live book in their hands.

Chester Campbell

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The curse of pet words by Chester Campbell

When I got the initial edit of Secret of the Scroll (my first published mystery) back from the editor, I shuffled through his nine pages of notes and stopped on this one:

"For some reason you like the color blue. Nothing wrong with that but if it breaks the mood of the story, then we have a problem. You have used blue as follows:

"blue cardigan/sweater

"blue car number one, Israel

"blue car number two, Nashville

"Father Coughlin decked out in blue

"Worker at Kibbutz in blue workclothes

"Blue blazer, and (dark) blue vehicle, shirts

"And the piece de resistence! Jill in oversize blue dress!

"When the reader starts counting the number of times you use something, you've lost him. He's detached from your book. The magic is gone."

Thank God for Word's search and replace function. What Bob Middlemiss mentioned was like the first dandelion in the front yard. When I did a search on "blue," I found the word appeared 48 times in the manuscript. After paring it down for the final version that went to the typesetter, only 17 blue mentions remained. They were spread around over the course of 264 pages.

In subsequent manuscripts, I have found other favorites that turn up way too often. Words like "suddenly." In her book Don't Murder Your Mystery, Chris Roerden cautions, "One 'suddenly' per book, please."

Another of those unbiquitous terms I have encountered too many times in my prose is "laughed." He laughed. She laughed. They all laughed. I wind up going through and creating some other way to indicate amusement.

Then there are words like "almost" and "about" that should be turned into definite quantities whenever possible. And there's "just," which one blog titled "Just Is a Four-Letter Word" went on to say, "It's a dangerous word that should be used as sparingly as possible."

These are "just" a few of the words that hound me. What about you? What words do you find difficult to eliminate from your writing?

Check The Marathon Murders for a sample of my efforts.