Maybe some of you have noticed we’re much more free-wheeling at VP than we used to be. We still aren’t intentionally offensive, but we don’t worry about offending anymore, either. There is a growing subculture that makes a lifetime hobby (or profession, in some cases) of finding excuses to be offended. Such individuals were never part of our target audience, nor will they ever be.

Virtual Pulp never was intended to be all things to all people.

With that in mind, I thought it was time to reassess our “mission statement,” and here’s what I came up with:

“You can’t judge a book by its cover.” We all know the cliche is true. And yet when we’re browsing for a good book, we forget or ignore that wise adage (I’m including myself here). I’ve made perhaps every mistake an indie author can make in this business, and one of them was publishing a novel with a weak cover design.

Subsequently I learned a few things about Photoshop, and took more time, making the cover better…but it still wasn’t great. Same goes for a few of my e-books.

Recently Virtual Pulp has enjoyed working with Logotecture, who designed the cover for the newest Retreads novel False Flag, and replaced the cover design for the first novel, Hell and Gone.

We’ve found them to be accommodating, fast, reasonably-priced…and, best of all, Logotecture does darn good work.

The paperback version of False Flag will be published soon, and this is what it looks like. You can see they added the barcode already. From the tinting to the font, the designer did it all right the first time with no suggestions from us. He just knew what it should look like.

We are very fortunate to have found Logotecture and can’t recommend them highly enough. Whether you need a cover for a new book, a redesign for an old cover, formatting of a manuscript, banners or advertising art, they’ve got you covered.

The Goodreads giveaway of my debut novel Hell & Gone is finished. I just returned from the post office, where I sent out 10 paperbacks to the winners.

I didn’t realize until just before the giveaway ended that I could see the profiles of those who entered. I was rather disappointed that none of the folks I regularly interact with on Goodreads signed up, unless I missed them while skimming through the list. Oh well–my fiction certainly isn’t for everybody.

I would have been happy if only 10 people signed up, and all 10 won a paperback, if they were people  truly interested in reading this kind of book (and then would write an Amazon review afterwards). But 504 people signed up, before all was said and done, and the ones I browsed didn’t appear to particularly like military thrillers. That leads me to worry that they signed up merely to get free stuff, not really caring what the free stuff is.

Maybe they’ll get the book and it will just sit around collecting dust for years until they host a garage sale. Maybe they’ll give it to somebody for Christmas or a birthday. Or maybe they’ll turn around immediately and sell it on E-Bay. Or maybe I’ll actually get a review something along the lines of, “I normally don’t read this genre, but I got the book for free. So I tried to read it but there just weren’t enough strong female characters…”

Or maybe I’ll just get a drive-by one star review the SJWs are so fond of giving: “This sucks. Couldn’t even finish the first page.” Yes, those reviews happen, all over Amazon.

I now have a list of giveaway winners. Nine out of ten are female. That would be great if the genre was romance or chick-lit or lesbian vampire paranormal urban coming-of-age fiction. But Jack Silkstone called Hell & Gone “A man’s book through and through,” which is precisely what I wrote it to be.

Here’s some depressing details about the winners: three of them haven’t bothered to post a single review on anything at all. One of them has posted one review, and one has posted three.  Only four winners have reviews posted in the double digits and two of them are tied at 12.

Some of these folks haven’t added a single book to their shelf. It’s a little surprising they expended the energy to sign up for the giveaway.

This is building on my bad experience at Goodreads. Previously, in my ongoing quest for reviews, I offered free download codes for my audiobooks to anyone willing to post a review after listening. All those who volunteered took the free stuff and ran. Some even deleted their responses in the thread where they volunteered.

Ostensibly Goodreads is the perfect venue for finding reviewers, because everybody there allegedly likes to read. There are a couple strikes against me right away because…

1. It’s mostly women (I write for men).
2. It’s 90% left-leaning feminists.

I tried to counteract this by only advertising the giveaway in groups where my intended audience was likely to be. But alas, it would appear that none of those folks entered, while 500+ from the general Goodreads population did.

It’s beginning to look like this experiment is doomed to the same fate as every other marketing ploy I’ve tried.

Well, we’ll see. Maybe I’m not giving the winners enough credit, because I’ve been stung so much in the past. So far I still plan on a Goodreads giveaway for the sequel, Tier Zero. When it’s all over and the reviews come in (or don’t), we’ll have some data to determine whether Goodreads giveaways have any marketing value for an author.

An author who does not write lesbian vampire paranormal urban coming-of-age fiction, that is.

Seems like there are thousands of bloggers in the manosphere, and most of them either have books published, or will have soon. So a lot of you probably understand the significance of the much-coveted Amazon review.

My first book was published in 2010 and I did pretty much everything wrong. (I became a blogger not long afterwards kind of by accident.) If there was a mistake to be made as an author, I made it. An opportunity to be missed? I missed it—for the first three years of my writing career. Long story short: One truth I found out the hard way was that an indie author’s career lives or dies by Amazon.

The more essential I realized Amazon was, the more of a presence I tried to maintain there.  That, and my old blog, were the reasons I became a prolific Amazon reviewer for a while.

I still get more review requests than I can ever hope to fulfill, so this post can also serve as a disclaimer. My methods may be peculiar or even bizarre; sometimes perhaps inconsistent as well. But nobody’s paying me for this, so I make the rules. At least I have a modicum of ethics, unlike many reviewers out there.

First off, my reviews are honest. I may cut authors slack (see below) with Amazon’s star rating, but I don’t make stuff up or try to BS anybody.  If the book flat-out sucks, I usually don’t even review it. If a review was requested and the book sucks, I contact the author to tell them. If they still insist on a review, I write one and let people know it sucks. I make an effort to be constructive, but you can’t polish a turd.

My schedule is very tight and I have an impossibly-gigantic To Be Read pile. Because of that, I use audiobooks whenever possible. I have an Audible.com subscription and I get my money’s worth from it. If you have an Audible version of your book, that increases its chances of getting read/reviewed 10X, all other factors being equal. It’s a real sacrifice to stop what I’m doing, halt my productivity and read a book. But I can listen to a book while getting other stuff done.

Back in the day I used to read for the pure joy of it, and the escape it offered. Without audiobooks, that phase of my life is long gone. I’ve served my time when it comes to Quixotic thankless jobs helping other authors succeed, so I am less and less inclined to spend precious time needed for my own career to read/review scads of other authors’ books. If you get your foot in my door at all, most likely you’ll have a long wait on your hands (again, unless you’ve got an audio version).

Next, I usually give preference to indie authors. As an indie, I know what an uphill struggle it is and I empathize. So I push indies toward the front of the queue and also cut them more slack on Amazon (I have no star-rating scheme on the blog so just say what I think and leave it at that).

There are exceptions: As a result of my reviewing, I’ve made friends with tradpubbed authors whose books I love. Because they are friends, I sometimes shuffle them to the front, too.

Also, I’ve stopped mucking about with books outside my genre umbrella. Unless I owe you a favor, I’m probably not going to read your book if it’s not men’s adventure (be it science fiction, fantasy, war, western, TEOTWAWKI or whatever flavor of men’s fiction). I occasionally review non-fiction and classics, but solely at my discretion. I have author friends, and sometimes stretch beyond my preference to help them out, but don’t count on it. If you see me review a romance or horror novel, it’s safe to assume that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve gotten picky in other ways, too. In the past, I read/reviewed indie books written from the typical leftist/feminist/America-hating perspective. (Some of the better ones I even gave four or five-star reviews on Amazon. )That’s history. You pinkos already have the deck stacked in your favor, and don’t need additional help from me. Apolitical work is great, but my patience for leftard, globalist…and even neocon…stuff has been worn completely through. I get enough of that crap everywhere else and I’m definitely not gonna expose myself to more when I have a choice. Same goes for “gay” pandering and the obligatory pixie ninjas and other “strong female characters.”

The buck stops here.

And if you sucker-punch me with any of that…one strike and you’re probably out. A while back I was working my way through a series written by some fellow pulp writers. I got sucker-punched a third of the way through one book with some establishment-approved homophile bupkus and stopped reading right there. Never finished the book; never will; and may never try another one from that series. I definitely won’t read that author again. This kind of thing has become a deal-breaker.

As you can surely tell from this post, I tend to be long-winded. Most of my reviews were lengthy—more like scholastic book reports than typical Amazon feedback. (Actually, you’re lucky to get more than a sentence or two from the average Amazon reviewer.) I have begun making an effort at brevity. Don’t feel cheated or spurned if I only give you a paragraph—that’s probably my new standard, for everybody.

It used to be Goodreads was an afterthought for me. I’m in the process of making it my default venue. It’s probably the closest to social networking I will get, anymore. In fact, unless requested by the author, it’s possible I won’t even bother to duplicate Goodreads reviews on Amazon. If you’re on Goodreads, hit me up. I could use some book recommendations from non-SJW/feminista/homophiles.

Finally, there’s an issue that really chaps my fourth point: Amazon’s helpful/non-helpful votes for reviews.

There are a whole bunch of worthless reviews on Amazon. These include:

• Reviews by people who have obviously never read the book.
• Reviews by people who have only skimmed the book, or not finished it.
• One or two-sentence drive-bys that give an “it sucks” opinion without any clue as to why the book allegedly sucks.
• Hatchet jobs by leftards out to sabotage non-leftard authors based on their beliefs, not on whether the book was good or bad.
• Combinations of two or more of the above.
• The positive equivalent of any of the above examples of negative reviews.

“Reviews” like those are deserving of a “not helpful” vote. However, what I’ve noticed is that people vote “helpful” or “not helpful” based on whether the reviewer personally liked or didn’t like the book.

I sacrifice valuable time to write thoughtful reviews. Whether I liked the book or disliked it, I take pains to be constructive in my critiques. I use examples and give reasons for what I say, which makes it possible for the reader to intuit whether they would agree or disagree with my opinions. (Some negative reviews I’ve read have convinced me to buy a book.) I’ve never written the equivalent of “It rocks! Buy it!” or “It sucks! Next!” without explanation. And yet it’s pretty much guaranteed I will get “not helpful” votes any time I give an overall negative report.

Not only that, but I’ve gotten “not helpful” votes on positive reviews because I didn’t rate the book in question five stars!

What a bunch of bovine assclowns.

One more thing along these lines: So far I’ve avoided responding to negative reviews of my own books. But if you’re foolish enough to mouth off a stupid comment about one of my reviews, you will likely have your ignorance thrown back in your face.

UPDATE: Forget  what I said about Goodreads. It is an SJW-converged playground; I have taken my toys and left the sandbox.

UPDATE 2.0: I have now, on occasion, begun responding to negative reviews of my books. Not always, because some readers are honest and honestly just didn’t like something. Others, however…well, we’re in a culture war, and I’ve decided to shoot back.

What is so bleeding “hawt” about an S&M chick-lit novel, anyway? Haven’t those been around since Victorian times?

As authors (and aspiring full-time authors) here at VP, we take an interest when success stories are waved in our faces. While getting work published is easier than it’s ever been; the writing racket is also tougher than ever before. Fewer and fewer people read; yet there’s more and more competition from other authors to capture the (mercurial) attention of that shrinking pool of readers. And those readers, by-and-large, don’t necessarily care that much about the quality of the material.

It’s worse than that when you’re a man, writing books for other men. Why? Because men have never been the avid readers women were (on average). Fewer still read fiction. Here are a few distractions contributing to this imbalance:

• Work (even in this age of “equality,” men still put in more hours than women).
• Movies (they’re everywhere, now–you don’t need to visit a theater).
• Video/computer games (often they’re written better anyway).
• The Internet.

When the New York Publishing Cartel abandoned male readers in the 1990s, the male population abandoned literature in a mass exodus.

(Anybody remember how J.A. Konrath snuck by the NYPC gatekeepers to get published in the first place? The fact that he used the androgynous “J.A.” in lieu of a first name was no mistake. Neither was the “strong female character” orthodoxy.)

So when 50 Shades or some other literary fad comes along and makes big money, we pay attention, but generally don’t learn anything useful from it.

What this bestseller-turned-blockbuster(?) movie teaches us has more to do with the state of our culture than anything else. And I’m not even referring to the kinky sex fetishes. I’m referring to the fact that 50 Shades of Grey is just a hyped, edited work of fan fiction derived from the Twilight series.