But the part that I found most interesting, is when I went and looked at his 1 star reviews, in that there were quite a few familiar names with the same reviews! Oh, I had a good laugh at that!! What is it with some women that they can not stand stand for story to be written that features a more masculine hero, and more feminine heroines? ESPECIALLY when we have Paranormal Romance, where each Heroine ends up with MULTIPLE slavishly devoted males, who satisfy her every sexual fantasy, which is explained in graphic and minute detail?
I don't see guys going there and making one star reviews complaining about how the female author is a stunted teen-aged girl who has never slept with a man and is writing a mary sue based on her childish adolescent fantasies, do you? Of course not.
PNR and woman's romance is far far 'worse' than anything I (or this other author) write, or have written, when it comes to sex, descriptive sex, sexism, etc. So why don't these harpies feel the need to attack that as well? Do they think it's okay for women to write these kinds of things about men? But heaven help us if a man writes anything even close to that?
I used to write PNR under a pen name, it was (and still is) quite successful. While some people may not have liked the story, or complained about the quality, no one ever ever ragged on it being a teenaged wetdream, or demeaning to men. Even when my heroines ended up with their own personal harem's of male lovers who worshiped them! But then, everyone thinks a woman wrote those stories, so that makes it okay then, doesn't it?
*GRIN*
Never been a big fan of double standards! I mean if you don't like my stuff, that's fine! I don't write for everyone, and I'm not going to change to suit the people who don't like it. Especially not the social justice harpies. My stories are meant to be fun, they're meant to be escapism, and I just want the people who read them to have a good time. I don't criticize women's fiction for the way it demeans and uses/abuses men. Maybe you shouldn't criticize men's fiction, especially when it doesn't come anywhere near that level of abuse. (Oh, and almost all of my beta readers are women, two of them are department heads managing lots of people in critical environments, definitely -strong- mature women, they don't have a problem with my hero's in the slightest, and they are not the type to hold their tongues either!)
You should know that a large portion of your readers for POI come from a certain fangroup who like a few genres not commonly done in mainstream literature. Those are
ReplyDelete1)"Transported to another world", where average joe from current world gets pulled into another more exciting world somehow (usually a fantasy world)
2)"Reincarnation" Protagonist dies at the start of the story and reincarnates into another world and/or a different species and you explore the world that way.
3) "Virtual Reality", protagonist plays out a story of a player in an amazing virtual reality game.
These are often paired with an "overpowered protagonist" who somehow gets ridiculously strong and can walk through his enemies with ease.
The people who like these series come from the Japanese light novel fandom. Your series as well as Daniel Black are two of the more popular Amazon published books. The website in question would be
http://royalroadl.com/
https://bato.to/forums/topic/22141-where-can-i-find-recommendations/
You'll find the people who don't like harem stories are much quieter there since almost every fiction on the website has one to some degree.
On the first one, I only found two mentions of my work, and they were both in responses to other person's posts (one of which appeared to be you, so thank you very much for mentioning me).
ReplyDeleteOn the second site (bato.to), I only found one buried mention of the series (with no links) and then a couple of links to pirated copies of my stuff, no links to the actual buy site.
So, I don't think the people at either of those sites are fans of mine, because they don't buy what I write, and on the second site they just pirate (steal) it.
They do seem to be big fans of Daniel Black however, as there were dozens of mentions of his books, with actual links to the pay link for the books, not pirated copies. So I can see that they're fans of that author, and hopefully they're paying him at least.
But they're not buying my books, so they're not fans of mine. So I'm fairly certain that a large portion of my readers (note that I only count paying customers, the rest don't matter to me, as they don't pay for me to survive) are not coming from those sites, or that 'fandom'.
Yes, it would be cool if there was some big fandom out there I was tapping into that was promoting and helping me.
Hmm, I thought the pirated copies were gone long ago on that site. I'm pretty sure they got nailed for it by the site owners and stuff like yours all got taken down.
ReplyDeleteRoyalRoadL is a fictionpress type website dedicated to those three specific genres I mentioned. The users on RoyalRoadL are frequent visitors of that batoto list I assure you. And there is quite a large group of users on both sites, so even if there are pirates which are everywhere, there are also a large group of people who pay.