I took a look inside. You can usually tell if it’s crap from the first page, but this one looks ok. There is that one one star that claims it’s horrible, but… I don’t know. Ranking isn’t too low. Maybe the reviews are selling it enough so he doesn’t think he needs a new cover?
Catie
9 years ago
A red stick? In a forest? Is it a redwood forest?
Good thing it says “A Novel”. By the looks of it, I would’ve never guessed.
Naaman Brown
9 years ago
Red Stick is a Florida term for Creek Indian and the protagonist is part Creek. The cover barely suggests Florida.
I found a review of this book from 17 Feb 2014 showing the same cover. The review seems to be honest (not by a reviewer held hostage in the mid-Atlantic by a vanity press cartel).
This may be another case of a good independent small press book hurt by a lousy book cover.
Kirkus Reviews? From their website:
Request a review by simply clicking the Get Started link. You’ll provide as much information as possible about your book, choose whether you want to send us a printed (mailed) or digital (uploaded) submission, select either standard service (7-9 weeks) or express service (4-6 weeks) and pay for your review (standard service $425, express service $575). When you submit your order, you’ll get a response from the Kirkus Indie team confirming receipt of your request.”
The reviews are “suspicious BECAUSE” THEY ARE FAKE!!!
I read a confession by a Kirkus reviewer who said he was paid $50 per review. Yeah Kirkus Indie charges $425+ to do a 320 word review. And if your Kirkus reviewer gives you a bad review, you can have the status set to private. Plus I have read a few author reviews of Kirkus reviews (which get hilarious).
But I don’t think the “suspicious” Amazon 5 star reviews came from Kirkus. They may be from people paid to give high-five reviews at Amazon, but the author is an editor at an outdoor magazine and may have a lot of admiring friends and co-workers or actually may be a good writer.
Attention authors everywhere: paid reviews and what appear to be reviews by shills (or Mom or Dad or Sis or Bro) can backfire big time.
Oh, I looked them up and that was interesting, thank you Naaman!
I honestly had no idea that it wasn’t a fake place that was just out to take money. LoL. I’m not at that stage yet, but I will be soon.
I don’t know why, but for some reason I thought reviews for books were like done… I dunno what I thought. Like reviewers worked at a magazine or site and they reviewed books because it was their job and the magazine or site payed them through the revenue. I didn’t for a second think you had to pay for reviews.
It’s so freaking tempting. The benefits are huge and the penalty if you get caught is practically non-existent. Why pay an editor when you can pay for reviews? A ton of positive reviews could sell crap, but a well written book might just go invisible and not sell at all. Personally, I’m not interested in “making it” by cheating because I’m not in it for the money, I want to write books that people will love, not books they’ll be tricked into reading, and it would be far more interesting to me to see how far the books would get on their own. But it is awfully tempting.
It’s sort of funny that the biggest complaint about Kirkus I’ve heard from other authors is that you spend all that money on them and don’t necessarily get a positive review. Which means, at least, that Kirkus is trying to be honest.
Reading up I found Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980) started her book review service in 1932, known since 1969 as Kirkus Reviews, at one time owned by The New York Review of Books.
Self published authors marketing their own book can go through Kirkus Author Services for a review. If the reviewer turns in a negative review, the author can keep it private.
I think Kirkus is trusted by booksellers and libraries and is not a sham. A phony review service always turns in a positive review (and many sound like they never read the book).
They have to be. Think about what they are, historically. In the days before Amazon, publishers didn’t sell their books to readers, but bookstores. Their target audience were always bookstores, they couldn’t care less if the book would appeal to the readers (the bookstores were the ones who worried about appealing to the readers, so indirectly publishers did publish books that they thought bookstores would think would appeal to readers). So Kirkus’s target audience were also bookstores, never readers. So while it might be relatively easy to dope a few million readers, it’s a lot tougher to do it with a significantly less number of bookstore chains. So they have to maintain their reputation with those bookstores, otherwise they’re finished. Their role is similar to an agent, but on the other side of the publisher. Just like an agent is a filter towards the publisher for bad writers and would never take on a writer she thought was unpublishable no matter how much you paid her, Kirkus is a filter for bad books that come from the publisher and would never take on a book they thought was unsellable. Agents filter what comes in, Kirkus filters what comes out.
Only in the past few years when the industry started to change did they adapt and form an indie department and opened themselves up to readers, but they still have that same reputation to uphold towards the bookstores, that part hasn’t changed. The problem is that an uninformed indie author assumes these are paid reviews, when in reality they’re paid appraisals. It’s like when you pay someone to appraise your house. You wouldn’t expect the person to appraise your house for more than it’s worth just because you’re paying the man, would you?
BookBUB works on the same principle. They’re not going to promote a bad book just because you paid them, they have a reputation to uphold (otherwise what reader would trust them?), so your book gets read and appraised before (and if) it’s accepted.
I got a Twitter follower the other day that advertised “endless Amazon reviews”. The site, written in pigeon English, told the story of how the author (who couldn’t even write a coherent web page) has discovered a secret of endless Amazon reviews! I bet there’s a horde of Chinese in a sweat shop somewhere mass writing bogus reviews for peanuts. I wanted to link the page here, but I can’t find the account anymore, must’ve been suspended. Good riddance.
Oh, wait. This isn’t some fishy scheme for getting bogus reviews. This is a genuine book review magazine that’s been around since 1933. This is not “buying reviews”, this is getting your book into a catalogue of sorts which helps bookshops and libraries pick books which are sellable. There’s nothing wrong with the service, provided it’s not abused, except that it’s pricy for Indies. It’s not much different from using BookBUB. There should be more like it, actually.
I guess they’re thinking short term. A good cover doesn’t necessarily mean good content (although a bad cover does suggest carelessness and amateurish). By rating the content itself, they’re trying to bypass the cover and make it irrelevant (don’t judge a book by its cover, judge it by the review it got from Kirkus). They’re not thinking that in long term, this book can be online forever. And it’s going to forever show that they did less than their best on their work.
![cover[1]](https://lousybookcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cover128-500x769.jpg)
I find the Amazon reviews of this particular book to be ‘suspicious’…
If the book truly is as amazing as they say, spend $50, get a good cover, and become famous Kenny K.
I took a look inside. You can usually tell if it’s crap from the first page, but this one looks ok. There is that one one star that claims it’s horrible, but… I don’t know. Ranking isn’t too low. Maybe the reviews are selling it enough so he doesn’t think he needs a new cover?
A red stick? In a forest? Is it a redwood forest?
Good thing it says “A Novel”. By the looks of it, I would’ve never guessed.
Red Stick is a Florida term for Creek Indian and the protagonist is part Creek. The cover barely suggests Florida.
I found a review of this book from 17 Feb 2014 showing the same cover. The review seems to be honest (not by a reviewer held hostage in the mid-Atlantic by a vanity press cartel).
This may be another case of a good independent small press book hurt by a lousy book cover.
Ah. Mystery solved. It’s still a very silly sounding title.
It would make a very interesting experiment to substitute this for a better cover and see how that affects the sale.
Note: None of the sticks are red.
(and yes, I know the Native American connotation)
It’s getting so LBC is going to need a tag for “completely boring photograph of a completely boring patch of a completely boring forest.”
Kirkus Reviews? From their website:
Request a review by simply clicking the Get Started link. You’ll provide as much information as possible about your book, choose whether you want to send us a printed (mailed) or digital (uploaded) submission, select either standard service (7-9 weeks) or express service (4-6 weeks) and pay for your review (standard service $425, express service $575). When you submit your order, you’ll get a response from the Kirkus Indie team confirming receipt of your request.”
The reviews are “suspicious BECAUSE” THEY ARE FAKE!!!
That is $425 ($575 Express) more dollars than I would be willing to pay for a review. Fake or otherwise.
Maybe if it was a famous author… but I am pretty sure that famous authors are not shills.
I read a confession by a Kirkus reviewer who said he was paid $50 per review. Yeah Kirkus Indie charges $425+ to do a 320 word review. And if your Kirkus reviewer gives you a bad review, you can have the status set to private. Plus I have read a few author reviews of Kirkus reviews (which get hilarious).
But I don’t think the “suspicious” Amazon 5 star reviews came from Kirkus. They may be from people paid to give high-five reviews at Amazon, but the author is an editor at an outdoor magazine and may have a lot of admiring friends and co-workers or actually may be a good writer.
Attention authors everywhere: paid reviews and what appear to be reviews by shills (or Mom or Dad or Sis or Bro) can backfire big time.
Oh, I looked them up and that was interesting, thank you Naaman!
I honestly had no idea that it wasn’t a fake place that was just out to take money. LoL. I’m not at that stage yet, but I will be soon.
I don’t know why, but for some reason I thought reviews for books were like done… I dunno what I thought. Like reviewers worked at a magazine or site and they reviewed books because it was their job and the magazine or site payed them through the revenue. I didn’t for a second think you had to pay for reviews.
<- Mystery world.
It’s so freaking tempting. The benefits are huge and the penalty if you get caught is practically non-existent. Why pay an editor when you can pay for reviews? A ton of positive reviews could sell crap, but a well written book might just go invisible and not sell at all. Personally, I’m not interested in “making it” by cheating because I’m not in it for the money, I want to write books that people will love, not books they’ll be tricked into reading, and it would be far more interesting to me to see how far the books would get on their own. But it is awfully tempting.
It’s sort of funny that the biggest complaint about Kirkus I’ve heard from other authors is that you spend all that money on them and don’t necessarily get a positive review. Which means, at least, that Kirkus is trying to be honest.
Reading up I found Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980) started her book review service in 1932, known since 1969 as Kirkus Reviews, at one time owned by The New York Review of Books.
Self published authors marketing their own book can go through Kirkus Author Services for a review. If the reviewer turns in a negative review, the author can keep it private.
I think Kirkus is trusted by booksellers and libraries and is not a sham. A phony review service always turns in a positive review (and many sound like they never read the book).
They have to be. Think about what they are, historically. In the days before Amazon, publishers didn’t sell their books to readers, but bookstores. Their target audience were always bookstores, they couldn’t care less if the book would appeal to the readers (the bookstores were the ones who worried about appealing to the readers, so indirectly publishers did publish books that they thought bookstores would think would appeal to readers). So Kirkus’s target audience were also bookstores, never readers. So while it might be relatively easy to dope a few million readers, it’s a lot tougher to do it with a significantly less number of bookstore chains. So they have to maintain their reputation with those bookstores, otherwise they’re finished. Their role is similar to an agent, but on the other side of the publisher. Just like an agent is a filter towards the publisher for bad writers and would never take on a writer she thought was unpublishable no matter how much you paid her, Kirkus is a filter for bad books that come from the publisher and would never take on a book they thought was unsellable. Agents filter what comes in, Kirkus filters what comes out.
Only in the past few years when the industry started to change did they adapt and form an indie department and opened themselves up to readers, but they still have that same reputation to uphold towards the bookstores, that part hasn’t changed. The problem is that an uninformed indie author assumes these are paid reviews, when in reality they’re paid appraisals. It’s like when you pay someone to appraise your house. You wouldn’t expect the person to appraise your house for more than it’s worth just because you’re paying the man, would you?
BookBUB works on the same principle. They’re not going to promote a bad book just because you paid them, they have a reputation to uphold (otherwise what reader would trust them?), so your book gets read and appraised before (and if) it’s accepted.
I got a Twitter follower the other day that advertised “endless Amazon reviews”. The site, written in pigeon English, told the story of how the author (who couldn’t even write a coherent web page) has discovered a secret of endless Amazon reviews! I bet there’s a horde of Chinese in a sweat shop somewhere mass writing bogus reviews for peanuts. I wanted to link the page here, but I can’t find the account anymore, must’ve been suspended. Good riddance.
Oh, wait. This isn’t some fishy scheme for getting bogus reviews. This is a genuine book review magazine that’s been around since 1933. This is not “buying reviews”, this is getting your book into a catalogue of sorts which helps bookshops and libraries pick books which are sellable. There’s nothing wrong with the service, provided it’s not abused, except that it’s pricy for Indies. It’s not much different from using BookBUB. There should be more like it, actually.
This is true. Of course, it’s still pretty ridiculous to spend $425 on a review from a prestigious outfit and spend nothing on the cover of the book.
I guess they’re thinking short term. A good cover doesn’t necessarily mean good content (although a bad cover does suggest carelessness and amateurish). By rating the content itself, they’re trying to bypass the cover and make it irrelevant (don’t judge a book by its cover, judge it by the review it got from Kirkus). They’re not thinking that in long term, this book can be online forever. And it’s going to forever show that they did less than their best on their work.