Why I’m okay with giving negative reviews

This is a topic I’ve covered before, but it’s one that the Internet just won’t leave alone. Should authors give bad reviews on books they don’t like? The last time I talked about it, the ongoing theme of peoples’ articles was that it was somehow unprofessional to have a negative opinion to another writer’s efforts. I still don’t agree with that, since all artists are known to give their opinions on others in their field. Musicians can diss each other, and that’s not unprofessional; it’s just a part of the job. The same goes for writers, in my opinion.

Now some folks are shifting their focus and saying that with so many bookstores closing, giving bad reviews is harmful to the industry as a whole. But these issues are actually unrelated. Chain stores got in the habit of bulk buying for all their regions, and they did a bad job of stocking books according to local trends. They doomed themselves by being too big to see their clients. That had nothing to do with bad reviews, and was more about a bad relationship with customers. Adding coffee shops and free wifi couldn’t change the fact that people couldn’t find books relevant to their interests.

Compare those chains with Amazon’s recommendations system. When you read a book on Amazon, an algorithm looks for similar books and then offers them to you on the site or through your Kindle. “Hey, did you like that werewolf book? Well here’s four other books you might also like!” And this model is helping them to sell a lot of books. It’s a little thing, but it reaches people and convinces them to buy more, whereas the big chain stores didn’t seem to care about building that kind of rapport.

There’s this idea that bad reviews scare readers off and ruin a book’s reputation. I admit, I kind of worry about this with my books because I’m a little nobody, and I don’t have that many reviews in the first place. But even a really bad review can’t kill off my sales. If anything, I think I’d have a harder time selling my books if they all had glowing five star reviews. People are wary of authors gaming the system, and that leads them to look for lower scoring reviews to get a sense of what’s wrong with the book. This doesn’t mean they won’t buy it. But they do want to see some negative reviews as proof that the upper scoring reviews aren’t all sock puppets or friends of the author.

And here’s another thing to think about my negative reviews. I’m a nobody, and my influence on peoples’ reading decisions isn’t that powerful. I can’t imagine someone saying, “Yeah, The Hunger Games looks interesting, but Zoe Whitten hated it, so I’m going to ignore the thousands of glowing fan reviews and trust her instincts.” If I somehow do gain that kind of influence through a strange quirk of fate or a pact with demons, then I might start toning down my negativity. But until then, I feel relatively safe in letting people know I hated a book.

Many writers who give reviews are only willing to do so if they like the book. I think that sets a bad image for them because people begin to think they only write good reviews to support their friends. I think having bad reviews in their portfolio shows that they’re not just blowing sunshine up peoples’ asses, and it makes the good reviews more genuine. If all you do is glowing reviews, how can people trust you to be telling the truth?

The percentage of readers willing to give reviews of any length is very small, somewhere around 2-4% of the overall market. Writers have been asking politely for reviews to help them spread the word about their books, but the message isn’t rallying folks to their cause. If all writer/readers stopped reviewing too, the pool of reviews dries up even further. And while I’m on this facet, a lot of review blogs simply will not review anything self-published. Maybe it’s because they got burned by too many bad books, or because too many self-pubbed authors jumped their shit for giving a bad review. In either case, as a fellow self-pubbed writer, I know how hard it is to get a book reviewed. But even for the pros, it’s a difficult task. I want to do my part and put out reviews for most of the books I read, even if my review isn’t positive. Even a bad review can create interest in a book if people haven’t heard of it before.

So in conclusion, I don’t believe giving a bad review is unprofessional, nor is it harmful to the authors or the industry. A bad review is my explanation as a reader for why some books don’t work for me. If all I gave were bad reviews, I might be seen as a bitter hack making hit jobs on the competition. (And while I am a hack, I already pointed out how my influence is too small for said hit pieces to have any impact.) But my reviews cover the range from one to five stars, from damning rants to gushing praise. I’m giving you my honest opinions, so if my opinion on a book is negative, there’s no other motive than to express my dislike as a reader.

No one should be made to feel obligated to only say nice things; not under the guise of professionalism or with the threat of harming the craft. A bad review by itself is not a kiss of death to a creative project, and I refuse to feel guilty about hating a book. Unless that is, it’s a book written by someone I know personally. Then I have a metric shit-ton of guilt and anxiety about penning a bad review. (I blogged about that before, too.) But I’ll still give a bad review to my friends. They deserve to know how I really felt, after all. And if I can’t be honest in my feelings as a reader, I might as well forget trying to find the ugly truth in my fictional writing.