FavourableReview.Com

 As a writer, specifically because, apparently, I have no rizz, the hardest thing I've found is getting people who have told you privately that they've read and enjoyed your work to admit it in public. To go onto a public forum - perhaps somewhere the book is sold and where people read reviews to judge whether a purchase is worthwhile - and write "I enjoyed this book". That's really all that's required. I mean, you could get into the specifics - the prose style, the big-belly-yuk-yuks, the part where you actually started to feel something - but really, "I enjoyed this book", is fine. A sentence it took me three seconds to write. 

You would be doing me - poor and old and sad - a massive favour. And, hopefully, you'd be telling the truth anyway. There would be no moral quandary. If you hated it, that's fine. But, like, keep it to yourself, yeah? 

I've just gone on Facebook - it's a kind of social media platform used by the elderly - asking people to write reviews. Because books live and die by them, and I don't have many. It's painful and demeaning. It looks like an admission of weakness or neediness, and you know how keen middle-aged men are on seeming weak and needy. Middle-aged men would rather shoot themselves in the head than ask for help. It's why suicide is the biggest killer of men in my age group in the country I live in. I wrote a play about it once. They liked it most places, but in Belfast one reviewer suggested the protagonist "should man up." Go figure for the sad boys dying in barns. 

I'm not about to do anything silly - and that's the first time I've ever said that and it's been true - but it is somewhat demoralising having to repeatedly ask people to write the reviews they've said they'll write over and over. Even now, friendless and likeless, that post is warding people off like a leper's bell. No likes. No blue thumbs. No action. It could be Facebook, of course. There's an ever growing list of things you can do to displease the dyspeptic tyrant, and maybe asking people to be nice about something somewhere else is enough to earn the giant's ire. But I don't know. There IS something properly awful about begging for love in the public market. Diogenes would have been disgusted. 

Does it help if I say I don't care about your love? I just want to sell books. If I get enough reviews the algorithms on Amazon start to dance. They'll shove my little book under the noses of others. They may buy it. They may hate it - they won't, it's delightful - but they'll buy it, and my publisher will be pleased and I might get to write another one. This is a business. I'm an entrepreneur, dealing in a crypto-currency called "favourable review". It has a market weight. It means something. Make me a favourable review millionaire, Dragons.