Expectations and a Reviewer’s Rubric

by benmweilertNo Comments
When I first started my website, www.benjamin-m-weilert.com, I knew I wanted it to be a repository of reviews for all the books I’ve read and all the movies I’ve seen. I have some of these reviews scattered across the web, but I wanted a single location where all of them could reside. A single place where I could control these reviews. Now that my website is almost a year-and-a-half old, I have accumulated over 250 reviews on it. These reviews range from nights at the Colorado Springs Philharmonic to audiobooks to movies to books received from authors and/or publishers. As most of my reviews, I provide a “star” rating to help visitors to my site determine if the piece of media is worth their time. Early on, I based most of my ratings on an intuitive “hunch” of what I felt the work deserved. This scale (from 0.0 to 5.0) is mostly subjective and, while this is still largely the case,...
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How to handle a bad review

by benmweilertNo Comments
You can’t please all people all the time. The best you can do is please most people most of the time. This adage is as true in life as it is to writing. Some readers will love your book, others will not. We all love to receive glowing reviews, as they boost our confidence, but what about those readers and reviewers who don’t care for our book? While I’ve received a few bad reviews for my books, as a reviewer of books, I have had to write some bad reviews. If your book is out there for the public to read, you have to expect to receive a bad review eventually. There are two ways to deal with these negative reviews: the right way and the wrong way. How you handle bad reviews says a lot about who you are as an author. My first one-star review was for my first book, First Name Basis. While I was upset that I received this bad...
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What a month of content looks like

by benmweilertNo Comments
Back in June, I wrote a post about what it takes to “do it all” as an independent author. While one of the many tasks of the independent author is marketing, nobody will buy your books if you’re always promoting them on social media. There needs to be a balance of promotion and what’s known as “web content.” Web content doesn’t need to be much, especially for social media, but the fact that you’re continually posting about something shows that you’re actively engaged with people who could potentially become your audience. There are plenty of debates about which social networks to post to, how often to post, and when to post during the day (or during the week), but this post won’t go into the details of that. I still haven’t figured out the “sweet spot” for social media, but I have accumulated a regular schedule of web content that helps me to be active on these platforms. When it comes...
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