Why do you wear Armani?

I haven't blogged in so many months that it's almost alien to be here. I think I am on crack - not the drug but a rather literal connotation of the word. When I hear or see something that infuriates me enough to put forth my thoughts on the blog, I "crack". This morning, I was harmlessly surfing twitter when I came across a blog post that had enough malice built in it to match Osama Bin Laden.

For the uninitiated, a few months ago, the blogger community was up in arms against an author. From the bloggers perspective, the author had slighted the community of online book reviewers at large.

You can read the details here to understand the authors perspective.

http://gyaankasagar.blogspot.in/2013/07/the-fifth-estate-is-it.html?m=1

I am not sure if you've been able to understand the angst but you would have realized that our friend, the author in question, has left 'no turn un-stoned' to make his point. I think the language used in his post is proof enough that the person is suffering from a misplaced sense of superiority.

In all fairness, the author has raised some pertinent questions about bloggers having no literary background. Strange, when contrasted with the fact that the author is a marketing and advertising executive who doesn't have a 'literary' background either.

There are several instances in this blog post that I could counter and present in a different perspective but that is not my intention. Given, that I am in the same situation as the author and share the same 'online agency', I thought it was pertinent to put forth my perspective of the situation.

When I was approached by a blogger to do a review of my book, "The Homing Pigeons", I took it a step further. I requested this blogger to help me reach out to as many bloggers as possible. I was a novice and she was in the circuit. Her insights helped me immensely. It also meant a lot of labour on her part and it was only fair that I paid her for her hard work.

Yet, because I am a control freak, I reviewed every single blogger that would review my book. A lot of them were selected and a few were rejected. To say, that I was uninformed of who was going to review my book, would be a fallacy.

When the reviews started coming in, they ranged from 1-5 on the review scale. Some reviewers considered it the worst book ever written and some thought that I was the next big thing on the literary circuit. Did the bad reviews disappoint me?

I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't disappointed. A book, any book, is the result of sweat and toil for the author. As a business, writing is the worst means to make money because all your investment is upfront with no guarantee of a return. Even after completing the book, an author is not sure that the work will ever see the light of the day. So, when someone calls all that effort, a piece of trash, it is natural to be disappointed. Worse still, the feedback is very contrasting - some reviewers wanted the book to be shorter and the others wanted the book to be longer. Some loved the end and others hated it. As an author, I am the best judge of my craft. Does a review impact my ability to judge myself? I think what I have been successfully able to do, is to filter out the noise from the song. I picked up relevant points and disregarded the feedback that I didn't agree with. But, there is a disappointment associated with every bad review.

So, how does one deal with the disappointment? Does one go onto a social media site and send out derogatory messages, hiding behind the guise of humour? The answer has to be an unequivocal "NO".

In a broader sense, bloggers are a subset of the readers that an author wants to reach out  to. Irrespective of their literary background, a blogger is a reader first. Readers have different reactions to different books. It is unnatural to expect everyone to like every book. It's about a readers own personal taste. I have met an equal number of people who have loved and hated the bestselling "Immortals of Meluha". Does that make it a bad book or a good book?

Why do some people have two cubes of sugar in their coffee? And why do some have their coffee without sugar?

It's like someone asking me why I prefer Calvin Klein over Armani. 

Even when I can't afford either, my response would be : "Because I like to"