- Joined
- Feb 16, 2005
- Messages
- 2,093
- Reaction score
- 676
I am pinching the bridge of my nose, just like Uncle Jim sometimes does.
Want to see a remarkably ill-considered piece of self-promotion that's going on even as we speak? Go here, to the voting page for Tor.com's annual Reader's Choice awards for science fiction and fantasy.
There's a publisher in Tennessee, Seventh Star Press, that's set up a link to it on their front page, along with a list of eligible works they published during 2011. It's pretty tacky of them, and it's no favor to their books and authors, which are not the sort that normally spring to mind when one is contemplating a "best of the year" ballot.
But that's not the real problem. One of their authors, Stephen Zimmer, is obviously getting everyone he knows to vote for his novel, The Seventh Throne, plus the novel's cover art, and an obscure short story he had published in 2011. None of them are what you'd call likely or plausible choices in their categories. (I don't know whether there's any connection between Seventh Star and Seventh Throne.)
Most of the votes for Zimmer vote only for his work, which is improbable. Readers who are interested in SF and fantasy would also cast votes in other categories. More than a few of the votes for Zimmer have had identical formats and wording, which is so improbable that there's a term for it.
Stuffing the ballot box is a bad idea. The SF community isn't a big place, and it has a very long memory. What makes this worse is that the entire first chapter of The Seventh Throne is available on Amazon. That book is bad enough to make your eyeballs bleed. (Surprise! All the reviews give it five stars!) Here's the opening sentence:
The awfulness of Seventh Throne isn't just a matter of bad sentences, though they're plenty bad. Zimmer's narrative technique is so defective that half the time you can't tell what's happening. He makes errors I've never seen before, like forgetting to mention until he's halfway through a section that his POV character exists and is present onstage. Since I'd naturally been reading it as 3rd person omniscient, having to suddenly recast everything I'd read so far felt like a ten-car pileup in my head.
When narrative is handled as badly as he handles it, a book becomes literally unreadable -- your brain can't process it the way we normally process fiction. I doubt that most of the people who've voted for his book could pass a pop quiz on its contents.
Stephan Zimmer can't have thought through the implications of forcing the SF community to take notice of his book. If people start linking to that sample text, he's going to make himself famous in ways he'll regret for the rest of his career.
Want to see a remarkably ill-considered piece of self-promotion that's going on even as we speak? Go here, to the voting page for Tor.com's annual Reader's Choice awards for science fiction and fantasy.
There's a publisher in Tennessee, Seventh Star Press, that's set up a link to it on their front page, along with a list of eligible works they published during 2011. It's pretty tacky of them, and it's no favor to their books and authors, which are not the sort that normally spring to mind when one is contemplating a "best of the year" ballot.
But that's not the real problem. One of their authors, Stephen Zimmer, is obviously getting everyone he knows to vote for his novel, The Seventh Throne, plus the novel's cover art, and an obscure short story he had published in 2011. None of them are what you'd call likely or plausible choices in their categories. (I don't know whether there's any connection between Seventh Star and Seventh Throne.)
Most of the votes for Zimmer vote only for his work, which is improbable. Readers who are interested in SF and fantasy would also cast votes in other categories. More than a few of the votes for Zimmer have had identical formats and wording, which is so improbable that there's a term for it.
Stuffing the ballot box is a bad idea. The SF community isn't a big place, and it has a very long memory. What makes this worse is that the entire first chapter of The Seventh Throne is available on Amazon. That book is bad enough to make your eyeballs bleed. (Surprise! All the reviews give it five stars!) Here's the opening sentence:
"It would seem that these are all disparate groups, from all over the world, with widely different agendas. But in truth, their efforts are focused upon a unified, singular purpose ... something that is called the Convergence, by the ones that know the truth underlying it all," Father Wilson Rader stated, with an air of deep solemnity.
After that it gets really murky.
The awfulness of Seventh Throne isn't just a matter of bad sentences, though they're plenty bad. Zimmer's narrative technique is so defective that half the time you can't tell what's happening. He makes errors I've never seen before, like forgetting to mention until he's halfway through a section that his POV character exists and is present onstage. Since I'd naturally been reading it as 3rd person omniscient, having to suddenly recast everything I'd read so far felt like a ten-car pileup in my head.
When narrative is handled as badly as he handles it, a book becomes literally unreadable -- your brain can't process it the way we normally process fiction. I doubt that most of the people who've voted for his book could pass a pop quiz on its contents.
Stephan Zimmer can't have thought through the implications of forcing the SF community to take notice of his book. If people start linking to that sample text, he's going to make himself famous in ways he'll regret for the rest of his career.
Yeah, that's the gist of the impression I get when anyone starts talking about amazon rankings. I have a while before I descend into the crazy-making process.
