I’m always a little wigged out when an author links to a review I’ve written of one of their books. It’s happened a few times, usually (but not always) when I’ve written something positive.
It’s safe to say that if you post a review of a book online, the author of said book will see it, because they actively seek them out. Book reviews are ostensibly for readers, but it’s mainly writers who get excited by them, at least in science fiction and fantasy. That’s because so many writers are chasing so few readers. The marketplace is a lot more hardscrabble than it once was, it seems, and authors have increasingly been taking the marketing of their books into their own hands. They have a lean and hungry look; they need their books reviewed.
Now I read 85 books last year and am on track to read even more in 2013, but even so I can’t read everything in my narrow field of interest. And I’m not at all typical: according to a Pew survey, 78 percent of Americans 16 and older reported reading a book in the previous 12 months; among that 78 percent, the median number of books read per year was eight. (The average, 17, is higher thanks to heavy readers.) If the average book reader reads only one book a month or so, it’s a real challenge for midlist authors to make their book that one book.
The important thing is not to be sucked into what I suppose I could call the marketing-industrial complex, in which reviews are essentially fodder for the writer’s PR campaign, or an exercise in logrolling.
More broadly, the reader’s interest needs to come before the author’s. We often get that backward: so much noise is generated online, by writers, about their careers that it’s easy to forget that this is really about readers. A writer’s career is a means to an end: the work. Writers exist to provide books to readers; readers do not exist to provide writers with a career.
It’s dead easy to shower an excellent book with effusive praise. But if the author is in my social circle, that praise will lose some of its power, and even the author will wonder if I really mean it, or if I’m just sucking up. But a critical review is harder if I’m on friendly terms with the author—about as easy as giving an honest answer when that author sidles up to you at a convention and says, “So, you read my book. What did you think?” (This has happened to me.)
I have to confess that sometimes that review doesn’t get written as a result; it gets shunted to the backburner and eventually loses its timeliness. Most of the time, though, I don’t review a book because I can’t think of anything profound to say about the book that would add to the discussion. I usually have too much to work on anyway. Scathing reviews of bad books are often fun to read, and I suppose they would be fun to write, too, but I don’t think I’m mean enough to pull that off. Problematic books that aren’t bad, books that fall short of their promise, books that aren’t quite up to standard, books that left me with little more than “meh” as my response—these books require much more thought and consideration to review. More than I have available to give. It’s like marking: A’s and F’s are easy; it’s the C’s and B’s that are harder to assess.
I’m not a professional book reviewer,1 just some guy with a blog who reads too much, and who can get awfully self-conscious when people read what he writes. I’ll get the hang of this eventually, I suppose.
Footnote
- At least not at the time of writing this post, I wasn’t. [added 2024]