Erika Vanzin's Blog: One day a week - Posts Tagged "reader"

The review is the second most important thing if you want to sell a novel, the first one is to write a good book. You can find a huge amount of people that review books online, lately a lot of blogs are born to do that. Sometimes the reviewer knows his job, some other times you can't even figure out what novel he is talking about.
There are a few rules to write a good review:

1. Write a profile whit basic data: title, author, editor, price, publication's year…
2. Write an informative part with the novel's plot without spoilers
3. Write an evaluation of the style, atmosphere, language, characterization of the characters. Why you loved it or not.

Well, as a reader I hate those kind of reviews.
I'm not a publisher, I don't need to evaluate if a novel is worth of publication or not. I'm a reader and need to know if the author can drag me into those pages. When I read a book I want to become part of the story, live with the characters, feel the same emotions they feel.
I don't need to know if the author uses a particular style or if the dialogues language is coherent with the character or not. If the language is out of place I won’t probably relate with the characters and this is what I want to know.
I think that if you want to write a good review you have to describe which emotions you felt reading the novel, describe how the characters make you feel. Whether you loved or hated them and why. A good characterization of them creates an empathic link that drags you into the story, a bad characterization makes you emotionless in front of their stories. I don't need to know how this happened from a technical perspective.
In the end, a review should tell me something that the synopsis doesn't already tell me and it should consider that I'm a reader not a specialist or a publisher. I just want to enjoy my reading, that is the thing the reviewer needs to focus on.