Numbers Game

A trip to York has been an excellent excuse to neglect Authonomy where The Water’s Edge is now sinking down the rankings. And if I am ever to get on with my rewrite project I’m afraid that sink it must. Even maintaining its current position requires too much effort in finding and swapping reads. But I have made some good writing friends on Authonomy and hope I’ll catch up with them when the novel is put back together again. (Ali, Jane, Diana, Elinor, Lellie and Sandrine – this means you!)

 Ironically, as I withdraw from the fray, I am just starting to understand some aspects of how the ranking system works. It turns out that points allocated to a book when it’s backed vary according to the ‘reviewer rank’ of the backer. Reviewer points are allocated depending on the progress of a book after you have backed it, i.e. backing a ‘best seller’ book  will do little for your own reviewer ranking; backing an ‘unknown’ that subsequently shoots up the charts will boost your own rank – and consequently makes you a more effective backer of other books. Very cunning, methinks, and does something to mitigate the idea that it’s purely a numbers game.

 If anyone is still paying attention, I can tell you that The Water’s Edge has been backed by three ‘top reviewers’ so far. More perplexing is that while my book rank is hovering just outside 600, my reviewer rank is a tidy 375.   Okay, I think it is a numbers game after all. Or does this mean I should give up writing and become a professional editor?  

 While ignoring my read/review duties I also found a useful article on writing historical novels, which makes a clear statement that the story, rather than the research, is the thing to get right So all that research, however useful, is just a way of putting off the inevitable.  

 I think I knew that really.