I'm squeezing this post in between lots of guests - and on a Saturday afternoon when no one reads blogs anyway, no less - because it's topical.
Last Friday, I read an article in the Daily Mail about Quin Woodward Pu who sent a bizarre text to a man who 'dumped' her after two dates. (Note: after two dates, surely there is nothing to actually dump, it's more of an it was nice to know you, have a good life kind of deal?) A lot of the comments called her a narcissist and a bit delusional.
Reading the article further, I discovered this story had already been covered on Buzzfeed, which is more and more a trait of certain UK papers. Then, reading even further, I discovered this twenty-six year old woman was also a blogger and had two self-published autobiographies available on Amazon. (You'll recall the words narcissist and delusional from the previous paragraph, yes?)
But hang on a minute... what great publicity!! (Cue my cynical head, because - boy! - as a writer I would love this kind of free advertising for my books... albeit with a little less laughter at my expense.)
I attempted to follow the link to her blog, but my anti-virus programme blocked it (LOL!), so I did the next best thing and looked up her books. I found one here and the other here.
Do you see what I see (apart from the fact that this unknown woman has put herself on both book covers)?
The first book has 146 reviews, at the time I'm writing this. Mostly they are one star, and quite a number of them are from people who'd spent $10 on the paperback version... and what's more, when you read the reviews, they are from people who had bought the book after they'd seen this text melt-down by the author - and who assumed the book would be bad.
I'm going to reiterate that, because this is the source of my rant: people spent $10 on a book they knew was going to be bad.
I know many writers, self and indie published, who would love to sell over 100 books in two days (myself included) - but they don't, we don't. It would be lovely to think that when we write, edit, proof-read and generally make our books the best they can be, readers would be on the other side of the process waiting to read them. But no! Apparently notoriety is a much bigger draw.
If anyone knows how we can change this, please let me know!
