Online Protocol
Last February I was on a 'virtual' book tour that included eighteen 'stops', consisting of reviews, interviews, and guest blog posts. Despite the fact that I never had to leave my home, the tour was surprisingly hard work, time consuming, and a lot of fun.
On Monday, I started a second tour, this one much less work than the first. Only one interview and ten stops are scheduled, all of them reviews. The second of them was posted this morning, and it's a good one, but not great, so it presented a bit of a protocol problem for me. Although I have repeatedly been warned off responding to reviews in The New York Times, for example, my understanding is that the polite thing on the internet is to post a comment, at the very least thanking the host of the site. Did a modest review merit this? I wondered. Would a hearty expression of gratitude seem out-of-place, or a merely polite one somehow grudging? Could I respond without seeming argumentative? Perhaps I should ignore the whole thing? In the end, with fingers crossed that I'd somehow manage to hit the right note, I decided to abide by the rules and post a comment.
I'm glad I did. I think my post may have started a conversation. In any event, it didn't do any harm.
You can find both the review and the comment at:
http://trishsdiary.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/review-the-river-by-moonlight/
And if you have any advice about how to handle such matters, I'd be happy to hear it.
Keywords:
About Camille
Born in Brooklyn, Camille Marchetta received her BA in English Literature from the College of New Rochelle, in Westchester County, New York, and later studied fiction with noted writer Anatole Broyard at The New School in New York City. Shortly afterward, on...
Causes Camille Marchetta Supports
EDpowerment
The Alzheimer's Association
The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
Doctors Without Borders
Save the Children
...
Camille’s Favorite Books
Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, War and Peace, The Idiot, Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Lord of the Rings, Catch 22.
Otherwise It's An Empty Page
Never complain. Never explain.
If thanks should be given it should be to the author for producing the book and giving someone an opportunity to review it. By that I mean that no comment is necessary.
Achieving a Balance
That's the advice my agent gave me once when I was all fired up to write a reviewer who'd not only (I thought) totally misunderstood my book, but had misquoted it to make her point. It's the advice that was echoing in my head yesterday as I hesitated about posting a comment. And I still think it's good advice. But the internet is, for authors, a revolutionary marketing tool, which I think might require stretching the rules a bit. In any case, I didn't complain. I didn't explain. But my thank you and brief comment does seem to have elicited a few reponses and perhaps one or two sales. That's good, right?
As the great Doris Lessing observes...
“It does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, ‘Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages – all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronised, put-down and underpaid person.’ ”
True
Absolutely true. But ... although I think writing a book is its own great reward, it is also wonderful to be read.