“Scalzi BookTour ’07: He’s Subtly Bizarre”

(and just for completeness, I’ll go post this on the right comment thread, too.)

I’m waiting for the book. anxiously.

Oh, well as they say as long as they don’t spell your name wrong…

Loved the book and have been recommending it to all that I can…

The one that prompts a million people to buy the book.

However, short of Oprah (or possibly Stephen King waxing enthusiastic about it in his EW column), most people who would tout the book would not cause a serious bump to the book’s sales on their own.

I think probably the most useful review a book of mine has had so far came from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit; his championing of Old Man’s War helped the book burn through its first printing and kick-started its popularity. Glenn didn’t sell me a million books but he probably helped me sell a couple thousand at exactly the right time.

Alex:

“my question is have you seen any reviewers give you too much credit for a particular passage where you didn’t mean anything special by it but they read extra meaning into what you wrote?”

Sure, and it’s not all that unusual a thing, not just with passages but with entire books. Lots of reviewers of Old Man’s War felt it was indebted to The Forever, for example. It wasn’t because at the time I hadn’t read that book. Now, in this particular case, I do actually make reference to both the Bible and The Merchant of Venice in TAD, so this particular reviewer wasn’t imagining things, or over imagining them as the case may be.

I don’t particularly object to reviewers putting their own spins on the work, because it reflects the reality that every reader filters what they read through their own experience (literary or otherwise). A writer may not have put an connection a reader sees in the text, but it doesn’t mean that connection isn’t there, at least for that particular reader.

Now from time to time this can mean a reader makes conclusions about me, based on my books, which are not necessarily correct. But again that’s not a big deal for me. I like seeing how I look, and how my books look, from the point of view of other people.

Read the review and the parts about you paying homage to other books reminded me of my High School English class, and, in particular, how much I hated it. I remember analyzing stories and having to write all these damn essays about what the author was thinking and what he meant by this particular passage, etc… Most of the time I just wanted to write that maybe the author meant nothing and it was just a story and we should stop reading too much into it and enjoy it for itself. Some of the time that was just pure laziness on my part, but I’m convinced I must have been right at least once. So, if you are still with me, my question is have you seen any reviewers give you too much credit for a particular passage where you didn’t mean anything special by it but they read extra meaning into what you wrote?

What kind of review would make you sooo happy that you would, say, take off your pants, dance in the snowy yard at sunset AND videotape it and put it on the site or youtube?