Michael Potts's Blog: Bits and Pieces: Book Reviews and Articles on Writing, Horror Fiction, and Some Philosophy - Posts Tagged "book-reviews"

I suppose one of the first things for which an author of a new book searches online is reviews of the book. For me, I search for reader reviews on Amazon first, and later regularly check for reviews on Google. If you do something similar and worry about the quality of the reviews you receive, remember one thing: good or bad, a book review allows more people to know about your book. Some people may be intrigued by a bad review's description of the content in the book and want to buy it in spite of a negative review. They may wonder if the book is really as bad as the negative review claims--and they check out the book for that reason. Positive reviews help, of course, but readers tend to suspect a book that gets only "all fives" reviews.

Reviewers vary in quality. In general, the most consistently good reviewers of fiction are those who are well-grounded in literary fiction. This may include genre reviewers who also read a great deal of literary fiction outside their particular genre.

Horror reviewers are no exception. Since the advent of the "New Horror" in the 1990s, there has been a division in the horror fiction community between those who want to see a higher, "more literary" style of horror fiction and those who remain in a more limited genre mode. A few years ago at the World Horror Convention I saw a confrontation between a writer of more literary horror with a more traditional panelist over rules of writing. The literary horror writer was more willing to bend the rules when needed, while the more traditional genre-oriented writer was more legalistic in approach. Some horror reviewers do not like for a horror novel or short story to explore aspects of universal human experience--they prefer old-fashioned scares and that's about it. Such reviewers would disagree with my position that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness can count as a horror novel.

Literary horror reviewers may not appreciate a book that offers scares but fails to provide, through the story (show, don't tell, applies to all fiction writing) insight into human experience. I tend to get better reviews from either literary fiction reviewers are more literary oriented horror reviewers. More traditional genre reviewers tend not to like my work as well.

The approach of the reviewer makes a fundamental difference as to whether you receive a good or a bad review. I am trusting that you have done your homework in making your book as good as you can be--that it is a quality book. Some people, no matter who well-written your work, will like it; others will not. Reviews are opinions that are sometimes, though not always, backed up with facts. Take them in stride, and remember that any way to get your name out into the public, even though it might be through a negative book review, ultimately works in your favor.