It’s great to be a published writer, having your work out there in the public domain for people to discover. Sometimes people who have discovered your work take the time to say what they think about it. Either in an amazon or Goodreads review, or on their own blog.
Occasionally I put my writing name into the Google bar and go looking for these reviews. Just because, you know, I need to know how my books are being received. Before you accuse me of being a narcissist, let me say that I never did this before I was a published author, and as I say, the name I enter is my writing name “R.N. Morris”, not the name I go by in real life, Roger Morris. You might think it’s personal vanity, but really it’s for professional reasons – because part of being a writer is a business as well as an art. Any business would be interested in what its customers have to say about their products. And my products are my books.
OK, maybe I’m protesting too much, but believe me, I’d rather not be doing this. If there was someone I could delegate Googling R.N. Morris to, I would.
Sometimes it turns out to be quite a masochistic experience. Either no one has said anything new (the most common result, if I’m honest), or you discover an opinion that you rather wish the writer had kept to themselves.
But sometimes you find something nice. Like this review that appeared yesterday on a blog called Novelhistorian. It’s for a book that I wrote a couple of years ago, The White Feather Killer.
It’s a beautifully written and very detailed review. What I love most about it is that the reviewer really seems to get what I was trying to do with the book. And I was lucky because what I was trying to do seems to correspond with what this reader looks for in a mystery novel.
“Morris allows himself deeper, more rounded descriptions and motivations than many mystery writers, yet you never feel disconnected or impatient with the narrative. Quite the contrary; I wish more mystery writers trusted themselves (and their readers) to write like this.”
The kindle edition of The White Feather Killer is currently £1.99. Or you can do what the Novelhistorian reviewer did, and take it out of your local library.