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Reviewing a Book, Part I

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Book reviews allow us to share more than our opinions about specific books or authors: they are an opportunity to defend what we consider the qualities a good book should have, while often giving us easy examples of the traits a book should not posses. A well written review offers a lesson to writers and readers.

In this first part of “Reviewing a Book” we examine basic school book review assignments and promotional marketing reviews. Our second part will explore impartial reviews such as those appearing in newspapers and magazines. Some college courses also encourage students to compose long-form impartial reviews.

Beginning with Book Reports

Our first experiences with writing about books is the elementary school book report. The genre is the simplest form of a review. Consider one possible assignment outline for young students:

  • Title
  • Author
  • Setting
  • Protagonist(s)
  • Antagonist(s)
  • Other Characters
  • Summary
  • Why I would or would not recommend this book.

In the lower elementary grades, students might complete a basic form with spaces for the required information. Teachers want students to develop the ability to identify elements of narratives. Early reviews reflect this emphasis on identification. Once students can identify narrative elements, teachers encourage more advanced comprehension and application activities.

Once you can identify the role characters play within a narrative, you are ready to explore the lessons taught by the choices characters make. In upper elementary grades and middle school, students begin to compose five-paragraph reviews exploring the themes and theses of books. The theme of a work is often a generalization. A thesis is the core argument of a work.

Theme: A family is more than genetic inheritance.

Thesis: An adopted child is as much a part of a loving family as any child might be.

Appreciating the relationship between a theme and the thesis of a work helps you understand why a writer makes certain choices when developing a plot. Exploring such complex concepts as “theme” requires more than a simple fill-in-the-blanks approach.

The (infamous) standard school essay format leads to a review that might be structured according to this model from the state of New York (http://www.nysedregents.org):

Catchy Review Title

Paragraph 1: Introduction of the Review. This paragraph mentions the author and the book title. Indicate your overall recommendation in the first paragraph, which will be rephrased in the conclusion.

Paragraph 2: Summary and Main Characters. Summarize the story and describe the main characters.

Paragraph 3: Favorite Section. Describe the best part of the book, explaining why other readers will enjoy it, without giving away the entire plot. If you are writing a negative review, explain your least favorite part of the book.

Paragraph 4: Lessons Learned. Explain the theme of the story and any lessons that the author wants readers to remember.

Paragraph 5: Conclusion of the Review. The last paragraph should restate if you recommend the book to others or not.

Book reviews expand in detail as we gain experiences as readers and writers, but the underlying structure remains the same. A New York Times book review tells us a bit about the author, the basics about the book, and tries to persuade us to either read or avoid an encounter with the text. The breadth and depth increase, but those elementary school models remind us that most of us have written book reviews.

In high school, book review assignments resemble marketing reviews. Teachers tend to ask students to write about books they enjoyed reading. As a result, the book reviews of high school students read like promotional materials.

Blurbs and Marketing Reviews

If you read dust jacket endorsements, known as cover blurbs, you are familiar with the shortest form of marketing review. A marketing review is meant to sell a book; rarely does a marketing review teach the potential reader a meaningful lesson. Of course, if you do buy a book based solely on blurbs, you do risk learning how useless blurbs are.

Blurbs read like the snippets of movie reviews studios use (often out of context) to promote their films. Hyperbole is the norm in blurbs. “The ‘must-read’ book of the year!” “This book will change your life.” “I had to read it cover to cover. It is impossible to put down this book.” If blurbs were accurate, then every book published would be superior to all previous books. Blurbs are less than 100 words and seldom longer than 50 words.

Marketing reviews are short reviews commissioned by a publisher or author. Some writing groups offer to review member books, so these reviews can be cited in marketing materials. Such reviews are collegial and supportive, rarely examples of detailed critical analysis. However, before dismissing all marketing reviews as useless, appreciate that there is a difference between being supportive and being dishonest. When writing groups review books by members or when an agent asks an author for a review, these reviewers tend do their best to compose honest reviews.

Marketing reviews tend to be less than 750 words. Within the constraints of their purpose, the reviews adhere to the conventions of longer form reviews you might find in newspapers or magazines.

A sample marketing review structure:

Catchy Review Title Review Subtitle

Paragraph 1: Introduction. This paragraph includes short, easily quoted sentences about the best qualities of the book. Mention the author and the title in the middle of the paragraph. The wittier your statements recommending the book, the better in a marketing review.

Paragraphs 2 and 3: Summary. In the summary paragraphs, continue the positive and witty recommendation model. Marketing reviews tend to embrace adjectives and adverbs, without the absurd hyperbole of blurbs. Clichés pepper marketing reviews, but we wish they didn’t. You do not need to write, “The dangerous voyage across Lake Superior during a squall had me on the edge of my seat.” Replace a cliché like “edge of my seat” with more detail to make the marketing review more substantial.

Paragraph 4: Characters. People want to know what makes the main characters compelling. Marketing materials know that people remember characters better than plot points.

Paragraph 5: Promote the Author. Marketing reviews tend to include more promotion of the author than impartial reviews do.

Paragraph 6: Style Points. Because most marketing reviews try to associate an author’s style with his or her biography, praise of the style tends to follow the biographical information. For example: “Drawing on her experience as a surgeon, Dr. Garza vividly describes the operating room scenes. Readers witness the common mistakes surgeons make under pressure, from a firsthand perspective.”

Paragraph 7: Conclusion. Again, the wittier, the better. The first and last paragraphs of a marketing review are the most important because they are meant to be quoted.

If you are asked to write a marketing review, we suggest outlining the review using the above model. A marketing review needs to fit on a page or two. The sentences and the paragraphs are short, allowing them to be quoted. As Shakespeare wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Part II

In our next post, we will address composing long-form reviews.

Publishers Losing Control

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Publishers are still relevant in the Amazon-dominated world of book retailing, but they are losing their influence in some of the most important areas of publishing — and they will either adapt or fade into the smallest niches.

Academic publishing is a huge industry, from peer-review journals to textbooks. There are also industry journals, which cater to a variety of fields and specialities. Publishers charge a lot for academic and industry publications because they can.

Over the next five years, and certainly within a decade, major universities with in-house “presses” and journals will migrate to digital editions. There are several content management systems (CMSs) designed specifically to manage academic journals and monographs. I anticipate that these systems will someday support numerous output formats from a single database of articles or chapters. If you need an e-book in ePub format, a few clicks later it will be transferred to your device or computer.

The Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca) is one example of a set of open platforms targeting the academic publishing market. The applications are free and already popular among research universities around the globe. Other open software solutions and numerous commercial solutions exist. I’ve helped install many of these platforms; one or two good administrators can manage a complete publishing and online solution.

We’ve already seen self-published books for the mass market displace books from major publishing houses on Amazon. Self-published textbooks are starting to rise on Apple’s iTunes U. The publishers are losing control — so they can either adapt or fade away.

Industry organizations will also move to online, digital publishing. They won’t need to rely on massive publishing companies to print and distribute journals. Those organizations that are also publishers, and there are many, will also migrate to digital publishing. They will be forced to make content more affordable and more readily available.

As an aside, I hope writers aren’t among the losers in this shift to affordable distribution models. So far, moved to digital formats haven’t helped publishers or writers. We will need to find a way to balance the needs of writers with the needs of readers. Then again, academic publishers have seldom offered fair compensation to writers.

 

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Writers Need Editors

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Many great writers need great editors.

I recently watched biographies of Mark Twain and Jules Verne. Both of these writers relied on collaboration to craft their famous works into masterpieces.

Pierre-Jules Hetzel edited and published the works of Verne. According to the biography, Hetzel was involved in every stage of Verne’s writing. The editor-publisher would help with outlines, guide character development, and aggressively edited the works of his friend. There is some debate as to how much Hetzel might have written — but that doesn’t matter to me. What is important is that the works of Jules Verne seem to have been sloppy and disorganized without editing.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the legendary Mark Twain, relied on many colleagues to help shape his works, including William Wright and Bret Harte. Twain wrote a great deal, often in choppy vignettes that had to be stitched together with some assistance. Friends like Wright helped Twain balance his wit with storytelling. Pacing a story is not easy, and Twain recognized the value of collaborating to polish a tale.

While these are only two examples, many — if not most — famous writers share credit with editors.

I’ve met too many aspiring writers unwilling to recognize that writing is a collaborative process. The self-publishing boom is not helping this situation. Maybe it is because a writer needs to be confident; rejection is part of the publishing process. Maybe it is because a writer doesn’t want someone else to alter a work that is a part of the writer’s soul. There are probably a dozen reasons many emerging writers don’t want to call on an editor.

Read about famous writers and learn about their relationships with editors and publishers. We are losing those relationships in our digital era, and that concerns me.

Lately, I’ve read too many stories that are not “good” by the most generous of standards. I imagine sitting down with the authors and asking them questions. Yes, I see too many grammar and mechanical errors, but the problems that annoy me involve storytelling. Characters suddenly appear, clues are omitted, and hate turns to love in an instant. Books feel like puzzles that shipped with four or five missing pieces. You can still make out the image, but it is unfulfilling.

If you are set on self-publishing, find an editor. I don’t mean a copyeditor, though that is certainly good advice. No, find an editor with experience shaping stories. You want someone able to tell you why the main character won’t be liked by readers. You need someone to tell you when the story is boring. You need someone willing to bruise your ego a little so that story you want to tell is the one you finally publish.

There are solitary writers, but they are exception. Most writers need feedback to be at their best.

Exploring iBooks Author Books and Templates

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I’ve talked to a few authors and editors who wish to create custom templates for iBooks Author, well beyond what is possible making minor changes to fonts.

To create a custom template with altered background images and formatting, first create a simple iBook using an existing template.

If you are familiar with the ePub format, which is a compressed directory, you know there are several folders within the ePub. These folders contain what might be compared to a self-contained website. I like the ePub structure and wish iBooks were closer to that format than they are. But, Apple goes its own way. The iBooks format is much simpler than ePubs.

Do you wonder what is inside an iBooks “iba” file? To find out, do the following:

    1. Copy your “.iba” (I use the Apple-D “Duplicate” command in Finder)
    2. Change the extension from “.iba” to “.zip”
    3. Double-click the “.zip” file, which will uncompress the folder
    4. Explore the new folder

First, you will notice there are a lot of files. In the iBook I tested for this analysis, there were 16,720 files and one folder. That’s why I suggest using a nearly empty book to craft a custom template.

The entire text of the book, layout information, and revision data reside in two files:

    buildVersionHistory.plist
    index.xml

The “index.xml” can be opened in any text editor. If you open this file, you can skim through the file until you see the text of your book. While the ePub format supports chapters or sections as individual files, the Apple approach places everything in one huge XML file. Again, I prefer the ePub standard instead of placing everything in one disorganized folder.

The only subdirectory / folder that Apple creates in the iBooks format is named “QuickLook.” The folder contains thumbnail images of the book. This is interesting because the mail folder also contains a long list of thumbnail images. In the sample book I am using for this analysis, the thumbnails in the main folder are named KFPageThumbnail-XXX.jpeg, where the XXX ranges from 1 to 650.

In the example books I have explored, there are some images that seem to exist no matter what. These image files are:

    slate_green.jpg
    slate_grey.jpg
    slate_light-grey.jpg
    slate_rust.jpg
    slate_tan.jpg
    slate_yellow.jpg

I don’t know what the purpose of the “slate” set of images might be, but they appear in three different books I created using a mix of templates. Maybe someone else can dig into these?

There are also several other image files. These seem to be the images used for the various templates, based on my explorations. These files are different in each template. The design files in the book used for this example are:

    Background-1.jpg
    Colored_paper_backgrounds-1.jpg
    Light-parchment-paper_a-1.jpg
    Photo 2.jpg
    Photo 6.jpg
    Shape1.png

Three Adobe/Apple color profiles are also in the book folder:

    color-profile
    color-profile-1
    color-profile-2

If you want to craft a custom template, you need to alter the files in this uncompressed iBook folder. For example, you could change the “Background-1.jpg” to a background of your own design. Match the size of the existing file, though. Don’t worry about things like “DPI” or other settings in a graphics program: focus on the pixel-by-pixel size, such as 1024-by-768 pixels used by the original iPad screens.

Once you have changed images or made other tweaks, you can then compress the file back into a “.zip” format. Changing “.zip” to “.iba” makes the compressed folder an “iBook” again, a document you can open and edit in iBooks Author.

Again, the steps are:

    1. Create an “empty” shell book using an existing template.
    2. Duplicate the file and change the extension to “.zip” so it can be decompressed.
    3. Decompress the iBook into a folder you can edit.
    4. Alter or replace any images you wish to customize.
    5. Compress the modified folder.
    6. Change the extension from “.zip” back to “.iba” to open the file in iBooks Author.
    7. Open the new file in iBooks Author and save it as a template!

You now have a customized template.

For a discussion on creating a template, read the following thread in the Apple Discussion Forums:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3677610

Some iBooks Author Thoughts

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I have been working in iBooks Author and finding it fairly good for basic tasks. However, the moment you want a bit extra from the program, it does fall short. Then again, the ePub 2 format also falls short in numerous areas.

The “.iba” (iBooks) and “.epub” formats are nothing more than standard compressed “zip” files containing various folders and files of HTML, images, fonts, and more. The structures are well documented, but not simple to edit and update without a good tool.

Let me acknowledge that some of the “problems” I experience with ePub/iBook formats are limitations that will require some re-imagining of the book format. The issues arise because eBooks in various formats are designed to allow the *reader* more control of content than the designer. The eBook concept is reader-centered, not designer centered.

The reader can change orientation (portrait vs. landscape), magnification, typefaces, font sizes, and screen colors (inverse, for example, when white-on-black is preferable than black on white). With everything a reader can do, the layout of a book is dynamic, not static.

My mind is already pondering how eBook generators could be improved.

A dynamic book, at least with current tools, cannot display footnotes or marginalia easily. My opinion is that references should “pop-up” the full citation, which for now means coding in HTML. I’d prefer an easier method that not only adds a pop-up, but it would be great to add citations to a bibliography and include links to works available via various booksellers.

I suppose a simple script can be added to the eBook pages, just like you might use for website pop-up definitions. I’ll certainly be testing the idea for my current projects.

The dynamic pages also make indices difficult. You cannot link to “page numbers” because the numbers change. For now, creating links to anchors within the text is the best solution I can imagine. Links are not a perfect solution, but they are a solution.

Again, hand-coding links is not horrible, but can’t this be automated? The programming logic is straightforward: given a word or phrase, find it and create a link. The text of the link could be the chapter and section numbers, since page numbers won’t help readers. An example index entry might read: Fonts; Ch 1 Sec 2, Ch 2 Sec 1. It isn’t as convenient as page numbers at first glance, but remember that these would be hyperlinks to the anchors. I plan to use this approach for a book we’re converting at this moment.

To use the “anchor” approach, you do need to keep track of anchors somehow. I suppose the anchors would be something like this: “#fonts_1″, “#fonts_2″, and so on, incremented for each new occurrence of the indexed word and not associated with a chapter or section since text can be moved. The index generator would have to track locations, though.

Most eBook generators create decent tables of content, but they don’t easily generate tables of figures or lists of tables. I’d like those features, too. Yet more “auto-generation” based on anchors, ids, and styles, I would suggest.

None of the missing features would be difficult to add to eBook generators. Already, iBooks Author includes a glossary tool. Why not add some of the other common textbook features?

Once the features are added, let’s do something about the pain and misery required to create custom templates. Why don’t the eBook tools, including iBooks, do a better job with the CSS they generate? I’ve used Pages, InDesign, Sigil, and iBooks to create eBooks. I’ve also used Scrivener. Without question, the bare minimum ePub generated by Scrivener was the best of the bunch — because it was simple. I used the Oxygen XML editor to tweak the CSS in a Scrivener ePub and was pleased.

We all mix-n-match software applications for the best possible results. We create images in Illustrator or Photoshop, edit long texts in Word, and finish the layout of a book with InDesign or QuarkXPress. But, I consider the CSS aspect of eBooks similar to the styles of InDesign or Word. Why should I need another program to tune simple CSS, with only a handful of styles?

In time, iBooks Author and similar tools will add the features I want. Even with fine-tuning and hand-coding, eBooks are much easier to create and distribute than traditional printed books.