About Reviews

My time recently has been taken up with promoting my latest Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery, Bears With Us.

This is what I’ve done so far: a book launch at our local used bookstore (we have no book stores anywhere nearby), and two days at our Springville Apple Festival (sold about 1/2 the books I did two years ago) and I just finished up on a month long blog tour.

Blog tours always take a lot of time because of the promoting, going back and comment about the comments, plus I ran a contest–the person who commented on the most blogs could have his or her name used as a character in my next book–so I had to keep checking in order to keep track of all those who commented.

Some of the bloggers reviewed my book and all of them were wonderful, but one gave away the whole ending of the book. Eeek! She’s been asked to take that line out and as I write this I’m not sure if it happened or not. Unless she does, of course, I won’t promote the blog nor will I use the review anywhere.

Through the years I’ve received mostly wonderful reviews, but there have been some that were a bit odd, a couple where I could tell the person hadn’t read the book all the way through, and once before an Amazon review gave away a surprise ending. I contacted the reviewer and she eliminated that part. What I don’t understand is why anyone would do that. I work really hard to come up with an ending that might surprise most people and putting that in a review is definitely a spoiler.

Believe me I appreciate the time someone puts into writing a review about one of my books. I’ve written lots of reviews over the years–and believe me I would never give away the ending.

Authors, anyone else ever have that problem?

Readers, how do you feel about a review like that?

Marilyn