I’ve seen this guy’s books promoted all over the place, but it wasn’t until reader Ever pointed it out to me that I saw this “open letter” in his Amazon “about” page:
An open letter to my fellow scifi/fantasy writers.
Dear, dear friends:
You are awful. All of you. (Yes, ALL OF YOU!)
Please do not take it personally. But someone has to tell you this, and it might as well be me.
You suffer from three key deficits: LACK OF IMAGINATION, LACK OF EMPATHY, and LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS.
First, your lack of IMAGINATION.
99% of scifi/fantasy novels can be categorized as follows:
a) “Hip”, “Modern Day” Fantasy: “diverse” teenagers with magical powers fighting vampires in urban settings.
b) Teenagers suffering deprivation in a post-nuclear wasteland;
c) The so-called “epic” fantasy novel, with “world building” expecting you to learn the history of hundreds of characters, castles, cities and taverns like a History of Art exam.
d) Everyone fighting World War II again, in outer space; and
e) “Hard” scifi, with 500 pages of hand wringing and mental _asturbation about a transmission from an alien sphere (or… if you’re feeling imaginative… an alien cube!).
Not only are these topics very, very trite, but your rendition of them is even worse. You’re like a bad photocopy machine making worse and worse copies which themselves are bad copies of other copies.
…
Go ahead and read the rest of it. (It continues for another thousand words.)
This, I should point out, is a writer whose illustrious books look like this:
So, you know, “consider the source” and all that.
Can’t blame a guy for liking boobs. (Not being a guy, I don’t understand the attraction, but still . . .)
And, of course, women all look the same from behind.
Well….bless his little porny heart. That’s all I gotta say. We can all text exactly what type of babe appeals to him, as all his women look pretty much the same.
But wait, he’s coming out with a music video – I can hardly wait!!!
We can all TELL what, not TEXT what. Sheesh! I’m losing it.
Oh, whew – I thought he was yelling at us! 😉 If I’ve disappointed you, Gary L.M., then I’m very very (not) sorry!
“Lastly, and most importantly, you lack SELF-AWARENESS.”
Right? Like… dude.
I’ll concede there are, in fact, too many Joss Whedon, Stephenie Meyer, John Christopher, J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, George Lucas, and Harlan Ellison wannabes at Amazon these days; but dude, you are not helping your case by being one of them.
Also, when you apparently feel compelled to state how offensive to politically correct “snowflake” types you allegedly are at the end of nearly every one of your book summaries, one can’t help thinking you’re a teensy bit insecure concerning the adequacy of your alleged political incorrectness. Trust me, if you’re really so offensive and transgressive to those wokesters as you’d like to think you are, they won’t need any prompting to tell you as much in their negative reviews. (Case in point: one such angry reviewer described one of my books as “far-right propaganda” and “intensely homophobic” in his/her/its review on Amazon; I guess I must be pretty offensive and transgressive and all that awesome stuff.)
I feel sorry for someone that’s imitating Of all people Stephanie Meyer
I personally think Twilight was a badly written romance between two of the most repulsive people I’ve ever had the misfortune to read about. However, you can’t deny that Stephenie Meyer tapped into something, and that there was a huge market for what she was selling. If I could figure out what her secret sauce was, I would be tempted to imitate it too.
I think her “secret sauce” is simply that she happened to be writing a romance series about a gal falling for an unrealistically sexy vampire dude (and later an unrealistically sexy werewolf dude as well) right around the time when a bunch of pubescent girls suddenly formed a burgeoning market for that; under slightly different circumstances, someone else could just as easily have ridden this unanticipated trend to stardom. The twofold reason this “secret sauce” hasn’t worked for her imitators is A) despite what they’d like to think of themselves, the vast majority of them just aren’t all that good and B) even if they are any good, only the first author gets to ride the trend to stardom, and Stephenie Meyer is that first author.
Oh, well…what is really repulsive about it is the number of GROWN women that rode that train. I tried to read the first one, in the interest of “WTF?,” and it was nothing more than your usual romantic triangle, with the woman being the object of EVERYBODY’S affection and lust. What was horrifying, to me, was that the girl was utterly undescribed and undifferentiated from 100m other boring girls. She had NO interests, no hobbies, no academic achievements; no personality, nothing.
Her entire value came from being wildly desired by these two “alpha” males. That was it. It was as if this were written in Austen’s day–oh, ayup, ladies, forget achieving anything yourself! Find you some of them thar alpha males and forge your path to worth!
Then some of the other stuff–she sits in her room and sulks FOR A YEAR, because she breaks up with her vampy boyfriend? Jesus, my parents would have kicked my ass and they damn sure wouldn’t let me sit in my room for a year.
Honest to god, as an adult woman in the 21st Century, it’s one of the most repulsive things I’ve ever read. And for grown-up women to go nuts over it–one of the most repulsive things I’ve ever seen.
With due respect, I think that was probably deliberate; what better way to get 100 million boring girls to buy your books than to let them fill in those details based entirely on themselves? That’s about as close as you can get to publishing a reader-self-insert fiction without openly stating to your target audience “From now on, girl, you are Mary Sue and this tragically romantic vampire dude is here to tell you that every guy in your school is secretly slobbering over you.”
Not only that, it was “Hot vampire dude is totally into you for reasons that no one else can see. YOU ARE TOTALLY ALL THAT BUT IT’S A SECRET.”
I think you two are kinda missing my point.
Yes, it’s the “you are totally all that” part, but the “all that” wasn’t anything SHE HAD DONE, or achieved, or accomplished. Right?
Her “all that” was simply because she was WANTED BY TWO FREAKING MEN!!!!! All her coolness, all her “all that” was given to her, through the lust of two boys-men. Not by anything she had herself accomplished, done, anything. I mean, the 1940’s called and they want their mores back.
Ain’t arguing that it’s good. Just saying why it hit a nerve and sold a bajillion copies.
I know, I know, I get rant-y. But man, I worked too goddamned hard to get out of the dreaded Pink Ghetto, “back in the day” and break those ceilings, work in an all-male field, yadda, to see this sort of s**t. It’s like…why did we bother? Grown women, GROWN WOMEN, running around saying “Team Edward” or “Team Werewolf dude,” amirite? Seriously, appalling.
Yeah, turns out gals in the aughts wanted the same thing gals from just about every generation before theirs have always wanted: to be deemed irresistibly desirable to ravishingly attractive young guys whether they’d done anything to earn such desirability or not, feminist ideals of equality and merit be damned. Who knew? Not saying it’s fair, but them’s the breaks.
On the male side of that equation, it’s worth noting (and many a critic certainly has noted) that hot vampire dude Edward Cullen’s behavior is basically that of a creepy stalker, and neither a mentally healthy lifestyle nor anything that girls ought to encourage or find attractive in boys; yet that’s exactly what so many of his fans like about him. If you point out to all of his fans what a yandere he is, their typical response? “Well yeah, but he’s real cute!”
Hard science fiction about contact with aliens. Oh, like “Childhood’s End” I suppose Clarke was also feeling imaginative by using a monolith instead of a sphere.
For what it is worth, the guy seems rather prolific. Probably wins NANOWRIMO two or three times over every year.
Yeah, but his reviews are pretty scalding. I mean, there are always a handful of 4-5’s, and then…I mean, if I were getting 25% 1’s, I’d be worried. And no, I don’t think it has jack to do with other writers’ work; it has to do with the quality of his own work. I mean…this reminds me of a post we were all talking about the other day, when a man with a bad cover somehow went off on a tangent about how all the hugely popular writers are “sellouts.”
Okay, so, fine, even assuming arguendo that that’s true–what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China, as my old Gran used to say? How Patterson or Brown, et al, sell out, or don’t, has nada to do with the quality of one’s cover–or whether you, as an author, get good or bad reviews.
(One such reviewer, that left a 1-star, said that the author was lucky that Disney didn’t own Star Trek, b/c apparently, this innovator, this guy thinking “outside of the box” set his Time Tunnel (not making that up) sci-fi erotica….in the Star Trek universe.)
Yup, the innovation is strong with this one, alright.
Methinks if Paramount wanted to sue the guy for infringing on the Star Trek franchise, its lawyers could be every bit as ruthless as Disney’s could be. What’s keeping both companies from suing him is probably that:
1) The guy’s about as much of a threat to their profitability as fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org are… which is to say, not even remotely.
2) The lawyers’ fees would be much more than either company could ever hope to make from suing him.
3) Even a defense lawyer of rather dubious competence could probably pretty easily convince the court that the work in question is a “parody” or “satire” or “criticism” or in some other way close enough to being an original work that it’s not really infringing on the franchise; sort of like Frankie Rose’s Black Moon Rising, which is DEFINITELY not a published Reylo fanfic novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJGm8Sj7Qn8
Sounds like someone is having a tantrum after getting a bad review…
I don’t think it’s the bad reviews; after all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, particularly when you’re trying to market yourself as that gleefully politically incorrect guy all the SJWs and other wokesters hate. (“See? They say so right there in their reviews!”) It sounds to me more like he’s an imitator and wannabe complaining about how all the other imitators’ and wannabes’ one-step-shy-of-a-lawsuit published fanfics are selling better than his.one-step-shy-of-a-lawsuit published fanfics.
Also, from what I’m seeing of his covers, they’re not really bad so much as they’re just awfully one-note. This guy knows what he likes, and what he likes is bewbs; which probably should come as no surprise, considering that he apparently started his indie author career as a Game of Thrones fan and George R.R. Martin wannabe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVaD8rouJn0&t=176s Since then, he’s also apparently gone on to be a George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry wannabe as well; and let’s not forget those are the guys who brought us Princess Leia in her slave outfit and one of color TV’s earliest scantily-clad green-skinned alien space babes, respectively.
Really, though: if you’re gonna cater to a target audience consisting mainly of fanboys seeking their bewbs fix from fanfics, you shouldn’t go giving away the game by berating your competitors’ kettles for being black and then castigating prospective customers for preferring those kettles over the big shiny black pot you’re selling.
There’s a big ass line between saying “lots of other writers in my genre are bad” and “everyone else’s bad writing and cultural marxism makes people too stupid to like my books”
You know an author who had a similar attitude (particularly with the fantasy genre), Terry Goodkind, and he was a traditionally published author. His egotistism particularly why he is not well liked with hot takes like this:
“First of all, I don’t write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It’s either about magic or a world-building. I don’t do either.” – Terry Goodkind.
My point is this mr. Gary Martin, never go full Goodkind. It never ends well. And hire someone that has some talent to do your covers. so you could focus more on your writing because it might be the real reason why you’re getting those one star reviews.