And it sucks. A bad review can make you feel like hiding in a corner and never writing anything but awkward poetry about marmosets that you won’t show anyone just in case they review it.

Maybe that’s just me.

However a bad review, no matter how painful, can actually help you far more than it hurts you. The next time you get a one or two star review, bear these points in mind:

1. Perfect scores generate suspicion

If I see a book with five perfect glowing reviews on Amazon, I do wonder if those five reviews have come from the authors five closest friends. Now, to be fair, this is going to happen if it’s your first work. People that love you want to give you good reviews and they’ll tend to give you five stars whether you deserve it or not for fear of hurting your feelings.

However a single negative review shows that someone you didn’t know has gotten a hold of your work, and even if they didn’t like it, it affected them enough to leave feedback.

When you first start out, quantity of reviews matters far more than quality (within the boundaries of reason). Having fifty 3 star reviews will benefit you far more than having three five star reviews.

2. They can make a valid point

Those friends that left you the five star reviews may well be being perfectly honest; maybe you really did deserve five stars (it could happen), however they may also be being influenced by how they feel about you and that’s making your story seem better than it is.

A bad review from a stranger can shed light on your story that no amount of well meaning reviews from friends can. If you can separate yourself from the sting of criticism, there may well be some very good advice about the way that you write that can carry over into whatever you write next.

3. It let’s you know your work is getting read

As Mur Lafferty once said: “Anyone can get five star reviews, but once someone hates you, you know you’ve made it.”

It can be hard to tell who is picking up your work, and why, but if you get a terrible review you know that your book has gotten the attention of someone outside your immediate social circle…even though they didn’t like it that much.

4. It can help you toughen up

No matter how vitriolic the review, no matter how unlikely it is that the reviewer has actually read your work, I can guarantee that worse is coming. The more popular your stuff becomes the more likely it is to attract a breed of reviewer that lives to give one star reviews.

These particular beasts don’t actually seem to read a lot, and you can spot them on Amazon and Goodreads by the fact that all of there five hundred plus reviews are one star and full of hate. You don’t have to pay too much attention to these ones.

But there is worse coming, as I said, and getting these nasty little reviews will help prepare you for the rare review where you’ve offended someone so much they threaten you.

These threats are almost always meaningless (if someone bothers to email you, or indicates they know where you are then it’s more serious and time to call the police) but it still hurts to know that your lovingly crafted story makes someone want to punch you in the reproductive organs.

5. It means your cover is working

Assuming that the person doing the review has actually read your book, then they bought it on the strength of your idea and your cover art. This is an amazingly positive sign, as a bad review can just mean that the book didn’t suit the reviewer, however the concept and the cover art was enough to get them to try it out in the first place.

One caveat…

If you are getting ONLY bad reviews, then something is wrong and it might be time to pull your book (assuming you self published. If you’re traditionally published and you get only bad reviews you have my sympathy) and see if what’s angering your reviewers is something that can be fixed.

There is a tale about the three horses and a donkey. I don’t know where this one came from so if anyone would like to let me know in the comments I’d be grateful.

The story says that if you purchase a horse and on the way home someone tells you that you actually bought a donkey, you can ignore them.

If, on the way home, two people stop you and tell you that you have indeed somehow purchased a donkey then you should probably check the horse and listen for suspicious braying noises.

If a third person says you bought a donkey, you bought a donkey.

So, applying that to writing, if you end up with three reviews criticising one particular aspect of your story, then at the very least it’s worth checking to see if those reviewers are right.

Plus, low g gladiatorial combat on the moon and an octogenarian killing machine named Heather. Who wouldn’t want to see that?

Until someone in the film industry wakes up though you’ll just have to be happy with Lafferty’s excellent novella. Set in the near (but not to near, this is sci-fi, not cyberpunk) future where humanity has an uneasy truce with a betentacled alien race called the Li-Jun (a play on the word ‘legion’ maybe? I’m not sure) who have seven senses and a love and appreciation of human art that borders on the obsessive.

The Li-Jun operate from Mollywood, a moon base where all the best artists, designers and other creatives are given big money commissions to create art for the aliens, who in turn add extra senses to the art to be sold on. Imagine being able to drink your favourite novel, or be able to wear the feeling of nostalgia and you’re on the right track.

Marco is down and out when he gets the call to pack his bags for the moon to join the dream life. Along the way Marco meets up with Heather, the titular Red Granny. She’s an eighty-something undefeated gladiator who competes, and kills, in a televised gladiatorial contest called The Most Dangerous Game. Marco and Heather become friends of a sort on the way to the Moon, and she acts as his guide to all things Li-Jun.

Marco needs all the friends he can get, and the Li-Jun are not quite what they first appear to be, but how can a friendly, art loving race be anything but the perfect cosmic neighbours for earth?

Lafferty handles the pitfalls of this kind of story masterfully. Heather herself dances in and out of the story like a knife. Never overstaying her welcome but making her presence felt every time you see her. The Li-Jun are appropriately ambiguous and very subtly threatening and the world is full of tiny flourishes that flesh out the universe the story takes place in.

The combat sequences are excellent, and Lafferty’s martial arts training shows through in the gladiator scenes which are brief, bloody and exciting.

As good as everything else in the book is, one thing that stands out for me is that some of Lafferty’s ideas seem truly original, and while I could be wrong, I’ve never seen anything quite like Marco and The Red Granny. My only real complaint is that I wish there was more of it.

As a writer this is the kind of thing I wish I’d written; fresh, original, fun and easy to read. You can get a copy from Amazon here. If you’d prefer Devo Spice’s dulcet tones to read it to you, you can get the audio book here.

Avempartha is part two of Michael J Sullivan’s Ririya Revelations series that follows Hadrian and Royce in their adventures. I can’t quite call them reluctant heroes because Hadrian is champing at the bit every time a chance for a little heroing* comes up. With that said Royce is reluctant enough for the both of them looking for ways to avoid trouble and make money, preferably both at the same time.

I love the previous book in the series, The Crown Conspiracy because it captured the sense of fun that I’d found lacking in a lot of modern fantasy. Avempartha keeps the sense of fun but adds layers of depth that fill out the characters and give the book more bite than its predecessor. Part of the reason I’m so excited by Avempartha and The Crown Conspiracy  being released together as Theft Of Swords is that these two books read exceptionally well together and I think the idea of combining the series of six into a series of three for the print release is a great idea. Orbit is releasing Theft Of Swords  this November and they’re open for pre-orders.

Avempartha follows Royce and Hadrian to a small village being plagued by the scariest rendition of a dragon I’ve seen for some time (winged toothy demon might be a better description). The creature seems to be unkillable, and the answers to the rapidly approaching and very hungry monstrosity are locked inside and ancient Elven tower near the village that just happens to border the old Elven lands.

Part of what makes The Ririya Revelations so good is that Sullivan twists your expectations of fantasy tropes just enough that they’re new and interesting without forcing the issue. The elves feel like the sword of Damocles, hanging over the entire world whether they know it or not. Sullivan also manages to sneak in a lot of world building under the radar so by the end of the book you are far surer of what the world entails than you were at the start.

There is a lot of fighting, but most of the gore is subtly implied rather than stated outright. This makes for some serious delayed horror scenes where your brain works out exactly what’s been implied to have happened and paints in the blood and bone for you.

Despite all this, the series hinges on the bromance between Royce and Hadrian, and the banter between the characters carries the book through quieter scenes without a hitch. Even if the dialogue hadn’t been so good I think Avempartha would still have been a good read, but the dialogue and character interaction lifts it into a permanent place on my top ten.

Highly recommended. Buy two and give one to someone who’s given up on reading Fantasy. 

*  heroing, if it’s not a word it should be

Note: The Crown Conspiracy is the first book in Michael J Sullivan’s six book series The Riyria Revelations. I’m writing this after reading all the way up until book five and this review is for the Crown Conspiracy as part of the wider series.

I’d almost given up reading fantasy by people not named Terry Pratchett*. I’d read too much once upon a time, and I was burned out on 1000 page tomes that stripped of their world descriptions would have filled a decent sized pamphlet and no more.

I did occasionally come across one that I like (such as Pip Ballantine’s Geist) but for the most part the only fantasy I read was urban.

Cut to me looking at The Crown Conspiracy on Amazon. I’d already heard good things about Michael J Sullivan’s work through Goodreads and I figured that I’d give it a try. After all, five bucks isn’t a huge price to pay, and since it was an ebook, I could get it right then and there**.

This isn’t Tolkien. It’s high fantasy but it’s high fantasy written in the same style as most urban fantasy.  Imagine The Hobbit crossed with Lethal Weapon crossed with Ocean’s Eleven with a dose of The Princess Bride thrown in to round out the experience.

The Crown Conspiracy follows the adventures of two master thieves, Royce and Hadrian, as they try desperately to be amoral mercenaries and fail so hard they end up being the heroes. Heroes who save the Crown Prince Alric from the assassination that killed his father and along the way get framed for the murder of his Father.

In their defence they achieve this by kidnapping the prince and carrying him out through a sewer so they get to keep a little street-cred.

The plot isn’t formulaic by any means, and it does fit well into the wider story of The Riyria Revelations, but that’s not what hooked me. It was the characters that yanked me into the world, in particular the relationship between Royce and Hadrian is amazingly well realized.

Sullivan’s writing style is light and easy to read, meant to fun rather than overbearingly serious. He does give you plenty of world building, but instead of presenting you with brick like chunks of description he slips the world in behind the characters. I love this way of doing things, and it’s something I hope to work into my own writing.

The story, the characters and the plot all lend themselves well to a series of books. By the time I’d finished The Crown Conspiracy I desperately wanted to spend more time with the characters (even snotty Prince Alric grows on you). I truly enjoyed the Princess Arista’s story arc in this book, and looking back from the end of the fifth book the beginnings of her character’s path are planted here. She is quite literally a self rescuing princess.

Sullivan is also very good at using Chekhov’s gun to hint at the wider world (goblins? What goblins? What’s the deal with the elves? How is it that Hadrian knows a style of fighting that’s all but forgotten by the rest of the world?). Tiny seeds planted in The Crown Conspiracy bear fruit in later books, especially in book five.

It isn’t for everyone; if you prefer your fantasy books to be 400,000 words of lovingly crafted agricultural descriptions then Michael J Sullivan’s work might be too light for you. However, if you’re down for a fun, fast romp through a fantasy world that keeps getting better, then I highly recommend The Crown Conspiracy.

 Buy two and give one to your grumpy misanthropic friend.

P.S Michael J Sullivan has recently signed a deal with Orbit Books to bring out the six Riyria*** Revalations books as three combined volumes. If you want to buy them in their current format you’ll need to get in quick. I’m not sure of the exact day the Ridan versions go offline but I’ll update this as soon as I know.

* I personally think Terry Pratchett deserves a genre all of his own.

** Never underestimate the power of the “one click” buying system on Amazon.

*** Riyria: It means “two”.

When The Hero Comes Home edited by Gabrielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood, was a real surprise. I expected it to be good, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as moving as it was. This is a perfect example of how an anthology of stories should work, individual tales tied together by a cohesive theme.

When The Hero Comes Home looks at the aftermath of various heroic battles and daring deeds, something that contemporary fantasy rarely does. In doing so the authors use the fantasy setting to examine some very real world issues like PTSD and the ways that trauma can change us.

Moving as the anthology was, don’t think that it’s all doom and gloom, some of the stories are pure fun, and even the more serious tales manage to find a glimmer of hope for the protagonists. I think this is a big part of what makes When The Hero Comes Home so good; it would have been easy to make every one of the stories inside an angst fest, or to write off the traumas the characters have gone through as trivial but all of the stories handle the fine line well.

The stories all have a fantasy setting, but within that catch all term there are a wide variety of settings and themes. Whether it’s the dragon with a penchant for rescuing damsels in Full Circle by Steve Bornstein (which has a fantastically well crafted twist to it) or the “just this side of real life” tale The Evil That Remains by Erik Buchanan; When The Hero Comes Home has something for everyone. There’s even a goblins and zombies tale that really does not play out the way you’d expect (The Blue Corpse Corps by Jim C Hines).

There’s a sentence I never thought I’d type.

There’s also a story in there called The Legend Of Gluck by Marie Bilodeau. If a title that awesome doesn’t interest you then you’re dead to me.*

I struggled with this review, because there really is nothing bad to say about When The Hero Comes Home, except that I wish I’d written some of these stories, and that I wish there were more of them. I also wish I could go into detail about all the stories contained within; rest assured that they are all excellent. Dragon Moon Press has outdone themselves with this one.

Highly Recommended.

You can get When The Hero Comes Home from Amazon, both in print and on the Kindle.

The Kindle eedition is $3.99 and considering that you get 19 stories and an insightful introduction by Susan J Morris, that’s an absolute bargain.

* OK, dead might be a little harsh. Badly injured at least.

Yes, I said winners. I chose one comment at random (actually my cat did. She knocked over the hat full of numbers and in the end there was only one left in it). I also picked one because it contained the bit of advice I wish I’d gotten.

Actually I did get the advice, I just didn’t listen.

So the random draw winner is Bailey (The Bookworm)  and the one I picked out is from (Squid Ink) Sarah. Congratulations and thanks for commenting.

Thanks everyone else for commenting too. I’ll be doing more giveaways soon.

* END UPDATE*

First a confession from this penmonkey; I’m a fan of Chuck Wendig’s writing. I love his blog and his work, so this review probably isn’t coming from a place you could call unbiased.

With that said, I loved Confessions Of A Freelance Penmonkey. Chuck has taken all of his best advice for writers from his blog and put it all together in a liquor and profanity soaked hybrid tome. This is not for the faint of heart, if you can’t cope with swearing, sexual references (including but not limited to badgers) and writing advice that sounds like it came from a belligerent sasquatch then this is not your writing advice book.

Sometimes books that are made up of blog posts are pointless money grabs, and while I can’t deny that Chuck’s probably getting paid for Confessions Of A Freelance Penmonkey he manages to avoid the “pointless” by putting in an editors commentary to each post, telling readers how he feels about the advice he gave then, and any extra advice on top of what he’s already given. These little extras are not just one hundred word bites added in ten minutes of desperation (I don’t think so anyway), they are well thought out and often several pages long.

There was some criticism that the book is full of mistakes, but I didn’t find that in the copy I bought from Amazon. This may be down to me being unobservant, but I didn’t find any typos that pulled me up short or made me want to write Chuck an angry email.

There is a certain theme to the points, which is that of a drunken three am rant by a bearded and desperate writer pushed to the edges of sanity, so if you don’t enjoy the blog posts at Chuck’s website www.terribleminds.com then I should warn you that the beardy insanity is omnipresent in Confessions Of A Freelance Penmonkey.

Chuck manages to cover a lot of ground over the course of one book. Plot, structure, story, characterization and dialogue all get serious scrutiny. So does querying and self publishing.

To sum up: The advice is excellent, bullshit free advice that gets to the core of the problems that plague virtually all writers (pants, or no pants? That is the question.) I found the posts hilarious and relevant to the things I’m doing a writer. This book is five bucks, and I think that makes it a bargain.

Hit up Chuck’s site here for the myriad of ways you can buy the book.

So, I’m going to give away a copy of this to a random commenter. Tell me the one piece of writing advice you wish you’d gotten before you started writing and I’ll pick a winner on Friday.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Irregular Creatures is a collection of short stories from self described freelance pen monkey Chuck Wendig. Each of the stories features a different strange creature, including (but not limited to) flying cats, mermaids, aliens and radioactive monkeys.

You heard me.

My favorite was the first story Dog-Man and Cat-Bird (A Flying Cat Story). It’s an excellent example of balancing the weird (flying cats, flying cat demons) with very human, very relatable characters and Wendig handles it perfectly. I found myself buying into the weirdness of the story (and all the stories in fact) because the human side of the tales were so grounded.

Even the very short, amazingly gory A Radioactive Monkey has a relatable protagonist. Briefly.

Even though Dog-Man and Cat-Bird (A Flying Cat Story) was my favorite, there’s no drop off in story quality. All of he stories are worth a read, and I whiled a way a very pleasant afternoon indoors, reading Irregular Creatures on my iPhone (I’ll get on buying an e-reader or an iPad as soon as I can sell a kidney*). Some of the stories are disturbing, and if you can’t cope with violence in you literature then you’re not going to enjoy this as much as I did.

I should probably warn you that there’s a story that features a toothy demonic vagina. It’s a very good story though, so don’t let that put you off.

Considering it’s only three bucks, I think Irregular Creatures should be on every genre fictions e-reader. It’s by turns weird, inspiring, disturbing and awesome.

You can pick it up from  Amazon, Smashwords and on PDF through Chuck’s site Terrible Minds.

*No one panic, it’s not my kidney.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Night Shift is Urban Fantasy gone hardcore. Protagonist Jill Kismet runs and guns her way through so many of Hell’s denizens you wonder why the Hellbreed ever stick their heads above the ground at all.

Jill is a hunter, a human trained to lay the smackdown whenever the supernatural starts messing with the normal world. She’s also chock full of demonic power thanks to a pact she made with a demon called Perry.

The entire book could have gone wrong at that point as a super strong, quick human protagonist high on demonic power could have gone cheeseball very quickly, but Saintcrow manages to walk the line between making Jill too awesome and too tragic and produces one of the few true anti-heroes I’ve seen in urban fantasy.

Jill is hard to like at first, and Saintcrow has the character push her luck far more than is healthy considering how often she seems to annoy the powers that be, but as the book goes on Jill evolves naturally into someone just as hard-ass, but far more likable.

I think Jill Kismet could still have been too awesome for words if it wasn’t for her demonic benefactor lurking in the background every time she uses her power. Perry (Pericles) is the demon giving Jill enough juice to fight the forces of darkness. He makes the story far more tragic, as no matter how much good she does, she’s damned by the power he gives her. Perry himself is extremely well written, and often feels far more of a threat than the main bad guys.

This isn’t a happy book. Jill is very aware of how much shit she’s in, and she doesn’t always react well to the knowledge. However, this makes her, and Night Shift surprisingly well rounded for what could have been a pure popcorn novel.

Highly Recommended*

* One caveat, if you can’t cope with violence on the page, this isn’t the book for you.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unholy Magic is the follow up to Unholy Ghosts, and part two of Stacia Kane’s urban fantasy series. I thought City Of Ghosts was excellent, everything an urban fantasy should be.

Unholy Magic is better.

The plot follows Church debunker Chess Putnam as sh attempts to balance a career as a Church sanctioned witch/fraud squad with being a very unsanctioned drug addict.

Addiction plays an even stronger part in this novel than it did in Unholy Ghosts, and there is a withdrawal scene about halfway through which is downright harrowing. If you ever need to scare the bejesus out of a kid in regards to drugs get them to read that scene.

One of Stacia Kane’s strengths is that no matter how strange things get with the surroundings (sex magic, ghosts, movie stars and fake hauntings) she keeps the book centered on its characters. While there is a wide cast of miscreants to enjoy the focus is usually on either Lex, Chess’s on again off again drug dealing boyfriend, and Terrible, chess’s on again off again enforcer friend and occasional lust mate. Terrible in particular is a joy to read, and seeing his character switch between fearsome killer to actual human being is one of my favorite parts of the series.

We also get to see more of the Church than we did in Unholy Ghosts. Stacia Kane shows more of the Church’s absolute dominion over humanity as well, and she leaves it as a gray area as to whether or not it’s a good thing. She also shows more of the afterlife, including the Church run spirit prisons (read: torture chambers) that the Church uses to enforce post mortem punishments on the souls of the dead.

It’s hard to discuss too much more of the book without giving away plot points, but rest assured that the ghosts are scary, the characters interesting, the violence and drug use both necessary and affecting and the sex scenes smoking.

What more do you want?

Highly Recommended.