40 reviews in 24 hours
As of this writing, The Variant has 11 reviews on Amazon — and nice ones, too. My thanks to everyone who’s left one. Eleven is not bad for something that’s been out for a little over a week.
But several of the books nearby it on the bestseller list have more. A lot more.
Norah Roberts’s Vision in White has 96. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has 187. Bill O’Reilly’s A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity: A Memoir has 193.
I’d love a few more reviews. I think they make the book feel more real in a wisdom-of-crowds way. So if you’ve already read The Variant, but haven’t yet posted a review, let me offer you some enticement:
If we can get to 40 reviews by noon (LA time) on Thursday, I’ll post a scene from my never-finished comedy Greeks, a collegiate buddy comedy set in mythological times.
Make no mistake: it’s not The Greatest Thing Ever Typed. But it is fairly amusing, and you’ll only see it if you and enough of your fellow readers spend a minute or two placing a review.
Twenty-four hours, starting now.
Articles
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:33 pm
What about 40 reviews in 40 hours, which should end about 4am Friday? Just a thought. =P
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
I haven’t used Amazon in so long that I forgot the password for the email that no longer exists. Ironically, you can’t review a product until 24 hours after a purchase. But it’s the thought that counts.
My review would mention how The Variant brought me back to all the science fiction stories any geek poured over through high school and how happy I am to have remembered what a good sci-fi short story can do for the soul.
Ethically though, I appreciate your strong arm tactics of gathering your faithful minions to wreak havoc on those Amazonian drones.
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Nora Roberts, fyi. And she has a HUGE following, so don’t feel bad about that. :) (Not that you were…)
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Good lord, man. You know your readership wants to see this, so this is…borderline blackmail?
I like you even more.
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Shameless!
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Lord help us all… You’re going to make The Variant the new Nines… You will drown this blog and flood it with as many Variant tales as possible… And you still haven’t replied to the thesis that your movies are trash. That’s cowardly.
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:41 pm
@S and @Cybermonker:
Yes and Yes.
@Barbara:
Cowardly is not leaving an email address. So feel free to not come back any time.
Also, I generally don’t wade into comment threads once they leave the front page.
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:25 pm
John, don’t listen to the haters.
I appreciate all the Variant tales as much as the story itself. The whole idea of self epublishing is really fascinating so keep it up. I’m pulling for 60 in 24.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Done. 33 reviews – only 7 more people! :)
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Sort of off-topic, regarding your latest tweet:
I’ve heard an idea proposed, I’ve no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It’s an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It’s often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying “Jump!” and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, “For Christ’s sake, don’t!” In fact, vertigo is explained by some not as the fear of falling, but as the temptation to jump!
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Shouldn’t you make it 48 hours? Since the fine print on Amazon says it may take up to 48 hours to post a review?
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:48 pm
@Rafael – Interesting… but I pretty much prefer anything that gets John to refer to stuff as going Ape Shit to rational explanation. :)
‘Sides I’m pretty sure what you’re talking about is a mind going Bat Shit, and that’s just a whole nother field of science.
(You might have an interesting premise though. – If one were to claim that not only is our current makeup stored in the genomic map, but also an archival memory which could be forcibly re-stimulated? – An unexplained wave of suicides? – A Jurassic park of temporally regressed people?)
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:54 pm
You’d want it to look as far from “30 Days of Night” as possible, but I’m pretty sure the guy doing the genomic “Instinct Editing” would look more like a dude in a video bay, and less like a dude in a bunson-honeydew lab.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Can’t wait to read the scene. I love period comedies – so many clever jokes to be had. However, it seems the general public doesn’t care for them, really. If “Year One” does well, though, you might have to finish this one.
June 4th, 2009 at 2:17 am
Yay, #40! It’s in, guys. Rock a’rolla round the bend!
June 4th, 2009 at 6:32 am
I’ll post my review here as I’m tired of having to create an account at yet another website simply to share my thoughts…
Very good read. I’m not normally a big fan of sci-fi/drama the story leaves a very human emotion for the characters lingering at the end. Being a reader of all things August I thought your voice carried throughout the piece. I’ll wager that most of your fans would have recognized it as your story without having been told so.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:18 am
Do you take requests? I’m trying to phrase this without spoilers, but there is a discussion between the two variants wherein they discover their similarities. It is about a paragraph long. I would absolutely love to know more. I’d pay another 99 cents to see that paragraph expanded into three pages.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Or is three pages too much? I’d take a page.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
@Rafael et al. “Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over.” Sartre