To review or not to review

[annathepiper]

For those of you who may have missed it yesterday, it was my turn to blog on the Here Be Magic blog yesterday, so I chimed in on an interesting question that came up on the Carina authors’ loop: whether authors should review other authors’ work.

On a related note I’d like to call to your attention this post of Doranna Durgin’s, wherein she laments the most frustrating types of reviews she’s received.

Me, I’m still operating on a small enough level that I feel lucky to get ANY reviews at all, though I gotta say, I’d be right there with Doranna on being frustrated about ratings on a book that hadn’t even gotten read. I beg you, Internets: if you haven’t actually read a book yet, don’t rate or review it. It’s not fair to the author and it’s not fair to your fellow readers. And while I’m on the topic, I beg you as well to refrain from dropping poor ratings on a book for factors outside the author’s control. Like DRM or price points.

And also, I’d just like to note that A Feral Darkness does indeed remain my all time favorite Doranna Durgin book ever.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I want writers to write reviews, because otherwise reviews are only written by people who can't write and are therefore mostly illegible and useless. Also a lot of great things have a comparatively narrow following, and if not reviewed by fans and writers, would not get reviewed at all because the mainstream cares fuckall about that stuff.

Re: Well...

[annathepiper]

I gotta quibble with the first part of this--a good review can be written by someone who is not themselves an author. And I suppose I should clarify that the whole question I'm discussing here is whether people who are authors should review other authors.

Excellent reviews get written all the time by people who don't write books themselves. Which is one of the reasons I keep hanging out at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, for example. :) That site's entire raison d'etre is to be a review/discussion site, and while SB Sarah has become an author in her own right, she only has released non-fiction stuff about the romance genre.

On a smaller scale there are plenty of excellent indie book bloggers out there as well. But writing a coherent book review isn't the same skill as writing a coherent novel.

But that said--absolutely with you re: how a lot of good material needs all the attention it can get.