topic: reviews

Reviews: No Lifeguard on Duty, Read at Your Own Risk

Thursday, May 17, 2018
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As soon as your book goes up on NetGalley, as soon as your publicist starts mailing out ARCs, you begin thinking about reader reviews. Will people love it? Hate it? Ignore it completely? Online author’s groups have multiple posts per day discussing reader reviews…celebrating the good ones, bemoaning the bad or unfair ones. But does any of it actually impact a book’s success? I decided to ask my editor what…

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The Highs And The Lows Of Reviews

Wednesday, May 16, 2018
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  Today we are talking about reviews and who they are meant to inform. That’s an easy one: readers. Reviews are not for authors, who tend toward the snowflake end of the spectrum when it comes to feedback. (Or possibly that’s just me…) Reading a horrible review of her own book tends to produce the same feels in an author as if a stranger suddenly marched up and bitch-slapped her…

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How to Write Useful Reviews

Tuesday, May 15, 2018
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For a long time, if I didn’t like a book enough to give it 4 or 5 stars, I wouldn’t leave a review. I’d quietly ignore the book, feeling like I was helping out the author by doing nothing instead of giving a three-star review.It turns out, ignoring a book is one of the worst things you can do for it. Sites like Amazon count the number of reviews in order…

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Reviews: An Object Lesson in Subjectivity

Monday, May 14, 2018
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Reviews — Who are they for? Honestly? I have no gods-damned idea. The standard line is “Reviews are for readers, not writers,” but I’m not sure they’re even that. Maybe in aggregate — if a book has a large number of ratings, the average may be some sort of an indication of overall merit. And maybe some of the large, reputable reviewers serve that reader-informing purpose — I’m thinking of…

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