It’s true. Not because of my Heathen Godlessness (or at least not only because), but because I dare to review books.
The piece starts off calmly and reasonably enough. The writer, PaperbackWriter (PBW for short) explains why she doesn’t read reviews of her work, and why she doesn’t think book reviews necessarily help her.
And then right around paragraph 8, she starts losing it:
Now, some ditz with internet access and a hair up an orifice for whatever reason wants to come and tell the world how he or she would write my book? Oh, be my guest. Only when you write that review, imagine how you’d feel if I came into your place of business, knowing little to nothing about how to do your job, and commenced to decide how well you did it. Then imagine me going to your boss and saying, I think Jane Reviewer sucks at the job that pays her mortgage, feeds her children and keeps her from living under a bridge. Dock her pay, will you? Now I’m off to smear her on every bookkeeping site on the internet. Oh, and if you ever need a new bookkeeper, here’s my card…
So, okay, despite this, I accept that I am a public figure, subject to public opinion. Goes with the job. Certainly you reviewers are entitled to your opinions, and free speech—something I dearly love—protects your right to air them. Air them. But expect me to read it? Think I’m going to learn something from you? Based on what? Have you written sixty-two novels? I have. How many of yours are published? My #27 and #28 will be out next month. Let’s put some credentials on the table here.
Right, forgot. You don’t have any. You just have your opinion.
REEEERRRRR! HISSSSS! Somebody put some SoftPaws on this dame. Hey, you know what? I write for a living. Not fiction, true, but I’ve produced, edited and revised well over 100 technical manuals in the five years I’ve worked as a writer/illustrator/webmaster for my company. And if a mechanic complained to my boss and said “That latest service manual is complete shit, the instructions and photos are confusing,” then based on what this writer is saying, I’d be justified in telling the customer: “GET THAT HAIR OUT OF YOUR ASS. You don’t know the torments I went through to crop, adjust and clean up those photos! You don’t know how many meetings I had with engineers and how many prints I consulted to find out the tolerances required for the clutch! How many service manuals have you created? Oh that’s right, NONE.”
This example is not strictly analogous, of course. Writing fiction is very different from writing a tech manual, just as the reasons why people read a tech manual are generally very different from the reasons why people read a novel. But the claim that those of us who don’t write or edit fiction professionally are not qualified to critique or have an opinion on a book is quite possibly the most fragrant pile of bullshit I’ve encountered in quite a while, and is a classic defense posture affected by thin-skinned whiners everywhere when their work is reviewed negatively. Last time I checked, reviews involved a person’s opinion based on several complex factors, chief of all being personal aesthetics, and I don’t see how publishing 28 books would somehow enhance my aesthetic sense. Now critiquing somebody’s bookkeeping, or engineering, or a PhD dissertation on the flurorescence of nitrous oxide when bombarded with high-energy electromagnetic waves would take a LOT more technical knowledge than reviewing a book—but even a layperson can catch errors and point out incompetence if the mistakes are particularly flagrant. So PBW’s analogy is even shittier than mine is.
I respect PBW’s freedom to read or not read, or to take to heart or disregard any and all reviews about her work. But she completely misses the point about why people like me write reviews. I don’t write reviews in the hopes of instructing the author on how to do her job, just as Joe Mechanic isn’t trying to tell me how to use PhotoShop and InDesign when he’s telling me that something about a manual is confusing him. I write reviews for a myriad of reasons:
- I’m a loudmouthed, opinionated bitch, and I figured what the hell, I might as well share my opinionated bitchiness on the Interweb since everyone else is. I’m nothing if not a joiner!
- I really, really love reading books in general, and romance novels in particular. Writing about it provides just another outlet for my fascination with the genre.
- I want to share the good books I’ve read, and warn people who might have similar tastes to mine about the stinkers.
- I enjoy writing, but unlike some authors—fuck that, MANY authors—I realized long ago that I can’t write fiction worth a good goddamn, so this is a fun project for me to keep the old gray matter working and my writing skillz sharp. (Note my substitution of the letter “z” for “s” in that last sentence. This indicates I’m young, hip and urban!)
If an author decides to take a review to heart and gets rid of annoying verbal tics or drops stupid plot devices, then hooray, awesome, champagne all around. But really, it’s an incidental by-product of reviewing, and not its primary purpose. My take on the whole thing is: if authors see the same criticism pop up over and over again, perhaps instead of saying “EVERYBODY IS FULL OF SHIT!” it might behoove her to see if these myriad viewers coming from different backgrounds and presumably with a variety of tastes might have a point? And hey, sometimes everybody IS full of shit—what else can explain the popularity of Avril Lavigne? But sometimes they’re not.
Her claims that reviewers are somehow out to get her, that we somehow run around posting every negative review to every website and clamor at her publisher to cut her contract, also strike me as distinctly paranoid, with a good dash of delusions of grandeur. So far I’ve written one bad review for this site. I haven’t publicized it. I haven’t gone on Amazon to throw in my 1-star review, which would certainly be higher-visibility than a website that ranks 99 for “romance novel reviews” on Google but number 2 for “trashy bitches”. I haven’t even asked anyone other than my sister and my best friend to look at this website. When I snarl and snark while writing a review for a bad book, I consider it cathartic, but I certainly don’t have a vendetta against the author. I’m snarky, not Annie Wilkes. The only authors I give a shit about are the good ones, and these are the ones I’m much more likely to talk about. The bad authors can be rolling in dough (God knows many of them are) or trolling the streets for their next hit of crack for all I care. And I honestly don’t think many (if any) reviewers behave in the way PBW writes about when they encounter a book they don’t like, simply because psychosis is a pretty rare ailment.
And towards the end of this blog entry, PBW really starts losing it. Witness:
I listen to my readers; if I hadn’t at least five of my books wouldn’t exist. They write to me, and talk about what they like and don’t like. They are always in the back of my mind when I write. Occasionally I write things or change things to please them, too. I can’t make them all happy, that would be like trying to count all the stars in the galaxy. (…) But I listen, because it’s part of the unwritten contract between me and someone who paid seven or nineteen or twenty-five bucks of their hard-earned money for that book.
I don’t maintain that kind of contract with reviewers, 99% of whom get the books for nothing from my publisher. Some of you write great reviews that sell a lot of books for me, but that doesn’t offset the hatchet jobs that cost me sales. I’m not going to kiss your ass. I’m not afraid of you. Mostly I feel nothing but contempt for you, as a soldier feels for an informant (stole that from my man Flaubert.) I’m working on turning that into pity. Because as much hell as I’ve gone through, it can’t be anything compared to where most of you burn.
So at first I thought maybe she was bitching about Amazon one-paragraph hackjob reviews, but this last paragraph indicates that she isn’t. Hey, here’s a thought: if there are more negative reviews than positive from across the spectrum—both “professional” reviews and reader reactions on sites like Amazon.com—perhaps, just maybe, what you’re writing is shit? Just a thought. Not that I’m trying to say all great books are critically acclaimed; Moby Dick tanked when it came out, but even now you can still make an excellent, convincing argument that it’s an overrated piece of crap. (Not me, personally, I love that huge, unwieldy piece of insanity. Now on the other hand, ask me about Wuthering Heights, go on, I dare you…)
And I’m just wondering: who does she think reviewers are? Some sort of weird sub-human, non-reader category? Because she makes a very distinct and bizarre demarcation between “readers” (who are good, and praiseworthy, and worth listening to) vs. “reviewers” (who deserve to burn in Hell if they dare have a negative opinion about her work). Y’know, last time I checked, every book reviewer is a book reader. If you paid any attention to high-school math when they covered Venn diagrams, that’d make us reviewers a sub-set of readers. Unless you volunteer for a big website like All About Romance or work for a publication, most of the people writing reviews on the Internet paid for the books out of their own pocket. She needs to make up her mind: either reviewers are worth listening to, or we’re shitful freaks. Or are we somehow magically less shitful if we paid for the book? Will our opinion somehow be more valid? Then let me state up front here: Sarah and I pay for ALL the books we review, one way or another. Sarah gets many of her books through Booksfree or buys them outright, while I either buy them or get them through the library (which I pay for with my taxes).
Are there good reviews and bad reviews? Of course there are. The bad ones go something like “I LOVED THIS BOOK! FIVE STARS ALL THE WAY! THIS AUTHOR DESERVES ORAL SEX WHILE BEING FED CHOCOLATE-DIPPED STRAWBERRIES BY HOT SHIRTLESS TENNIS PLAYERS INTO PERPETUITY FOR WRITING THIS GEM! A+++!” The good ones not only tell you the book was good, or bad, or mediocre, but WHY the reviewer thought so in an honest, coherent, entertaining manner. Reviews are not literary analysis—or at least they shouldn’t be unless you’re either a pretentious whore or have a fairly perverse sense of humor. Reviews are primarily gut reactions tempered by self-reflection.
So in short: if I’m burning in hell, I kind of like it here. I prefer warmer climates, anyway, and besides, it’s a dry kind of heat.
p.s. Did you like the way I casually tossed out references to science and literature? I wish I could’ve done it with the same panache she said “my man Flaubert,” but alas, I’m afraid I’m not a published author.
p.p.s. Hey, I guess I need SoftPaws too.
p.p.p.s. For a response that’s a lot more measured and a whole lot less catty than mine, check out what Laurie Likes Books wrote on her blog.
