On Reviewing Books You Hate

Janet Reid had an interesting question in her mailbag last week.  (By the way, I don't think I've ever gotten a reader question before, but feel free to contact me if you want me to address something on the blog.)  Aaaaanyway, Janet received a rather lengthy e-mail with a fairly specific problem, so she addressed that pretty directly, and it's worth a read.  But it did strike me that this is a topic which might be worth a broad stroke approach, too.

So, as I've often pointed out, being an author means being part of a community.  Like any community we have our Reggies from the Archie comics and our Franks from "M*A*S*H" and even our Barney Fifes, but it's a community nonetheless.  You notice no matter how exasperating Frank or Eeyore or whoever got, when it came down to the community vs. the outside world, the rest of the gang never excluded them.

I don't know why I got into that.  Look, the literary world is really an ecosystem.  Everybody knows everybody and every writer starts out as a reader and every reviewer aspires to be a writer.  A lot of publishing is predicated on favor-swapping, as well as paying it forward, which I've covered in other posts.  But what this all boils down to is that at some point in your career you will be asked to read a crappy book.

I don't think it matters if you're J.K. Rowling or if you're Crazy Eddie in the tin foil hat, you will be asked to read a book, and you will feel obligated to do so, and it will be crappy.

Imagine, for instance, that a reviewer who has bought, read, reviewed, and shared all eight of my extant books came to me and admitted they wrote under a pen name and asked me to review one of their books.  Or imagine one of the authors who I go to conventions with and who literally sit there for days at a time and sell my book to strangers