One of my seeming multitude of WIPs is the first novel I ever wrote. It is a gritty, tactical depiction of an infantry squad leader in a “Light” infantry division deployed to the Persian Gulf war. Through the four days of fighting he winds up the Platoon Leader. Much like Youth In Asia, it is not so much about heros doing superhuman things. Instead, it is about young men trying to accomplish their mission and stay alive. 

Work on that novel has been a multi-decade, on again, off again exercise. Over the last ~9 months I’ve decided to revisit it. Though I still enjoy the story and the characters, and I think much of it is good and engaging, it has its flaws and is need of substantial work.

One area in which it needs work is more accurate setting details about the daily life of soliders in Desert Shielf and Desert Storm, more details on the terrain and weather, etc. Which brought me to this book. It has very mixed reivews on Amazon, but not because it is not accurate… Below is a copy and paste (with a few tweaks) of the review I posted to Amazon.

I’ll start with the blurb:  “Alex Vernon with Neal Creighton, Jr., Greg Downey, Rob Holmes, and David Trybula with foreword by General Barry R. McCaffrey, retired (commander of the 24th Division during Desert Shield and Desert Storm) Winner of the 1999 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award: A highly personal account of the day-to-day experiences of the five platoon leaders who served in the same tank battalion during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm…”

My review…

Though not without its shortcomings, this book is an exceptionally personal presentation of the thoughts, fears, triumphs, and mistakes of young lieutenants in the US Army preparing for and in combat. Its strength is the deep – and honest – exploration of what young officers feel and experience as platoon leaders. These officers’ dedication to their country and especially their men is beyond question and rings true through their sharing.

To emphasize what the authors call out a number of times, this is their view of the war they experienced, and there can be no one, all-encompassing view of this or any war. The actual war is – as it was historically – brief and one-sided. The five platoon leaders share great detail of their race across southeast Iraq and the immense combat power they helped unleash on the hapless and inept Iraq military. The combat prowess of the US Army, of which these five lieutenants were a material part, is impressive. But in all cases, this is five unique and personal views of what they experienced.

Though a scholarly work that is well documented and organized, it is arguably too long. A significant portion of the book covers the many months the 24th division spent in Saudi Arabia preparing for combat. Though the color of daily life in the various platoons is interesting and provides deep historical detail, it becomes tedious.

The war, such as it was, is depicted in a relatively short portion of the book and consists mostly of relentless driving and short, profoundly one-sided destruction of the few Iraqi units that actually tried to fight.

The final section of the book is an honest, personal sharing by the lieutenants, reflections on their experiences and how it helped shape their decisions to leave the Army. In many ways, it echoed my own experience.

After earning my commission in 1985 and graduating from the Army’s Airborne and Ranger school and serving in the 7th ID(L), I also opted to leave active duty after completing my Advanced course…and the Berlin wall came down. I was on orders to join an armor division in Germany managing a battalion motor pool. I could not imagine a worse fate for a light infantryman: 3 years of turning in equipment as America extracted most of our military out of the reunified Germany.

I separated from the Army and was on terminal leave hanging out with my friends in Europe before I was to start graduate school when, while wandering around Greece, an endless stream of C-141s began flying over, headed southeast. The war had started, and the first American military units were heading to Saudi Arabia.

Similar to the experiences shared by these young men, though I was never in combat, I had been the platoon leader for infantry, anti-tank and scout platoons, as well as a company executive officer. In various ways, the authors of The Eyes of Orion note there is no greater job in the Army than being a platoon leader. I will quibble and say that being a company commander of a combat unit is equally exhilarating. After my time on active duty, I joined the National Guard and commanded an M2 Bradley company of an Enhanced Readiness Brigade.

So much of what these officers shared in the final section of the book echoed my own experiences and thinking. Being a platoon leader is an exciting time, but it is also incredibly daunting and lonely as these men described.

A young lieutenant’s experience and perception of the Army is greatly influenced by his platoon sergeant and his company commander. This is triply so in combat, I’m sure. There is no officer’s club to retreat to on Friday nights to learn from your peers in an informal setting, there are no roommates to compare notes with in the evening, there are no siblings or parents to call when you need a sounding board. As a young officer – learning the ropes of what it really means to lead in combat – you can find yourself very much alone, and often the enforcer of unpopular and sometimes idiotic orders. You constantly think: Mission first, men always. You fear you won’t bring them all home. You fear you will fail them when they need you most.

Overwhelmingly, the writers of this book depicted competent and insightful leaders above them and dedicated, trusting young men in their command. There were some exceptions, which I’ll leave for future readers to discover. On the whole, though, they were well-led, well-equipped, well cared for, and they took their responsibilites seriously. So much so that at times their own self-doubt became almost debilitating.

As detailed in the book, the coalition brought to bear overwhelming weapon systems and withering firepower. Frightening not just to imagine being on the receiving end, but frightening because of how close together the units operated, and how often that ended in fratricide or near fratricide. On this count, what these leaders shared is both tragic and disheartening.

I highly recommend this book especially to young officers and those about to earn their commission. The first half can become tiresome, and the combat scenes are short and one-sided, but the flavor of life as a young officer, and what can be learned to help you prepare for your first years as a leader is of tremendous value.

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The Road. Indeed. It is a road, a journey, a trek through hell, but is both more and less than that. Less than that meaning: Cormac McCarthy presents bleak as no other writer can. While I was reading it, several times I thought that I’ll never again believe a writer who uses the word “hopeless” to describe the plight of their character. In The Road, there is nothing but hopelessness. Almost. Which leads to where I struggled with this novel.

Let me cut the suspense. I’m giving it 5/5 stars as Amazon let’s us grade books. I’d give it 6/5 if I could figure out how because there is much to praise here, though that is putting it too gently.

Warning! Warning! Warning!

Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!

But let me share why I had some problems with this story.

I have long avoided reading it though friends have encouraged me to. I only read it after reading McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is a far better novel in my view.

I’ve long avoided the novel because, well…the premise is that they are traveling down a road in a post apocalypse setting. One of the first things you learn as a combat soldier is you never take the road. In the military, these are called “natural lines of drift.” It’s a clever way to say “the route people will take”. If you have ever walked across fields that cows regularly frequent you will know what I mean. Cows find the easiest path and tread it over and over. If you want to kill a cow, just wait along one of these paths. Roads for humans are built to take the easiest path between two points. If you want to kill a human, just wait along a road.

This world of McCarthy’s is populated with “bad guys” who are almost invariably cannibals. This is because there is simply no food left, no living thing other than the last scraps of humanity preying on each other. They are often also on the road, or setting up ambushes along it. Several times during the story, the man and the boy avoid dying in such attacks. Too many times to my thinking.

But the road is needed as a literary device. The two main characters have to start somewhere and end somewhere else. It is both physical and metaphorical. So they travel the road for hundreds and hundreds of miles, miraculously, without getting hurt.

I was so taken with McCarthy’s writing after Blood Meridian, I decided to read The Road in spite of my doubts about traveling this road of theirs. So getting into the book, and starting down the road, the next issue I had was that they were pushing a shopping cart full of their meager belongings.

You may see homeless people pushing shopping carts under bridges or down a sidewalk. You don’t see people pushing shopping carts hundreds of miles over roads after a decade of neglect and (apparently) nuclear blasts. To his credit, McCarthy had his character’s wear out one, and often had to dig a path through sand or snow to keep the cart going. Doable? Maybe…for a while. But the doable part had another issue. It takes a lot of water and a lot of calories to keep pushing such a cart.

The Road‘s landscape — world — is depressingly bleak and gray; even the snow falls gray. Rivers are described as molten-looking sludge. For much of the book, I wondered where they were getting water clean enough to drink. Though they stumbled across a few forgotten caches of food and water from time to time, not until the last few pages did we actually see them getting water out of a creek, straining it to clean it. It was a weak throw to acknowledging how they were getting their water. But he did not share it until the end of the book because it mitigates the desolate, rotted Earth images of the earlier portion of the book. Maybe the streams are not quite so dirty.

Another problem I had with the book was how they were getting enough calories to keep their strenuous trek going (in freezing weather, no less). I’ve lived outside doing hard work for weeks at a time. You burn 3K calories a day…easily.

When the book starts, there is no explanation of how they came to have a cart full of supplies. No matter. But as they deplete them through the story, they invariably stumbled upon more food as they were about to starve to death. And it was food the rest of humanity had missed while they were starving to death. The man and the boy found it, which was all too convenient.

I also struggled with what event would kill all life on Earth other than humans? I don’t doubt there could be a nuclear exchange, or a devastating meteorite strike, or some other terrible event. But what puzzled me was that there is no life. Nothing. There were no rats, flys or cockroaches… These are forms of life that are amazingly resilient. But somehow there are humans wandering about but none of these little critters. Not a lot of humans, but enough that we run into one or two or a dirty gaggle once every twenty or thirty pages. But not a mouse in sight. Seemed odd.

Another moment that stopped me was the famous scene of the man and the boy stumbling upon a just-abandoned campsite where a baby was being roasted on a spit. This was shortly after they hid on the side of the road as three men wearing backpacks and a pregnant woman passed. The clear implication was that it was the woman’s baby over the fire. Horrific? Yes. But did it make any sense? If the woman had died, why not eat her? She would have been more substantial. If she had survived the child’s birth, would she really be able to run away from the camp site? I suppose she could have just been hiding nearby. And if the people had been hungry enough to eat a baby, why would they take the time to pick up their packs and run off without grabbing their dinner?

In short, it is hard to imagine a scenario that made any sense with this one. It felt like McCarthy was more interested in the sensational and horrific than he was in being realistic. This is in marked contrast to Blood Meridian, which is far more violent but seemed more logical to me.

There were a few other scenes — one even more horric and gut-twisting — that I found improbable, but it was the last that seemed completely implausible.

After hundreds of pages and hundreds of miles on the road, and after every single person they came across was a cannibal that wanted them for dinner, at the end, after the man dies, and the boy sits beside him for three days on the verge of dying, who walks up? A well-armed father with a good Christian wife and their two children who are about the same age as the boy.

The man has delivered his son into the hands of someone who will care for him and raise him in a safe environment, complete with similarly aged playmates. Or so is the implication.

Of course, there is no food and the Earth is incapable of growing anything. There are no animals, no living plants, nothing. Are we left to believe that the boy has been saved? Or will he live in misery and despair until one way or the other, he also falls?

This in turn leads to the novel’s strengths. Beyond the extraordinary writing and the stunningly bleak vision, beyond the smart way McCarthy never feels the need to explain why or how it all happened, he sets up unrelenting tension.

Arguably the core story is that the man — the father — does not have the courage to kill his son and then himself to escape their hell. Where is the wife? The boy’s mother? She killed herself, we discover, before the story opened. And when the story opens, the man has a pistol with — you guessed it — two bullets. So we know from the start he has not yet found the courage to kill them both, and not long after we start our trip down the road, the man has to use one bullet.

With only a single bullet left, his dilemma is even more profound: Should he use it to kill the boy in his sleep? Get it over with? If so, how would he kill himself? He could do it, but he no longer would have such a simple and easy means as a self-inflicted shot to the head after killing his son.

In short, he can’t bring himself to kill his child, the child he loves so dearly, the child that trusts him so totally, which is shown over and over through the story.

Thus the tension mounts as we see the man, coughing his lungs out, sick and wounded, starving, limping toward his own death. We are left wondering until the end if he has the guts to kill his child and save him from what will befall him when taken by the cannibals.

In the end, though McCarthy could horrify us, he could not kill the child, his child, so he created an ending that made no sense and was completely out of step with the rest of his dark vision.

All said, the book is brilliant and highly recommended. The writing is uniquely McCarthy’s and the vision and violence are also something few (if any) writers can match. I urge you to read The Road. Just don’t think it is going to be fun.

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There is no understating how important it is to get reviews to help ramp sales of your new book. And I’ve previously written about how to get great reviews from some of Amazon’s top reviewers. But I’ve just discovered this: There is a group on Goodreads that is helping authors get thoughtful reviews posted to three sites (Goodreads, Amazon US and Amazon UK) from readers they don’t know. It’s a great and simple system. How much does it cost? No money involved. You just have to pay it forward and review a book from someone else. And there is no limit; you can get as many reviews as you can give.

I stumbled on this site when I saw a reference to it on a discussion board for an online writing workshop. Simplistically, it works like this: There is a sequential list of books that authors would like to have reviewed. You sign up to review the last book on the list. In doing so you simultaneously post your book. The next person signs up to review your book. Another person signs up to review the book by the person who is reviewing your book…and on and on. So it is never reciprocal, and you never know who is going to review your book.

Getting reviews on sites outside the US (for a US author) is far harder than getting reviews on the US Amazon site, which is already very hard. So this program from Goodreads is extremely helpful in that regard, too, because one of the requirements is that you have to post to three sites, as I noted above. Amazon’s UK site is the second largest English site, so racking up reviews on that site is also helpful to your overall sales. In part due to this program, I now have 11 reviews on the Amazon UK site, and I have made it as high as #14 on one of their bestseller lists. In addition to this, my first book has made it onto four top-ten bestseller lists in three countries.

In short, I’ve now reviewed six books through this program, and my novel has gotten six detailed and thoughtful reviews. They have been split between 4- and 5-star reviews.

Reviews drive sales

This is what is commonly referred to as a “BFO” — a Blinding Flash of the Obvious. But how many reviews do you need to drive sales, and how many sales will a given number of reviews drive?

In a study done by Smart Insights of more than one million product page visits from six UK retailers, they collected the data in the table below. Though it is not specifically books, I think we can consider it just as relevant for books. Simplistically, what you see is an increase in conversion rate (sales) as the number of reviews increases.

This should not surprise anyone. But what is of note is that there is not a consistent correlation of reviews to conversion rate. Obviously, as a seller, you want a high vol of traffic AND a high % of that traffic that buys. But getting traffic can be problematic at best, expensive at worst (think: advertising). So if you double your conversion rate, you can sell twice as many books to the traffic you are already getting. That’s where reviews come in. You want visitors to your site to see lots of positive reviews.

Of course, this is not an exact science (and it is not correlated against how long a product as been in the market, how much competition a given product has, the actual average review rating, etc.), but the results are instructional and intuitive to me.

Another factor is “brand equity”. Think of a company’s brand equity as the general perception of the quality of their product. Disney, Honda, Specialized (bikes), and Coleman (camping) for example, have very high brand equity. We know they offer good products. In the world of writing, Goerge R R Marin has very high brand equity. He can sell a million copies of his next novel before a single review is written because we know it is going to be good. For the rest of us…we need social proof that we have delivered a good product. We need positive, legitimate reviews. So the results below are instructional and intuitive to me.

To be clear about what I find intuitive:  The more reviews a book has, the more people will buy it. But I also believe there is a “plateau” phenomena as SmartInisghts shows in their data.

Everyone assumes when they are looking for a book on Amazon that the first three-to-five reviews are from the author’s family and friends. Perhaps even the first ten could come from personal connections. And the next ten might come from associates or more distant friends or perhaps Facebook fans.

My sense is that few “unknown” authors can generate more than 20 reviews through family, friends and Facebook (yes, I’m sure there are a handful of exceptions).

So, true to the data above, books that have more than 30 reviews seem to me to be generating sales and garnering additional reviews based primarily on the book’s merit. In other words, we authors need about 30 reviews to “prime the pump” and get a virtuous cycle of sales and reviews started. Thirty reviews is no easy feat!

The Reviews Initiative for Indie Books is a powerful tool for authors

Indie authors — all authors — should consider using this powerful tool to help get your book more legitimate and thoughtful reviews. It does take time because you have to review a book from another writer. And precisely because they are legitimate reviews from readers you don’t know, you might get your feelings hurt; Your book might get a negative review. It happens. If you are not ready for that, then you probably have bigger problems.

Don’t buy reviews…ever

Some people think they can buy reviews to get to the critical mass point at which sales take off. I’ve argued here, using data from others and my own sense, that the critical mass point is around 30 reviews for sales to take off. The problem with bought reviews is that they are obviously fake, and many readers, myself included, won’t buy or read a book with obviously fake reviews.

This includes books up for review on the Review Initiative site. Because you don’t have to sign up until you want to, you can preview the book that is up for review by looking it up on Amazon. If I see more than a few reviews that look fake, no way. I won’t review it. I’ll wait for the next book to come along.

Also note that fake reviews are almost always 4-star and  5-star reviews. But which reviews do people always read first? Yes, the 1-star reviews. So if the 4- and 5-star reviews are short, glowing and poorly written with vague comments such as “this was a great book i cant weight to read more from this really good author” but the 1- and 2-star reviews are articulate, three times as long and clearly communicate specifics about the main characters, setting and plot, you know you are dealing with an author who is buying reviews.

And think about this: Though Amazon is getting ever more aggressive about cracking down on fake reviews and those who buy and sell them, even if some author were to start achieving fame and fortune based on fake reviews, it can all come crashing down. Imagine being a guest on a podcast someday and someone calls in and says, “Hey, love your book, but your first 20 reviews look like you bought them from Fiverr…” Oops. So much for fame and fortune.

Want to sell more? Write a great book. Put great cover art on it. Optimize your keywords. Figure out how to increase your international sales. And get legitimate reviews from real readers. This group on Goodreads’ site is another way to do so. Try it out. And if you know of other such sites, please share.

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I don’t normally do much off-the-cuff editorializing on my blog, but I’m intrigued by Amazon’s recent announcement that they are going to attempt to get rid of bogus reviews.

I think it is a great news. This means that serious novel writers will have less BS competition out there.

I don’t think their methodology will be perfect at first, but my guess is they’ll put together an algorithm that considers such things as length, spelling errors, how many reviews are coming from a given reviewer, how many are coming from a given IP address and/or MAC address, are devoid any of the proper nouns found in the book, it is not a verified purchase and they don’t see that it was ever read on a Kindle, etc.

All these could be spoofed and no one or even two would prove much. On the other hand, if they see 10 book reviews a day coming out of the same MAC address (a computer’s unique identifier), a reviewer that consistently scores book a “5”, they are short, have spelling errors and no mention of any of the proper nouns in the book, get the author’s gender wrong, end with “I can’t wait to buy the next book in the series!”, and such “reviews” have no (or very few) “helpful” votes, it is a reasonable guess that such a review might have been purchased on fiverr.

From there, if they look at all the reviews for the book in question and 10 of the 12 reviews (for example) have similar profiles, then it is probably a safe bet that the author is buying reviews.

It is not going to be a perfect science, but given all the work Amazon (with Google leading the way) on indexing content, my guess is that they will be right far more often than wrong.

And could a legitimate review have all these suspect characteristics? Yes, it is possible, but highly unlikely. And even if you got such a review, even if were 5 stars, would you care if it got deleted? As a rule, I won’t read a book that looks like it has BS reviews based on my own BS sensor.

I am curious about the report that they will downgrade reviews from people who were not verified purchasers. I have in fact offered free copies to people have done early reviews for me. Some have reported that in their review. Some have not. And doing so is a common practice in the traditional world of publishing. It occurs to me that this could be solved in several ways. For instance, such a reviewer could be forced to check a box stating they got a free review copy, and such would be limited to 25 (just to make up a number) by Amazon.

In short – with the one caveat ref free review copies – I’m comfortable with where Amazon is going with this, though it might take them a few iterations really get it right. I can’t imagine how a legitimate author who earns reviews the old fashion way – quality writing, well-prepared product – is going to fear this.

Other thoughts?

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