Dinah, ClinkShrink, & Roy produce Shrink Rap: a blog by Psychiatrists for Psychiatrists, interested bystanders are also welcome. A place to talk; no one has to listen.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Home Inspection is Now Available for Free
Please do download Home Inspection while it's available at no cost. If you wouldn't mind-- I would be most appreciative if you'd tell your friends/ blog/ tweet/ or Google+ about the free promotion for my novel about psychotherapy and the quest for love. And as we always say on our podcasts "Go to Amazon and write a review." If you liked In Treatment, I think you will like this.
Thank you!
Link to the novel: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008LOFEYY/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb
And if you need a free Kindle app for your computer/phone/ or tablet: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771
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15 comments:
I was planning to download this since it is free, but then I checked out the reviews on amazon. As soon as I saw that you called a review ridiculous and discounted everything s/he said -- and for the same reasons you toss at comments that you disagree with on your blog -- I knew your book is probably a lot of the same. Poor grammar and spelling, unsophisticated writing and lack of plot were all the aspects I found annoying with the chapter you posted from your other story - the one with the separated twins? So my guess is that this one is quite similar in terms of style, content, level of sophistication and interest, and level of maturity.
P.S. You come across much more mature if you simply ignore the posts you disagree with. After all, you are the one who parrots review it at amazon!
I'm on chapter 14 now and I'm hooked on the three characters, especially the therapist. I'm in therapy myself, so it's insightful to get the other perspective and hear the therapist say many things I've heard directed at me.
I haven't looked at what "A" is referencing, but as a publisher myself (not involved in the publishing of this book), I think it's very well written so far.
More comments when I'm done! Best of luck with the book and thanks for offering it for free. I refuse to buy through Amazon (indiebound or indie bookstores only for me), so this made accessing your book possible.
Cheers!
A,
Please check shortly. Your comment will probably be removed by a bog admin. I am certain that there is an audience for the book. There is an audience for Beavis and Butthead. There is an audience for "reality" TV.
Okay bloggers, I await removal of my comment!
Dear last anon:
Middle anon, thank you, I hope you continue to enjoy the book.
A: I can't recall the last time I deleted a comment, it's been months. It's possible Clink or Roy have deleted something. Spam is the exception, especially from penis enlarging services.
You are right that it is best to ignore negative reviews or insulting comments, and I deleted my comment. At Shrink Rap we get a lot of mud slung as us, and roughly 94% of the time I do ignore it, but every now and then I feel like the fact that we have a blog shouldn't mean that it's fine for people to insult us, and I impulsively respond.
I'm not sure why the fact that I blog makes it fine for readers to insult me, but I do agree that ignoring it is the more mature response. I'll work on it.
Dinah,
It is not an insult to state that one has read a book and found it to be poorly written, unsophisticated and a waste of one's time. It is an opinion. When you assess a patient to be disorganized, disheveled and lacking judgement, is that an insult or your professional opinion? You may not share your thoughts openly with the patient. You have asked people to review your book.You may want to reword your request asking for only positive reviews.
I'm in the process of reading the book, on chapter 13 so far, and personally, I like it.
The opening was a bit stiff with too many adjectives, and I kept comparing it to a script for the TV show "in treatment." The fact that the shrink had problems was unsurprizing, and while I know that life can throw you some curv-balls, then from the point of good litterature, I'd have to say that making him impotent was taking it a step too far - in my opinion of course.
I'm a foreigner, so I have a hard time commenting on the grammar, but so far I've found no spelling errors. I've found a couple of editing errors, and if you are interested, I could try to find them again, and let you know where they are.
Still - you have me hooked. First character to spark my interest was Polly, then the shrink himself (took me some time to figure out that he was male, but that's ok), and lastly Tom.
I'm surprized to see you get so bad reviews here and on Amazon. Surely, if you get in a client who is dishelved, disorganized and lacking judgement, you'd try to mention those things to him or her, so that ultimately they might figure out if that's something they want to change? I wish your critics would give more concrete examples, because I do not recognize which book they are talking about, but perhaps with actual examples from it, we could all learn something from their wisdom :)
Anyway. Those were my five cents, back to work.
Cheers for the book!
PS. If you don't belong to a writing group already, you might want to join one. I can recommend "Scribophile" personally, although in light of your 'admirers' here, I'd suggest that you sign up under a pseudonym :)
Did you give 50
shades of gray a positive write up? Do you think the author cares that people say the writing is awful?? I do know why someone else had a tough time figuring out that the narrator in your book was supposed to be a guy. Julius Strand sounds so much like Dinah trying not to sound like Dinah and not succeeding.It felt forced and false (voice). It is okay for you to trash another author on your blog but not okay for people to criticize your writing? You and the other author have more in common than you want to believe. Of course, you do not provide the silly sex scenes and you will not make much money off of your book.
To the meanies: It's fascinating that people who have so much dislike for Dinah's work or her ideas continue to follow along on this blog. It's uncomfortable for me to read it -- and I am not generally squeamish. Why is it hard to be more constructive rather than just plain mean? Or seriously, stop coming to this blog if it is so painful for you. If you don't like her style as a writer, shrink and/or blogger, keep on surfing the net, don't buy her books, try not to obsess. It's her life, her choices, you don't have to participate in it. There are endless amounts of blogs and forums that you may genuinely enjoy and feel you learn from. Or jeez, start your own blog!
In the main, Dinah is a good blogger. She overreaches with the novels. It not hate. We all have strengths and weaknesses.
I haven't finished Dinah's book cuz I have been so busy and I keep not taking my kindle to a place with wireless (that is how I can receive it), so I just have to read it in my Amazon Cloud Drive when I am at a computer.
But from what I have read, it's pretty good. I think people need to remember that books aren't that good, usually, until a major book publisher grabs the book, has an editor check it for mistakes, has someone else check it for inconsistencies, another person make plot suggestions, etc.
Dinah, so far as I know, did not have any of that. JK Rowling didn't just write Harry Potter. She wrote a draft, a whole team of people scrutinized it, made changes, and then we got what we now know as the Harry Potter series. They had someone hired whose whole job was to basically be a Harry Potter expert and correct Rowling if she wrote something inconsistent with what she wrote in the other books.
I don't think Dinah had a team of of people helping her put the book together. It's very good when you take into account that she did it on her own.
A girl: Thank you. The reviews on Amazon seem to have gotten nicer, here too.
Anon who notes I didn't like the writing in 50 Shades of Gray. Well, I have some thoughts, but I have this funny feeling that anything I said would be wrong. (probably including that)
Anon re meanies: I wonder that too. Thank you for the support. In the past, when readers have said that commenters have made them uncomfortable, we've turned on comment moderation. Scream if anyone wants me to do that for a while.
Jane-- you can't imagine how right you are. Shrink Rap was a multi-year process and I lost count of all the editors, readers, committees and people involved. There was an entire meeting at the publishing house that was focused on whether to let us have a duck on our cover (it was nixed with a very official letter), multiple editors, we still have regular contact with the publicist. Home Inspection got a little direction along the way but it has not had any professional editing, marketing, etc. The cover was done by a neighbor who just graduated from high school. One of our readers chimed in and sent me pages of typos. And pulling this together has been more work than I imagined.
Dinah got no help? It seems she does not agree, unless some other Dinah Miller wrote a book called Home Inspection, in which case, one of them may be able to sue the other.
http://www.bancroftpress.com/editorial/AuthorAcknowledgements.html
Ah, I mentioned that small publisher (Bruce Bortz of Bancroft Press) in this post:
http://psychiatrist-blog.blogspot.com/2012/07/you-be-judge.html
and in the book's acknowledgment page. Funny, he quoted me, but he didn't publish the book (I think he said there was a freeze at the time).
He was very helpful, but it was a single meeting over sandwiches, not the kind of ongoing editorial help we got from JHUP.
You can quibble over that with BB. In the meantime, I always proof anything that is going out for publication. I hope he paid for the sandwich.
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