What advice do you have for new authors on reviews? Do you read reviews? What is the best ever review you’ve received? What’s the worst and most hilarious? Share it with us!
I read trade reviews when I'm lucky enough to get them - the Wall Street Journal said "Hitchcock-like suspense" about The Dead Room and all of a sudden I know what my first tattoo would be.
And I read Amazon reader reviews too - but with one proviso: I read them about books I'm maybe going to buy and read. That's what they're for. I don't read Amazon reviews of my books; they're not for me.
So my advice to new authors would be - don't read your Amazon reviews. Don't read the five-star ones and don't read the one-star ones. They're not for you! It's impossible not to see how many reviews you've got and what the overall star-rating is but you don't need to click through.
I'm a hard-core non-clicker - I don't click on anything online that I didn't specifically search for - so it's easy. Hang on, sometimes I click on things that friends send me. At the moment that's mostly videos of very refreshed Scots being jolly in Boston.
My favourite review was probably the first one I ever got. Stuart Kelly writing in the Scotsman called me "an exemplary crime-writer". You could have fanned me flat with an eyelash. And I was already so cool and professional that I immediately wrote to him to say thank you. Shudder. He was kind enough not to say anythimg about that when I met him at a festival soon after.
My funniest review was from another UK newspaper - I genuinely can't remember which one - that accused me of not writing tartan noir. Um, guilty as charged, m'lud. It's not actually obligatory to write disaffected cops in seedy settings because you're a Celt. Right? It was such a bizarre complaint.
I do love a good stupid review, mind you - almost as much as I love a good non-apology - and the one-star reader reviews of inarguably five-star books are a rich seam. I'll never forget the review of Pride and Prejudice that called it "an older and more boring Bridget Jones". Oh burn. Or the review of Catch-22 that said "It's like Mark Twain's Huck Finn, just an endless barrage of needless prose, instead of focusing on plot and character development by showing not telling". Oy-oy, I thought, someone's taken a class and reckons Twain and Heller would have got a lot out of it too. Brilliant.
Cx
5 comments:
Reviews, I rarely read them unless I’m buying a new toaster.
And I never give a bad review to a book. I just don’t say anything at all if I can’t say something good. My job is to create interest in a good read. It is not to keep others away from a book I didn’t like. What’s the point? It’s like telling a new mother her baby is ugly.
I like your books, some more than others, and I like you, so you needn’t be afraid to read my reviews.
And I think your baby is beautiful.
So there
I read one on Goodreads for Absence of Alice that made it sound like I was writing porn. It was hysterical—not meant to be of course.
Even when you’re buying a new toaster, can you trust reviews? The only people who review stuff have complaints. People who got what they wanted/expected are content… and don’t give reviews. Anyway, that’s toasters. For books, yeah, only the trades and only if they are sent to me. Do NOT go to Goodreads, good grief. The weirdest review I might have received was the guy who called me a misogynist because, I suppose, I let terrible things happen to my woman protagonist? I didn’t find it funny then, or now, actually. But it’s a nice reminder that they’ll let anyone be a reviewer, even people who don’t know what the crap they are talking about.
Lori, when I buy a new toaster, I mostly look to Consumer Reports. It’s true that there are many more negative reviews especially on Amazon, than positive. Theoretically people are nine x more likely to post a neg than they are a positive. Sad isn’t it.
PS. Best toaster I’ve had is a Breville.
Love everything you said here!
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