***** i couldn,t put it down

*****  i couldn,t put it down

By nikcgreen

The author strode purposefully into the living room, which was the main chamber of residence in the house in which his family lived. His family were in there. Boldly the author stood before them and folded his arms in brazen fashion.

“My family,” he insisted. “I wish you to open multiple Amazon accounts and review my novel many times, giving it five stars. This way I will be able to sell many books and put food on the table for you, and also lord it over my so-called fiends in the IT department at work,” he explained curtly.

His wife looked at him curiously, full of questions.

“Why don’t you just let readers read the book and review it themselves?” She asked questioningly. “I may be soarly mistaken but isnt’ that how its supposed to work?”

The writer laughed scornfully, giving a disdainful shake of his head, to let his wife know what he thought of this strategy. His scorn spoke for itself.

“You don’t understand,” he demonstrated. “Amazon has a dirty trick up their sleeves that will put paid to my dreams of bestsellerdom. Customers can click on ‘Look Inside!’ and read the first few pages of the book before they bye it.”

His disdain spoke for itself.

“Isn’t that good?” asked his wife, with a frown of her deep brown eyes.

“No it isn’t good,” the writer exploded suddenly, in a rage of anger. “It means that people will see that I can’t write for coffee.”

“Toffee,” murmured the youngest member of his offspring, loudly under his breath.

“Not now, son.”

“I mean the word is toffee,” said the irritated child, blinking pale blue eyes like his mother’s. “You can’t write for toffee. Or coffee, come to that.”

Frustrated, the brooding writer looked in the mirror. He saw a tall, square-jawed man with windswept sandy hair, with some seashells in it too.

“What’s that man doing in here? Get him out,” snapped the writer, turning back to the image of himself in the mirror, a short and balding man with a beer gut, and sand in the turnips of his trousers. (It had been a windy day at the beach.)

“Now you’re meandering off the point,” his wife pointed out unnecessarily.

“My point is this,” bellowed the writer, raising his finger to point with. “Whom in their write mind would buy a book by someone so incapably with the English language as me? As I? As me? I don’t even know which it is. And as for getting a hundred suspiciously similar five-star reviews, forget it.”

‘I have an objection’ objected his middle son, sweeping back her luxuriant head of long cropped treacle-coloured blonde hair. [revise this bit]

‘What is it?’ asked his irasibcle father.

‘If customers see that you have a hundred five-star reviews,’ continued his daughter [son?] ‘but the prose style of a mole rat using Google Translate, then won’t the star system gradually become meaning less?’

‘Star system? This isn’t my sci-fi book. Which is even better, by the way.’

‘I mean the rating system,’ said his son, batting her eyelashes. He put down his cricket bat. ‘How will customers be able to find genuinely good indie books, that actually deserve four or five stars, if people like you go around devaluing the system? It’s runaway inflation, that’s what it is.’

‘Huh,’ harrumphed the author. His disdain spoke for itself. ‘That’s there problem, not mine.’

‘Fare enough,’ chorused his family.

The author excited the living room with a brisk stride.