Monday, January 18, 2010

Of Reviews and Flames

At some point early yesterday evening I wandered over to Mr. Gaiman's blog, there to read first of his official engagement to Amanda Palmer (yay!) and then, eventually, to his latest example/cautionary tale of authors who respond to nasty bad reviews of their work.

Evidently a certain Candace Sams engaged her reviewers on Amazon.com. And then she kept engaging them, and also engaging a great many people who stopped by to see what the fuss was all about. And then she continued to engage commenters long after it was clear that they were there to keep her good and riled so that they could witness her descent into madness and perhaps high-five each other upon her inevitable commitment to an inpatient facility.

Because it's a 3-day weekend, and because my work has sucked and therefore I have a touch of schadenfreude about the whole affair (hey! someone out there made a bigger ass of herself than I usually do at work!) I read the whole thing, including the posts that have been deleted by Sams herself and by Amazon. Her descent into madness would have been, shall we say, a short but scenic journey, and the whole thing was at least as entertaining as an episode of Jersey Shore. Not that I'm recommending either of these things as entertainment--I'm sure our IR's have better things to do with their time.

But one of the best things I got out of reading the 400+ comments and the related commentaries and debates in various booklovers' forums was a link to this Amazon UK reviewer, who is a genius. I highly recommend all the reviews of cookbooks and also laughed out loud at the review of the GPS, in which I believe the reviewer goes through all the Kubler-Ross phases of dealing with recalcitrant technology. Should you need a quick laugh, one of these reviews will probably do the trick.

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