Rebuttals

 A long time ago writing sites might have a debate about whether you should respond to bad reviews on Amazon or not.  Not being a big time author I tended to think it didn't matter if I did.  But then a couple of months ago Amazon settled the issue forever by eliminating comments from reviews.

That doesn't mean people don't still say stupid things in reviews.  Though I doubt the people who wrote stupid things ever saw my comments, at least maybe someone would see them.  Now there's no chance at all to correct fake news reviews except on a blog.

This was a particularly stupid "review" of One Day As a Bimbo:

Besides the poor grammar, the really stupid thing is the book is FREE!  It's been perma-free for years.  So saying it was "to short for the money" is moronic because you spent no money.  I think a 25-page story for free isn't that bad of a deal.  Certainly not so bad that you should give it one-star.

This 3-star review is another of those John Daniels types who wants to act like some great expert and yet clearly is not.  Check out this review of Night at the Carnival 3:

The obvious glaring error is referring to ERIC Filler as "she" and "her."  How many girls named Eric are there?

This crap about my "struggle with endings" seems to fall into that old cliche bullshit about they don't all end Happily Ever After.  I'm not writing fucking fairy tales for kindergartners so they don't all have to end Happily Ever After.  As for not being a "complete" ending the main character escapes from the psycho ex-girlfriend who changed him into a girl.  He's still a girl but doesn't feel too bad about it.  Then in the end he gets a text from the psycho ex-girlfriend to imply she's still out there.  It's basically a horror movie ending.  So you're basically saying Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and so on weren't "complete" endings?

In a shorter "review" he basically said the same thing about Night at the Carnival 2:

In this case the idiot thought the book with the creepy clown on the cover was going to end Happily Ever After with "justice" for the main character.  As for "forced relations" I don't think that really is true.  The main character had a choice:  get turned into a girl and have sex with the creepy clown or get chopped up into hamburger.  Those aren't great options but it's not "forced relations" like the clown threw him down and raped him.

The thing about both "reviews" is neither one says "verified purchase" so he's paid a grand total of $0.  Probably rented them with Kindle Unlimited.  But he did like the first book of that series, so I guess that's something.  

And then after those ones he really liked Pool Hustle Swap:

Which is funny because the ending of that isn't entirely Happily Ever After.  I mean the main character falls in love and marries a guy and she gets knocked up, but the price for this is that she had to give up her pool talent to a demon.  So while she has a new husband and child on the way, she loses something precious to her.  I'm just saying.

"Amazonian God" disappeared for about a month and then liked Mulligan, a golf swap story. "This was a fun story, when you should check out if this is your preferred genre. Seriously, it’s in Kindle unlimited so you have nothing to lose."

Looking back, he's actually been reviewing some of my books for a while, usually not favorably.   In 2016 he whined that Transformed for Summer Too needed to "leave its politics at the gate" though I still have no idea what was political about it.  And in 2018 whined that the main character in Transformed for Christmas 4 was "too giggly."

Just because a review is 4 stars doesn't mean it can't be annoying.  Like these ones of Reunion:  Gender Swap Warriors:

I object to calling it "Voltron fanfiction."  Fanfiction would imply it's actually set in the world of Voltron.  Which it's not.  Besides the gender swapping, it's not purely drawn from Voltron.  The thing the dude bitches about the bad guys not matching the technology of the good guys refers to that the good guy ship crashed on Earth over a thousand years ago, where it was found by three college kids.  That was actually drawn from the 2017 Power Rangers movie, not Voltron.  And instead of lions or dinosaurs or whatever they use space fighters that form a giant robot, more like Transformers or Robotech.  So there.

As for lacking magic, there is an evil witch based on the witch in Voltron who does use magic to make one of the good guys a double agent.  So there--again.

Then there was this one:

The title says it's BOOK ONE, which implies there could be a series, so why would everything be tied up all nice and neat?  At the end of the first story our heroes form the giant robot and hand the bad guys a defeat and escape to continue the fight.  Saying it's not "a real end" is like saying A New Hope or Empire Strikes Back wasn't a real end because they didn't defeat the Empire right away.

It reminds me of Forever Young where some people complained that the mystery of Samantha's origin wasn't all wrapped up in the first book.  Do these people not understand how series work?

On Goodreads there was this 4-star review of Chance of a Lifetime last October:

I would say it was an enjoyable read, however, it wasn't perfect, the author is good but not Jim Butcher great, so 4 out of 5 feels right. However, since finding enjoyable reading as a Transgender person is limited to Cheap porn, preachy agenda fiction, or gender bender, when I find a gender bender which isn't someone's fetish fantasy I give it a read. This is a book worth a read because it's not a GB fetish book, but a Noir fiction with a GB twist. Since there are more books in this series I do plan on continuing it. As I said, it's hard to find fiction as a Trans woman and this book hits all the right checkboxes. 

p.s. I purposely compare all Noir fiction to Butcher, because he is still the best at modern fantasy noir, I think PT Dilloway could get close, although I'm not sure Stacy is the right protag for the job.

It's nice Jim Butcher is your favorite author, but I've only read one of his books and that was years after writing this book.  So obviously I wasn't trying to be like him.  Really leading up to this I had been reading a lot of Raymond Chandler and Lawrence Block, so if you mentioned one of those I might have agreed.  I  have another of Butcher's Dresden Files books on my Amazon Cloud but I haven't been in any hurry to read it.  I think I liked the first one but it didn't rock my world to the point I said I had to become like him.  But maybe I'll keep that in mind with the second one.

This last one wasn't a negative comment.  It's a positive one that I just find amusing:

That's pretty much the textbook definition of a backhanded compliment.  Here's the cover:

I thought it would be really easy to find a cover photo.  I mean how hard could it be to find a picture of a girl in underwear?  But it was kind of difficult to find one that had a good image of the panties and showing a face too.  The one I chose I liked because my eyes are always drawn right to the panties.  They aren't really the sexy kind of panties but still my eyes are always drawn straight to them.

I was glad when I finally got a review for Another Chance by PT Dilloway.  Since it came out in 2015 I had sold or given away hundreds of copies (and who knows how many were read in KU) but gotten no ratings or reviews on Amazon.

It's too bad this person didn't write this review in 2015 or so.  I don't think Sherman, the bad guy from the first book, really deserves redemption, but it gave me an idea.  Vinaya (the main character) could team up with Sherman in a Silence of the Lambs kind of thing.  It wasn't something I had thought of on my own.  But it's been 6 years so I'm not really that keen on doing a sequel right now.