It Has a Great Beat and You Can Dance to It; I give it a Ten!

We're still new at this and there is a lot about being a novelists that we don't know.  One of the biggest of those is that we really have no idea whether the projects into which we are pouring our hearts and souls and intellects are any good or whether they are total crap.  Our wives tell us they are good, but then again they also tell us that we are handsome, a conclusion about which we are extremely skeptical.

So, it is with great pleasure and no small measure of relief that we see that there are already eight reviews of the new book on Amazon.com and that they are all five stars.  Not only that, they are universally complimentary.  Now, there are a few reviews that say that they have small quibbles here and there, and we certainly look at all of those things very seriously (actually, we were already conscious of every one and had planned to do certain things a little different as we go along--mainly as the situations will be different and the characters more mature in their relationships), but certainly nothing major.  In fact, the reviews are better than the first wave of reviews were on the first book, and they weren't bad at all.

And, of course, based on our experience with the first book, we know that good reviews sell books.  Particularly, when people give good reviews on book number two or book number three of a series encourages people to start a series of which they might otherwise be skeptical.  No one wants to invest the time to read the first book in a series and find out that the series fizzles. 

Series die more often than you might think.  I've seen it several times.  Sometimes the writer simply has no new stories of any interest to tell about these characters.  Or, more often, the characters go through exciting and meaningful experiences and emerge from them completely unchanged--they learn nothing, they don't grow, they don't develop, they don't mature. 

Anyway, when people see that the second book is as good as or better than the first, then they have reason to believe that the writer can sustain the series over time.

So, now that there is a second book out and people can see that it is as good as, if not better than the first, we are hoping not only that everyone who read the first book will read the second, but also that people who might have passed on the first will give it a second look now that we have proved we are capable of producing more than one book that is worth reading.  Frankly, this was something about which we, ourselves, were worried.  After all, we didn't know we had the ability to produce ONE good book, much less two.

There is, of course, another dimension to reviews.  They are an emotional pay off.  Sure, if a book is good and if it catches on with an audience, it makes money for trivial stuff such as food and health insurance and car payments.  We like those things. We like them very much.  But, after working twelve and sixteen hour days, seven days a week for three months to produce a novel, it is very gratifying to read good things that people might have to say about it.  We put an extraordinary amount of effort and work very, very hard to develop the battle scenes and tactics, conceive of the maneuvers and the weapons and the back stories, and to get all of the little details just right.  We spend many, many hours sweating the small stuff, and there is lots and lots of small stuff.  These reviews are a reward for those efforts, and it does feel very, very good.

So, to the people who write the reviews, thank you.  They do mean a great deal to us.