I thought I was mostly caught up on all my website stuff, and more or less ready for posting various reviews to come. Recipes. Podcasts. Music in general. Books, TV and movies were already down.
So imagine my surprise when I went to do my updates for some of the other items, just to give myself a baseline for my goals and I realized that a bunch of things that were ON my website were not actually live. The music reviews were still in pending from my last migration. Podcasts sitting in draft.
I could live with that reality, sort of shrugged it off as “Oh, I guess I didn’t get to those before”. Okay, no big deal.
And then I realized that for my recipes, even though I had put a whopping TWO of them on the newly-configured site almost a year ago, I find of forgot to add any way to find them. No links in the menus. No sub-menus for recipes at all. If you searched the site, and knew what you were looking for, sure, they would have popped up. But it was a bit of a dodge to get there.
So I fixed the other six recipes that are on there AND put up multiple sub-menu options to aid in navigation.
Then I did the music ones. Plus some podcasts. And added all the sub-menu options for those too.
And just for fun, I did some book reviews this weekend too. Two fiction ones and one non-fiction. I have a somewhat large back-log of book reviews to do, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to get through them in an orderly fashion. I’ve decided they will be part of my writing goals, so I’ll try to do an “old” review of something in my “TO BE REVIEWED” pile every time I do a “NEWLY READ” review too. That means probably several years to get through the backlog, but I’m not in a rush. I’d just like to be a bit better organized.
Of course, I also had to organize my desktop files and make backups of all of this to various “mirror” sites and my own desktop plus cloud options.
I’m not done, but it was a busy weekend for updating my website. I *think* I have all the indices working the way they are supposed to, but only time will tell.
One of Chuck Lorre’s newest sitcoms, the United States of Al, picked up some pre-launch buzz but not good buzz. Lots of people looked at the 30s trailer and immediately jumped on it saying it was going to be tone-deaf, mocking Muslims, etc. Oddly enough, the goal of the producers was to have a Muslim protagonist that wasn’t a punchline.
Personally, I try not to prejudge a show from that perspective. What I ask myself is simply, “Is there much humour going to be found in said situational comedy that doesn’t make me cringe? Will the actors make me tune in? Will the writers make me laugh?”.
I watched EP1, and the short answer is no to all three questions.
I’m tough on comedies
I confess, I am really tough on comedies. There are a ton of sitcoms out there and I can’t watch them. Fat jokes, ethnic jokes, tease the different person, etc. all make me cringe. Or a premise that is simply miscommunication / misunderstanding combined with immaturity of the main star, often a man, to reinforce the idea that “men are from mars”-level stupid. Yawn.
Very, very few comedies make it through my gauntlet of fall or spring premieres. I watched Big Bang Theory because I’m nerdy and enjoyed the show enough to keep watching up until they added the girlfriends and then I started to love it. Currently, I’m regularly watching the animated show, The Great North, the show with Walter Goggins called The Unicorn, and the kidney donation show B Positive. I can’t imagine B Positive will get renewed, but TV Grim Reaper is predicting it will be, along with The Unicorn, while the Great North has already been renewed.
But I digress. Let’s get back to ripping The United States of Al, EP1. The show basically divides into five scenes:
Waiting for Al to arrive at the airport, where you learn that the main character is a Marine who has been trying to get his Afghani interpreter over to the US for three years (although there’s a timeline problem as he says he’s been trying for 3y, but he’s only been back 6m?);
Driving back from the airport, where there’s a series of one-liners to show the camaraderie between the two men;
A scene at home over dinner, where they talk about the fact that the Marine is going through a divorce;
A scene afterwards in the garage, where the two men get to talk about adjusting to life outside of Afghanistan for both of them; and,
A scene where Al invites the soon-to-be ex-wife over for some mediation with the Marine.
It’s slightly more than those five scenes, but not much. So here’s the thing…if you read those five scenes, there really isn’t much comic gold to be mined there. Waiting for Al, you see a guy and a girl trading lines, but it isn’t really clear who they are. You assume they are boyfriend/girlfriend, but they are brother and sister. It’s mildly amusing. The drive from the airport is more or less just an extended airport scene, with the sister in the backseat with NOTHING to do, while the two men reacquaint themselves. There’s a repeated series of lines throughout the show about the US bombing Afghanistan, hahaha, isn’t that funny? Well, no, it’s not. It’s just stupid, nor would the Afghani interpreter likely be the one making those jokes. But whatever.
The scene around the dinner table is mostly leading up to the revelation regarding the divorce, and how upset the Marine is about it. All leading to Al intervening the next morning to try to mediate between the divorcing couple. Oh, and before we get there, let’s talk about the fact that the sister was planning a wedding to a guy in the same unit who was killed, and now she goes out partying a lot, and the Marine is struggling to fit back into his old life. Wow, just screams laugh track, doesn’t it?
Can the actors or dialogue save it?
You may have noticed that I keep calling the main guy, The Marine. Why? Because his name is irrelevant. He acts like a petulant child for most of the episode, not the amazing smart compassionate guy who got the interpreter out of Afghanistan somehow. His name is Riley, sure, and he’s played by Parker Young but basically he’s a cardboard character. I saw Young before in Arrow and A Million Little Things, but he has very little presence and can’t seem to fit into his role, although perhaps that’s what he’s going for (as he TELLS us, he doesn’t know what he is back in the normal world). Considering he’s carrying 50% of the show, that’s a big risk.
The other half is Al, played by Adhir Kalyan, and he’s decent. Is he an “authentic” Afghani? No clue. He’s cast generically, and written generically, so it might be fairer to ask if he’s “authentic regular-guy” Muslim. Equally, no clue. What I do know? He drops some of his best lines woodenly. A bit of sarcasm throw-away lines rather than “mic drop” quality. I liked Kalyan back on Second Chance, but I don’t know if I like him enough for him to anchor half a show. Nor am I buying him as the “fixer” of everything. He doesn’t have enough gravitas to start a cult following of Riley’s friends and family.
Supporting characters are limited to three for the episode…Riley has a sister, played by Elizabeth Alderfer, and there is some hinting from Riley that she’s got some complicated mental stuff going on that won’t get fixed in a single 22m episode. That doesn’t mean there is any substance “there”. I’ve seen Alderfer in a few cameos but none of her big stuff and in EP1, she looks like “generic sitcom girl” who could have been a single episode character for all she contributed.
Dean Norris plays their father, Art, and much of his role is to run the house, he cooks meals, he keeps the family together, etc. Oh, and to keep saying how much he likes Al who does nothing but kiss his butt all episode. Yet here’s the thing that I find a bit hard to wrap my head around. I have seen Norris as guest-star-of-the-week on numerous shows going back almost 30 years. And every time, he’s okay but a bit of a caricature. Limited characters is probably closer to the description. And as soon as I saw him, I was like “Meh”. Not because I don’t like him, I do, but because everything I have seen him in, he’s had limited range.
We also get to meet the separated wife, Vanessa, played by Kelli Goss. I haven’t seen her in much, but honestly, my reaction is pretty much in her name “Kelli with an i”. There was no on-screen presence. She too could have been “sitcom girl of the EP” and disappear.
Apparently, we will get to meet the daughter Hazel in future EPs, but none of the acting here said, “Watch me!”.
And, as noted by the heading, when I turn myself to the writing, there are some wry comments throughout the show, but almost no real jokes. They may have come from the Big Bang Theory, but the writers should have been cancelled when TBBT ended. To be blunt, many of the lines could be delivered by anyone.
Where do I think the show will go?
Oh, look, let’s have an ethnic minority you don’t normally see and show how they make everyone’s life better. That must be show-worthy, right? In my opinion, no. There’s no meat on the bones. And as such, I’m going to predict cancellation. But I do so knowing that TV Grim Reaper predicts renewal based on the current ratings and knowing that it is a Chuck Lorre show, and EVERYONE loves Chuck. I’m still going with cancellation though.
I’m sure my wife saw the post title and started social distancing just for that. “Not again!” was likely her thought. It’s true, I do play with some stuff on the site, often figuring out new ways to do something, and since I’m anal-retentive, I hate the thought of something that leaving previous versions if, say, I find a better way to do book reviews that I would implement starting now.
Simple content areas
Most of my content is relatively straightforward — a blog post here, a blog post there. For each, they are pretty text-heavy even if the popular website wisdom is more graphics and video. That’s not me, I’m a writer, I write words. But there are a few areas where I feel the choices for how to display the text are not quite so clear; for the simple areas, it is relatively, umm, simple.
For astronomy, I share my own pics of course, but I’m also writing an astronomy guide. So having a simplified layout that is easy for anyone to read is important to me. Mostly so far it is only a table of contents and a series of early pages or blog posts. I can do them as either (post or page), really, but most are done as pages.
For my challenges (reading, baking/cooking), they’re relatively simple static pages.
For materials related to government, much of it is simply one-off posts, no real structure required. But then I have two other areas…the first is PS Transitions FP, a report from a conference that a group of students from Carleton organized in 2002, and for which I was the webmaster. It’s entirely static, but it does have some tabbing in it, as well as a photo gallery. I’ve kept the content there for over 18 years, but the methodology for doing so has had to be altered a little bit when plugins expired, or setups on my site changed.
The other area is my HR guide, and it has been a challenge more for organizing than content, at least in terms of the website portion. I have multiple versions of some of the content, with a LOT of comments on pages that I now consider archival. I hesitate to delete them and lose all those comments, but I don’t like having the old versions of the guide there when I’ve written later and better versions. I recently found a plugin that will let me move comments from an old post to my latest post on the same topic, and I’ll likely consolidate it all when I get my latest version of the guide finished. My wife is acting as my editor, so I’m hopeful it will be my best version yet. And then I’ll likely delete all the other content. The thought makes me queasy, to be honest. All those words, used extensively by people, but I’m going to delete entire posts and pages? I haven’t worked through that mentally yet. I might find a way to preserve it somewhere else on the site.
Under personal, I have posts about family and goals, all relatively straight-forward. But the ones for humour and quotes give me pause. I like the idea of sharing both through social media as memes. And then including them on my website. Sounds simple, right? Except if I do it as a meme, i.e. a graphic, then the graphic doesn’t get indexed on my site. Index bots don’t read the “text” within the graphic, it is just the graphic. So if I add a long joke, or even a short quote, and someone was to search anywhere for it, my site wouldn’t show up in the search engine because technically that text doesn’t appear on my site. Yet, by the same token, if I post it as text, it doesn’t look as sharp as a meme, suitable for sharing. Someone suggested including both, but that seems redundant. However, I might have a new way to at least create a searchable list of the description of the meme at least. A bit manual to create at first, but ongoing would be simple to update for future posts.
The more difficult areas to format
The real challenge has always been my reviews. Before I even had a website, I wrote book and movie reviews and just shared them along with jokes to a subscription-based newsletter list. It was free, but you had to “ask” to be on it. I had book reviews, movie reviews, jokes, and an active trivia game at the time. Most of it was in a spreadsheet that handled all my formatting in ASCII format so I could paste into an email and just pressed SEND. It worked, I liked it, and when I created my first PolyWogg website, I wanted to put my reviews there.
Of late, though, I have mostly focused on book reviews. I generally have liked the format for them (plot / premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, bottom line, rating), and yet I confess it took me several tries to get them looking the way I wanted. One of the early challenges was whether or not I include a “disclosure” phrase in the review on my own website. You’re supposed to declare any conflict-of-interest elements if you post reviews on a lot of commercial sites, and since I share them on those sites too, it seemed simple to also include them on mine. But over time, I realized I didn’t really care. For almost none of them do I have any conflict. I don’t have that many cases where I got a free book / advanced reader copy to read. So the disclosure was bulky and just said that I had no link to the author. Kind of meaningless in the long-run. I cut it.
Then Amazon started playing with how they handle referral links. I didn’t have a lot of links on my site, and so I wasn’t getting any referral money. I think I got about a dollar over five years. But I did have the account, and the main point of having it was so I could link to the Amazon website and hotlink in pictures of the book covers. Yet Amazon booted me from the active referral program along with 1000s of other affiliates who hadn’t earned any commissions in the previous year. They culled the list, so to speak, and I would have cut me too. But that called into question my hotlinking, which also required me to run two extra plugins. Could I get the images some other way? Yep, Good Reads grants permission to those doing reviews to link to the images on their own site. Yes! So I went through probably 150 or so book reviews, reformatting a few things as I went (like cutting disclosure paragraphs) and updating all the images. Tedious, but they were all “fixed” to match the new approach. That was about six months ago.
The part that was “left” was my index of book reviews. I had tried some indexing tools, some table plugins, a few other things, and none of them really worked the way I wanted them to do. Because I had different types of info that I wanted to be able to group by:
Alphabetically by title (obvious);
Alphabetically by author;
The raw review number (i.e., mostly chronologically for me for the order in which I write the reviews);
The date of my review (where #3 failed is some of my reviews are old and I’ve updated them and included them, but that means putting in a 1998 review in between two 2015 reviews, for example, so #3 and #4 are not exactly the same sort);
The year the book was published;
Series and order, to give me the ability to group books in the same series; and,
My rating.
But without the proper tool to display all of that, I organize it manually. I still use a flat-file database in a spreadsheet, Excel currently, although it started off in Lotus 1-2-3 years ago, and in the spreadsheet, I have a field that formats the info so I can simply paste it into my website. For example, I mix and match sub-fields into a single string that says:
TITLE by AUTHOR (BR#####; published {date}; reviewed {date}; series {order}; rating)
I then simply paste that into one page, add a hotlink to the URL for the review post, and then copy that to six other index pages. I have tended to do it in batches of twenty-five book reviews at a time, so I would write 25 reviews and post them over the course of a number of months, and when I got to the 25th, I would then paste all 25 strings into a web-page, add the URLs, and then paste them into the other six pages too. Time-consuming, and doing 25 together made it a bit more efficient on workflows, but it was a workflow blockage too. Plus, once in awhile, I’d mess up some link or a copy and paste, and then a year later, I would happen to notice that the link from one of the indices was not, in fact, linking to the right page. I’d messed it up, and when I beta-tested it, I had apparently missed the errors. REALLY annoying. Another downside to coding some things manually.
As I said, though, I had tried out a bunch of options to put it into various auto-sorting tools, but it never worked well.
An accidental revolution
In addition to my book reviews, I also do movie reviews, music reviews (although mainly only one year so far), and TV reviews. For the TV reviews, it is INCREDIBLY slow to do a review of a full season of TV for me. Which is odd, because the individual episodes are ALREADY reviewed. As I watch TV, I keep track of individual episodes and when I finish the episode, I use a similar spreadsheet to automate a quick TWEET that says:
Sooo, I have always wanted to embed those reviews in my website, but didn’t have a good way to do that, at least not quickly. I tried a manual approach:
Created a table in a reusable post template;
Added a line for the Tweet;
Added a line for a picture from the episode (I was saving them for a while);
Added some areas to talk about the overall season;
Added an area to rate the whole season;
But then I was stuck. That is a LOT of copy and pasting to get it to look right. I tried just pasting from Excel spreadsheets, but the paste is painful — it adds codes to EVERY cell, so if you want to adjust layout later, the whole table is a mess of codes. So I went looking for a way to embed an Excel Spreadsheet into a website easily. Just so I could paste, for example, a whole season’s worth of tweet/reviews at once.
And I found the very popular plugin for WordPress called TablePress. It would allow me to import spreadsheets directly or even to paste them raw. Gave it a try, and BAM, it worked right out of the box. Great, I had a way to paste the whole season at once into a page.
But then I noticed some other features. It would let me search the table too, applying the terms like a filter. Not really needed in a table of only 20-25 rows, but interesting. Oh, and you can sort columns too. Again, I don’t really need that with the episodes.
Or more accurately, I don’t need that function for THIS table. But what about my book review indices? Holy Hannah, I could have ONE table instead of 7 and EVERY FIELD is sortable? Plus I can paste directly from Excel? Holy fudgicles!
Welcome to the revolution
I only had 8 reviews of TV seasons, all for the show Castle that finished a few years ago. Again, as I said, too time-consuming to paste in every episode line by line, particularly if I was also pasting in photos. Meh. Instead, I’ve cut it down to an overview, episodes that I liked, those that were watchable, those that I didn’t like, a table of all the episodes, an overall review of the season, and some links to the index of other reviews.
With each column sortable. I copy the rows and columns from Excel where I already have the info, paste it all into the back end, add one line to my page, and BAM!, instant table. I started thinking, okay, this is good, I’ll do a table for each season, no problem. But then I thought again. Every table will be identical in format. And Castle has 8 seasons, that’s 8 tables to keep in the database with different names, I’ll need a good naming convention, etc. Hmm…but what if I could merge ALL of the Castle episodes into one table and just list those that correspond to Season 1. Is that doable? Turns out it is. TablePress has a premium extension called row filtering. So now I have pasted ALL of the info for each episode for eight seasons of Castle into the same table, and now instead of saying just “show Castle table”, I also say “filter to S01”. Still all one line.
Now I could get really aggressive, and paste all my shows into one database. Dozens of shows, hundreds of seasons, maybe even thousands of episodes and then filter on “Castle” and “S01”. Yet it would generate a HUGE table in the database. If it corrupts, I’m toast, I’ll lose everything, plus it would be loading the whole table each time it ran a filter. For TV episodes at least, I’ll keep it to one table per show. But once I’ve pasted one season in, the rest can go like gangbusters. A huge workflow saving, and it generates the same way every time.
And it got me thinking about how to do the book reviews.
As I mentioned earlier, I had 7 pages of book review indices generated relatively manually. Now they could be all in one page. Great! Except that all of my existing book review pages have a small table at the end of each that has links to each of the seven pages. All nicely formatted; all no longer needed. In 180 book reviews. The ones I updated 6 months ago to fix the problem with showing the pictures of the book covers. Dang it.
Editing Book Reviews
It really isn’t as bad as it sounds, maybe an hour or two of dedicated processing to open the page, go to the bottom, paste a new line that only links to the main index, and then delete the table for the rest. Easily doable. There likely is a way to do this in the block editor to prevent ever having this need again (i.e. perhaps I could edit the block next time and delete or update all of them at once), but I am not a block-editor kind of guy. I vastly prefer the simple classic editor. So that’s what I’ve done. But I went through my layout in detail asking myself if there is ANYTHING else I might want to change as I go. My ratings show as pictures of a frog reading on a lilypad, and if it is four out of five, it shows four green ones and one grey one, for instance. On all of my other reviews, TV / Movies / Music, I’m switching my ratings from an actual graphic file over to a simple icon / emoji of a smiling frog. So four green frogs and one grey circle, for 4/5. It looks simpler, shows up cleaner in tweets and FB, kind of cute. I like the branding. But for my book reviews, I like the graphic of the frog reading. So I am committing to that staying. I’ll use the frog emoji in tables, like above, but for the rest, it is graphics.
While I was playing with this, I also adjusted my movie reviews, even though for that too there are only a handful. Too hard to do the workflow, or so I thought. Now that I have an easily updatable table, it’s not that bad.
My other big tweak
A few months ago, I started the process of switching all of my photos from a separate Piwigo install on my website into a WordPress-based NextGen Gallery that embeds all the photos into the site. The integration is great, but it is a LOT of work to move 13K photos from one server area to another. I’m fixing a whole bunch of stuff on the back end as I go, including how filenames and captions, plus face tagging, are done, and I’m using Mylio as by desktop photo processor along with its built-in facial recognition. That has a small impact on my movie and TV reviews as I do include some photos for those (like the show’s title screen and a pic or two from an episode somewhere in the season). It’s working well, but I’m a bit stalled on the “big” move. Still a LONG way to go on the regular personal photos, not to mention astronomy photos later. Yikes.
Conclusion
And that’s where I am. TablePress as a major change, plus its extension for filtering + I’ve reformatted the entire approach to reviews + I’m using a new gallery plugin on the backend. But I’m really happy with the approach, for the first time in a long time. I feel like there aren’t any niggling elements on any of the review contents, or the others really, where I don’t have the approach I want. No “unresolved” issues like manually having to do multiple index pages rather than having the system generate it for me.
Back when I started doing reviews, I shared them by email with some friends and other people who asked to be put on the list after seeing other things I emailed out for PolyWogg Trivia and PW-Humour. I was an one-man GoogleGroups of sorts.
I had dreams of becoming semi-famous as an online blogger for movies. I tried posting a few reviews to various sites, and a site called Ottawa FilmCan loved my reviews — free content for them! So when studios offered them “press passes” for some premiere, they gave one to me. I went to the theatre, got in for free, and sat in a decent row where five of the seats said “reserved for press”. Me, with a press pass for a movie? Cool. I didn’t get a lot of free passes, but just enough that it remained a rush each time.
At the time, I was going to the movies fairly regularly, mostly by myself, and I tried to go to some premieres several times a year. So my reviews would show up within a day or two of a premiere. Sometimes I could even post them on the Friday night after seeing the 7:00 p.m. show. It was fun, and started posting my review links to IMDB.com as well, at a time when there weren’t a lot of people doing that. You couldn’t post directly, just your link, and online review sites tended to ONLY accept professional reviewers like Siskel and Ebert. There was no Rotten Tomatoes site and nobody had thought yet about collating reviews or ratings from the unwashed masses.
I moved into doing some book reviews too, or more accurately, moved into actually sharing them by something other than email, and when Amazon went live, I thought, “Hey, I could do book reviews for THEM!”. At the time, anyone with more than 100 or so reviews up was almost guaranteed to be in the top 20 reviewers on the site, and they were only soliciting and accepting book reviews at the time (not product reviews). I posted 50 or so and made it in the top 100 list for reviewers.
I had dreams of eventually getting books for free from publishers, as well as movies as screeners on DVD. But it’s a young person’s game, so to speak, before life intervenes and sucks your free time. You need to not only produce extensively to attract interest, you also have to do a lot of self-promotion and marketing. I couldn’t sustain that level, nor did I have much interest in the life of what people now do as celebrity Youtubers and social media stars even if it was on a much smaller scale. I had no entrepreneurial drive to turn it anything more than a hobby to guarantee those ongoing perks.
Over the last ten years, I’ve focused on my blog, and did occasional reviews when I got around to it. I managed to go through all my old book reviews, format them for the new site, and even write another 50 or so. I expanded to Amazon.CA when the Canadian site opened, and then expanded outward to lots of sites. I really don’t have a strong reason why at this point, but I post to Amazon (Canada, US), Indigo, Kobo, Ottawa Public Library (added recently), Barnes and Noble, Library Thing, Good Reads and Google. I did Shelfari for awhile too, but alas, it died. And as always, my own website. I’m not after free books or screeners (although I wouldn’t say no to the latter), but I love when people comment on my reviews to agree or disagree. People around the world that I don’t even KNOW. Still a bit of the rush of when I used to get press passes. Maybe some sort of external validation thing, I guess.
As I said, I ranked high on Amazon.com early on and even stayed there for a time when I had less than 50 in total, but that was solely based on number of reviews. Over time, people started posting reviews of limited length (i.e. “Good book, you should read”) which are worthless in my view. There are RABID onliners who have views about those types of reviews, and from both ends of the spectrum — many who think (as I do) that it hardly qualifies as a review as it doesn’t tell you anything other than “Yum” for a restaurant or recipe vs. others who think it qualifies as censorship or snobbery to put any limits on what constitutes a review. Regardless, Amazon changed up the algorithms eventually based on whether people rated a review as “helpful” or not.
Recently, I got curious though, as I passed the 125 review mark for my book reviews. Where do I rank now?
It took me a bit to find the reviewer ranking in my Amazon profiles, but I am at the 400K (!) position on Amazon.com and 19K on Amazon.ca. A far cry from any “top” positions. However, that is not surprising since I tend to rate older books, not new releases, which means very few people are going to see them shortly after a book’s release and click “helpful” (you get the most clicks for that when there are less than 10 reviews, particularly when I do a decent review of some length compared to the “read it last week” reviews, which don’t tend to get many “helpful” votes).
I can’t seem to find a list of how I’m doing in terms of raw numbers anymore though. When I review the list of “top reviewers” now though I see that the list varies considerably in how many reviews they have. Some have as few as a couple of hundred, some as many as 10K. However, when I look at the 10K ones, their reviews are almost always REALLY short, four stars and above, and some of the first to ever appear. Yeah, cuz that seems legit. Particularly for accounts active less than at least five years.
It’s one of the complaints about Amazon reviews, how the integrity has been compromised over the years by scammers and if I go to the Top Reviewers Hall of Fame area, there are a number who are listed who now have ZERO votes and ZERO reviews. Why? Almost all of them have deleted their reviews in disgust, or to monetize them elsewhere themselves, or in rare occasions, because Amazon killed their accounts! But I digress. I only have 120+ reviews on Amazon US and about 150+ on Amazon Canada, with the difference being that Amazon Canada also includes some product reviews (electronics, etc.), all verified purchases. For my books, while most of my ebook purchases come from Amazon, not all of them do. Some are just library loans, but I still post the review everywhere.
Over at Good Reads, they also go by “votes” on your reviews, but those numbers are driven by two things. First, it helps to give your reviews as early as possible for new releases so that people considering a book will see your review in the first five or six — get your review in early, and they’ll upvote you, same as on Amazon.
However, second, Good Reads encourages you to link to other people on the site — i.e. creating friend links like on FB — and a lot of them find those friends through Twitter-like reciprocity…they “like” anybody they can find and are liked back. Or they interact through discussions. Either way, they “link” to each other and thus any review one of them does, it instantly generates eyeballs and clicks. Think of it as a way of using the site to create your own following. Amazon doesn’t really do that in the same way, but Good Reads does.
Many of the top 20 reviewers on Good Reads have maxed out their account with 5000 friends. The lead, a woman named Emily, has 10K followers on her page on FB too. That requires not only effort to sustain but also a lot of effort at self-promotion, as I mentioned earlier. More power to her, but not my cup of tea. As a measure of her power, she has 500K votes on Good Reads, with the person in number 2 position being less than 300K. Wow. And she has that following from ~1500 reviews. I don’t know if all of her reviews are as long as the few I sampled, but she has a breezy style and doesn’t seem to post short ones…she talks about the book in some length, putting up > 200 books a year. The Top Canadian, Lola, read about 250 books in 2018, with 160K votes over the years. My ranking is so low, I don’t even register, but I don’t self-promote either. Hmm, I should probably think about that a little. Even if I just put my links on my blog too (I’ve recently started using their API to gather the book image and then link to the individual review overall).
Over at Chapters, I can’t seem to find a list of Top Reviewers. Heck, it’s even difficult to FIND my profile to see that I have 89 reviews with a whopping — wait for it — six votes. Yeah, pretty sure that’s not going to lead to any recognition. 🙂 On their sister site, Kobo, I can’t even find a list of my reviews nor any rankings. I pulled up one of my old reviews, and it doesn’t even let me click on my name to show me ANY info if I wanted to see other reviews by the same person. That is a huge missed opportunity for them.
For Barnes and Noble, they’ve linked their paperback and NOOK reviews, same as Amazon has with Kindle, and like Chapters, it’s almost impossible to track reviews of any one reviewer. I suppose I could get to it through a complicated Google Search of the site. I can’t even find out how many reviews I have posted there, and I wrote them!
Over at Google Books, it’s the same thing. I can see my individual reviews (i.e. if I go to a book I already reviewed), but there is no easy way to see all my reviews nor for others to see my profile. There are opportunities for upvoting, but it doesn’t seem to track it in any way.
Library Thing is a lot like Good Reads, but not as well developed for interactivity and rankings. I am not thrilled with the interface at all, including how to add books to my list in order to review them quickly, but that may just be a simple workflow tweak I haven’t seen yet. The site does however give a lot of stats about the books in your “library” and different ways to sort and see the data.
Finally, last but not least, I started sharing my reviews with the Ottawa Public Library. I have 145 “community credits”, which you get for doing various things like rating a book or submitting a comment (i.e. a review). Can you DO anything with credits? No, but it’s a bit of gamification I guess. I don’t see anyway to share my lists though as anything other than an RSS feed. And no way to search across other feeds.
For movies and TV, the world is simpler. I only post at 6 sites:
Internet Movie Database (IMDB): TV series reviews and rating, TV episode reviews and ratings, movie reviews and ratings;
The Movie Database (TMDB): TV series reviews and ratings, TV episode ratings, movie reviews and atings;
Rotten Tomatoes: TV season rating and review, movie review and rating;
MetaCritic: TV season rating and review, movie review and rating;
TV.COM: TV series reviews and ratings, TV episode ratings;
TVFanatic: TV episode ratings;
And I have absolutely NO idea about rankings within those sites.
I won’t get famous, that’s for sure. But I like doing it.
I met Harriet through the Dorothy-L newsgroup back in the late 1990s. I confess that I didn’t particularly like her style of review, a little too positive without enough critique and a little too pun-laden for my tastes. She almost always posted positive reviews, partly as she said that unless the book was good, she didn’t read past page 50, and sometimes not even that far. I admired her dedication to writing and posting the reviews. And, like anyone who posts away, and in such a prolific fashion, you get the fans and the haters, sometimes in equal measures.
The fans were obvious. Legions of people read her reviews and followed her missives; publishers included her gushes on the covers of book-jackets. The haters were equally legendary, often emboldened by finding other skeptics. Most of their popular criticisms of her had little resonance with me.
They questioned how one person could read so many books so fast. I too could read 3-4 books in a day if I had the time, and have done so many times. I don’t do it very often, and it has to be a certain type of book — serials, procedurals, Travis McGee sized novels, etc. Lots of YA. My record from my mis-spent youth was seven Three Investigator stories in a go, and from my adult years, 5 Kinsey Millhone stories in a go. I don’t recommend it, as they all blend together. So I had no trouble believing she was reading them all although as with most speed-readers who are not photographic-readers, retention becomes an issue even within hours of finishing the book. Even Harry Potter, for example — many people spent hours engrossed in the pages over several days; I read the fourth one (the first big one), in a single go, one day. It’s an immersive-type experience, but there’s little time to savour the flavour before it’s done. It’s almost like fast food instead of a gourmet meal. If I went into full skim-read mode, I could finish the first one in about 1.5 to 2 hours. And, if I was really into it, I could skim read 10 books in a day. Not my idea of fun, but to each their own.
They questioned the validity of her review, often citing the fact that her reviews were short, relatively content free, and error-prone. I find those same “errors” to be more reminiscent of someone who skim-reads tons of books, then sits down to review and finds that the details aren’t as sharp as they were when she finished the book. Jim becomes John; Mike becomes Martin. I have the same problem when I’m reviewing TV episodes — if I don’t do the review right after the episode, i.e. as soon as it ends, I find it really hard to go back and write the one-line tweet review even four episodes later. They just all blend together. Add in the fact that her reviews weren’t really reviews, they were short blurbs, about the equivalent of a dust-jacket and dashed together in 3 minutes with no going back to ensure she got the name right, etc. Not my style, but she was a perfect example of a type of internet dweller — the prolific commenter, writer, reviewer who cares more about writing a review and posting it to share their opinion than proof-reading, editing, tweaking, fact-checking. It’s a quick review, not painstaking journalism.
Harriet is, in my respects, the opposite of me when it comes to writing reviews. She could dash off 150 words and consider herself done, sending it out into the world. My reviews have detailed structures — plot / premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, a summary, info about publisher, year, stars, series, tags — and I’ve agonized over things to include or not. I’ve spent 2 hours reading a short novel, and another hour writing the review to get it down to 300 words that I think are fair, reasoned, pithy but substantive. I’m anal. If it goes out the door with my name on it, I fuss. The result? Really low volume of reviews. I have tons of books on my TB Reviewed list because they are just too time consuming. I can’t let go.
So while I could never switch to Harriet’s approach (short, formulaic, and in some cases error-laden), I wish I had her laissez-faire approach. It’s just a short review, one of hundreds. For me, even if people don’t agree with my review, I hope they find it helpful. Thorough even. In a word, professional, which falsely suggests that I think Harriet wasn’t…in actuality, I think it was just a different standard of self-analness.
A frequent complaint was also that she *gasp* profited from her amateur reviews. She probably did, in at least four ways, but not in the way most people assume. There’s no evidence, ever, that she “sold” reviews, so let’s ignore that particular claim — people assume she must have been selling them to do so many, since why would she do it for free, but that was how her brain was wired. And is likely linked to the first form of profit — there is a huge selfish thrill to having people read your reviews. I love it. It’s addictive. I suspect, without knowing of course, that this was her main drive, and if so, she profited immensely. 30,000 reviews? Millions of people reading her reviews. Secondly, she was an Amazon affiliate too I believe. So if they clicked on her review site and got to Amazon to buy it, she would have got a few pennies if something sold. Is it enough to live on? Hardly. But it might pay for a few books a year. Third, she got TONS of free books from publishers. As an executive mentioned back in ’05, it was a way to get yourself reviewed when the big reviewers didn’t have space for you. Harriet would read just about anything. And did! Plus, it was risk-free — if she didn’t like it, she would stop reading it early, and not rate it. If she finished it, you would get at least 3 stars and probably 4 or 5. Again, risk free.
The fourth way she “profited” was how she got into some hot water with people, and understandably so. All those free books? She sold them off used on used book websites. And I totally understand why some people would say, “Wait, I sent that to you for free, you can’t sell it and make money!”. I get that, makes sense. But I do know there’s a larger spectrum at play, another side so to speak, which is part of what was apparently stressing her out — she was throwing them out, didn’t have room to keep them all. A pretty large volume. It’s hard to imagine a former librarian not finding that incredibly traumatic on its own. Plus, lots of people said, “Hey, shouldn’t you give those away instead?” so that they wouldn’t end up in landfill. Plus another group of more mercantile types who said, “No way, don’t give them away, sell them, you did all that work, you should get something for it!”.
Taking books out of the equation for a second, partly as it is so visceral to the soul of a reader, this is to me just human nature — some people can get quite lively about whether you throw something out like a used toaster vs. e-recycling it vs. donating it to Value Village vs. trying to sell it online. In that vein, I have a used microwave. Works fine, a few years old, we bought a bigger more powerful one. But the old one works great. Do I want to sell it? Not really. I’d be far happier to give it to someone who needs it than sell it, but I have family and friends who think that is almost heresy. Equally, I have 3000 books I need to get rid of — if someone would take them for free and use them, I’d happily give them to them. They represent thousands of dollars of my investment, so there are TONS of people who are aghast that I’m not trying to have a book sale of my own, or donating to the library (they won’t take them, too many and too old) or a host of other options because “Well, they’re worth money.” I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable selling ARCs, but I can understand that not everyone has the same reservations as me. I hate the idea of the profit, but I love the idea they’re not being recycled. I wonder if the people would feel differently if they were sold, but all proceeds went to a literacy charity?
None of these criticisms really resonate with me, because in the end, it comes down to something far simpler for me.
Some people liked her, some people loathed her. Yet for the authors of the books for the 31000 reviews she did, they generally got a 4-star review and some positive words about their story posted by someone who didn’t know them, wasn’t related to them, and didn’t profit much (if at all) from doing the review.
I didn’t always agree with her, I didn’t know her that well. But I’m saddened she’s gone from the review world…
She came, she read, she reviewed a life spent reading. There are far worse legacies.
