Hi! Thanks very much for having me on Book Lovin’ Mamas today. Once upon a time, a long time ago (actually about one year… *grin*) I wrote book reviews for a website called GraveTells (GT) as Captain Dirty Pants or simply The Captain. GT specializes in books in the PNR/UF/SciFi genres and I had a blast reading and reviewing books for the site. Those are my very favorite book genres and I discovered some really kick-butt authors during my tenure there.
     But then I started writing my own fiction and it was *strongly* recommended that I no longer write reviews, especially since I write books in the very genres I’d be reviewing. I won’t get into the politics of why an author should or should not review books…it’s a fierce debate and I agree with arguments on both sides. I will say that I miss it. There’s nothing I like better than telling everyone about an awesome book I’ve found and doing my darndest to pimp out an author.
There are some things you learn as you begin to write books that you didn’t know as a reviewer. My own experience as an author is as one who publishes through a house and not indie, so I’ll talk to you about that.
     One of the first things you learn as you start to send your work out to try and find a publisher is how incredibly nerve wracking it is. You bust your hump on a book, then you have to send it out into the wild to sink or swim all on its own. This is the first time that someone outside your circle is judging your work, and it’s gut wrenching. The whole process is one of “hurry up and wait.” And wait. And wait. And wait.
      Then you get rejected. Probably several times. And it sucks! When you finally find a publisher, its complete elation followed by more waiting while your work is put in the editing queue and assigned to an editor, who will send you a letter telling you all the things you still need to do to make your work as perfect as possible.
       Depending on the length of your book and the amount of work the publisher/editor thinks it needs, you go back and forth with your editor working that book over. This takes months as well, because after you do your part of the polishing, the editor gets the book back, looks it over, and then sends it back again, with more notes.
       After all those content edits, you get copy edits, then proofreading…and finally a galley copy of the book. At some point in there you fill out forms that the publisher uses to design a cover and they’ll rework your blurb to make it as awesome and shiny as possible.
So now, when I read a book I really love, I’m deconstructing it to try and see how the author made it so incredible and am even awed by the level of awesome the content editor has. Because I know now how much work goes into a really wonderful book. It’s a huge collaborative effort that takes an entire team of people to produce.
       I think becoming an author has also made me more forgiving of small issues in a text. Things that used to drive me crazy, like a missing comma or even word here or there don’t send me into a cranky spiral of rantiness against the author because I know how easy it becomes to miss things like that when you’ve been over a text ten times. The author is such a small part of the picture in that respect. If the story is rockin’ and the characters compelling and sharply drawn, that’s the author and his/her content editor, and you’ve gotta give them super big props. I probably would rate books higher now as a reviewer than I used to, because I know firsthand the incredible effort that went into each and every sentence of a book.

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