Reviews: The Ecstasy and the Agony

Book reviews. Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them. Consider the following quotations from book reviews I found on Amazon:

I can’t believe I actually finished it. How does this author sell anything? I know he has a big name, but how? Really, do yourself a favor and just read something else.

What a thoroughly stupid book.

This is one of the very best books that I’ve read recently!! I think anyone that enjoyed the television show quantum leap would love this book. I enjoyed the twists in this book. Man you just have to read this. It is that good!

WOW – a story of life, death and survival! Science fiction with detail AND “real” understandable humans and their life challenges. Emotionally intense, well written with the story never failing to draw the reader into the future – Or the past!

Its really sad what passes for literature these days. Unless you’re impressed by the word Absalom and stilted dialogue there’s nothing worth reading here. Amazing that a book with almost 500 pages could be so rushed and incoherent. I’m sure it’ll be another bestseller. Pathetic.

Two positive reviews, and three negative ones. Two that would make any author proud, and three that might well crush the spirit. What surprises me most is that all five reader reviews are for the same book! So depending on whom you believe, it’s either one of the very best books ever, or it’s thoroughly stupid. Perhaps if I knew the reviewers, knew something about their literary tastes or points of reference, it would be helpful. But I don’t know them, so those five reviews bring me no closer to forming an opinion of the book than I was before I read them.

And that encapsulates the ecstasy and the agony of reviews. They’re so important, so necessary, and yet so useless. Potential buyers know that a book’s cover and back blurb are marketing materials, designed to induce them to buy. Before they part with their hard-earned cash, many people want social confirmation from neutral third parties who have read the book. So authors go to great lengths to cajole readers into leaving reviews. We’ll place a request for reviews in the final, pages of an e-book. If we have a buyer’s email address, we’ll email requests for reviews. We’ll slip such requests into hard copy books that we sell at live events. A nightmare scenario for writers is to have a book that’s been available for purchase for a year, but has only garnered a dozen reviews. That suggests few people are reading the book. It’s like driving past a restaurant that is open, but the parking lot is almost empty. Most people feel more confident choosing a restaurant — or a book — that is more popular.

To avoid that dearth of reviews, authors sometimes use services like NetGalley to give away free copies of our work to total strangers “in exchange for an honest review.” I’m not sure how this came to be. Self-published authors can spend thousands of dollars on cover design, interior design, editing, and advertising. Those expenses are in addition to the hundreds of hours spent researching, writing, and revising the text in order to tell the best story we can. Having to give away the finished product in exchange for reviews just feels wrong to me. After all, do restaurants give away free meals in exchange for honest reviews? Hotels don’t trade free rooms for reviews. Uber drivers don’t give free rides for reviews. Does anyone besides writers do this as a standard part of their marketing plan?

As if that weren’t bad enough, some reviewers go out of their way to add insult to injury. These folks can’t content themselves with “It wasn’t my cup of tea.” They have to savage the book and the author. It’s like kindness and self-restraint have become relics of the past. The kindest reviews probably come from people who know the author. But Amazon is ruthless about weeding those out. If they figure out that one of the reviewers is Facebook friends with the writer, they will delete that review on the assumption that it is not objective.

So as much as I’d like to dispense with reviews, I know I can’t. I’m going to fish for them like every other author out there. I know I need at least a hundred reviews if my book is to have any chance of selling well. Thank you in advance if you write one. I’m just not going to read mine!