Month: August 2018

An excerpt from: Paul Goat Allen | March 12, 2018, Writer’s Digest. Paul Goat Allen has worked as a genre fiction book critic and written thousands of reviews for companies like BarnesandNoble.com, Publishers Weekly, the Chicago Tribune and Kirkus Reviews.

Novelists live and die by reviews yet uncovering what garners a gushing ovation or blistering takedown is often a mystery. A professional critic lays out what it takes to earn five-star book reviews. For two decades I’d been working as a freelance genre fiction book critic for outlets such as BarnesandNoble.com, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and the Chicago Tribune. After sharing my credentials with the group, some of the writers began telling stories about mediocre or bad reviews they’d received at different points in their careers from one or more of the companies I’d listed.

As a reviewer, not much has changed since then. I enjoy all genres and have…

Over the past few years, there have been some disturbing trends in the functioning of our government. The Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case opened up campaign financing to unlimited large sums of “dark money” via anonymous contributors to political action committees that are supposedly not aligned with any individual candidate’s campaign. Corporations are deemed to have the rights of people and money deemed speech protected by the First Amendment. Rather than “one person, one vote” politics have become more a case of “one dollar, one vote”, as corporations and the wealthy are now much more able to make their voices heard during the campaign season. All previous attempts at reigning in campaign spending have been rendered meaningless and now often the amount of money a person can spend or raise becomes more significant than the ideas and policy positions individual candidates seek to bring forth.

More and…