Lois Wells Santalo, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Lois Wells Santalo
Kirkus Reviews:Are They Worth the Money? 4/1/2013 10:36:50 AM
It's a gamble. You can spend a lot of money to get a bad review.
Kirkus Reviews: Are They Worth the Expense?
A review is only one person’s opinion, however prestigious the reviewer. Is it really worth $425? I thought so at first. Perhaps I believed Kirkus’ hype. Now I have doubts.
My book, Night of the Humpbacked Moon, received positive editorial notice the first time I sent the manuscript out. The potential publisher was Cliffhanger Press, and the editorial comment was: “Just fascinating material. Needs editing, but well worth the effort.” The material the editor found so fascinating was the story of a murder investigation at a women’s crisis house. It was a true story except for the actual murder which, though threatened, didn’t happen. My aim in writing it was to show the tensions and conflicts that develop among people in crisis situations.
We like to believe that if someone sets out to help people in trouble, the assisted person will be infinitely grateful, guaranteeing the story a happy ending ala a Hallmark TV show, with the victim tearfully hugging and thanking the rescuer. Unfortunately, as I learned during seven years as Night Director of a crisis house, life isn’t always like that. A person in trouble is more likely to be resentful than to be grateful for rescue. He’s likely to believe he’s in trouble because of bad luck and not through any fault of his own, and he won’t necessarily thank those who came along and picked him up off the sidewalk. He’ll conclude that they were simply luckier than he was. Especially young people are inclined to feel this way. Older people may learn humility, but then they’re less likely to land in a crisis house in the first place. So the shelter staff must learn not to hope for oceans of gratitude to flow their way. Far from it, they must expect a mistrust and even resentment. Their clients will be thinking, “How come you made it and I didn’t? I can’t see that you’re so much better than I am.”
Tensions grow in situations like this. Murders can happen. The editor at Cliffhanger found it an interesting take on a situation so often viewed more simplistically in fiction. So I hired a good editor and then published the book and sought a Kirkus review.
Unfortunately, the reviewer did not share the Cliffhanger editor’s feeling that this was “just fascinating material.” The reviewer found some of it downright boring. I was forced to cancel publication of the review—after shelling out pots of money.
People react so differently to the same material. Every comment differs. It’s as if no two people are reading the same book. One person is fascinated to learn of life in a crisis house, where another person is reading the story of a murder investigation and wants only details that immediately move the investigation forward. The author has to leap into this maelstrom in deciding what to put in and what to take out. He or she also needs to keep in mind that a good book review should do more than detail the storyline. Tales of murder are running constantly on TV; one can tune in any time to the Investigation Discovery channel. A book should do more than that; it should provide details of what life was like in a small English town like St. Mary Meade between wars, or what it was like in a women’s shelter in the turbulent years after World War II. And a good reviewer should ask what the author’s intentions were, and judge the book accordingly.
Everyone knows you can’t please all readers, but to fail to please a Kirkus reviewer is a very expensive matter indeed. Perhaps too expensive, as I’m beginning to think. For my money I received a one-paragraph review, most of which merely restated the cover information about the book's contents. Kirkus offers the option of using that material wherever we wish, but there was nothing to use. The original was better stated. A good review ought to be at least three paragraphs long and provide information about the characters as well as the conent.
