The good, the bad and the ugly about book reviews.

Hi all!

I’m sure everyone knows the saying - ‘If you have nothing good to say then don’t say anything at all.’ (And all of its variations.) I think this should apply in some measure to book reviews.

I read a debut novel two years ago from an unknown author. I wrote to tell the author on her Facebook page how much I had enjoyed her book. She responded graciously, with enthusiasm and excitement… she was published and recognised! Then some weeks ago I came across reviews of the same novel on a well-received site and was surprised to see the huge variance of her ratings.

Her novel had been published by a large publishing house. It had beautiful layout, an amazing cover and perfect editing. I thought the story was enchanting and fascinating, but not everyone thought so. She scored a host of ratings around one out of five, not much in the middle, and then seemed to soar to four and five out of five. I noticed that she had taken down her Facebook page since. There were well over a hundred reviews, so unless she was extremely social, her high-end scores could not all have been given by friends! Imagine being a first time writer and creating this kind of conflict of opinion amongst the reading public? Imagine how tough it would be to take, after your hard work, acceptance by a publisher, the excitement of recognition and then, the ensuing confusion.

If the author is already hugely successful, has published thirty books and then written a bad one, then it’s hardly likely that it will hurt them to receive bad reviews for one or two novels. However, in writing a review for a debut novel, there might be a couple of things to take into consideration. The writer has just begun a journey, (and no, not everyone is meant to write books,) but destroying someone is also not the answer to helping their writing future.

And one more word on reviews: A good review is not supposed to be a spoiler, and there are some reviewers that appear to be confused about this; I would imagine it might be a fast track to losing them credibility. Also the length of a review needs to stay within the realm of sanity. When a reviewer dissects a novel to shreds and turns their review into a short story, I switch off, walk away and lose interest in the review altogether. I think a good review lets us know just enough of ‘why, how and where’ and then lets us get on with the job of reading the book for ourselves, if we choose.

I’d love to hear any opinions… because this topic affects us all.