Will you read my book?
In keeping with the recent spate of essays that address frequently asked questions, I’d like to talk about the position we end up in when someone asks if we’d please read their book, be it in manuscript, review copy of finished form. The person making the request is usually either looking for a critique, a review or a blurb.
Many writers have a policy of not reading anything that isn’t slated for publication. The reason for this is simple—established writers have targets painted on their backs, and some have been sued for plagiarism by people claiming the writer stole their ideas. In some cases, the litigant has no logical basis for the claim—one person suggested that someone famous broke into her home and read her manuscript—but on other occasions, people say they sent the book to the author. If you have a clear track record of refusing to read anything unpublished and unsolicited, you have a better defense if you’re accused of story theft.
However, most of us don’t have targets painted on our backs. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely source of a lawsuit windfall than a group of writers. So, let’s put that concern aside for the time being.
I simply no longer have the time to read manuscripts to provide useful feedback. It takes at least a week or two to give a book that kind of attention, and another day or two to gather my thoughts and turn them into a critique. If I were a full-time writer, I might squeeze something like that in occasionally, but I have to select carefully how I use my “free” time these days because I have so many commitments and projects. I’ve stopped going to the local writers’ guild meetings because I decided those four hours a month are better devoted to writing. I suspect the imbalance between the number of writers seeking mentors and those willing to act in that capacity is an indication that many others have made the same choice.
My thoughts on blurb requests are less clear. On one hand, it’s a faster process. All I have to do is read the book and say something pithy and quotable about it. On the other, I ask myself—and the person soliciting the blurb—what currency they think my name will have in association with their book. I’ve been quoted a few times where the attribution is to the venue where the review was published (Cemetery Dance, for example) rather than to me personally, and that’s fine. However, who is going to pick up a book just because it has my kudos on the cover? The only case where I think a quote from me might be helpful is one I supplied recently for a book on a subject where I have some established credibility1. Otherwise, it seems a shame to cover up perfectly good cover art with my words of praise.
So that leaves review requests. On a good month, I might write several book reviews. On average, though, probably no more than fifteen or twenty a year. I read three times that many books, so clearly not everything I read will be reviewed. I prefer operating in stealth mode, popping up from time to time with critiques of books of my choosing.
If someone I’m not familiar with approaches me with a review request, I usually tell the person to submit the novel to the venue’s book editor rather than to me directly. That way if I don’t care to review it—or simply don’t have time to read it—I can ask for it to be assigned to another reviewer, which is best for both the author and for me.
However, people I know through various organizations occasionally ask me specifically to consider one of their books for review. If I agree to the request, there are two scenarios.
1) I think the book is good. Everything’s rosy. I can write a balanced review. If there are negatives, I’ll point them out, but I reserve predominantly negative reviews for the big guns, where the author’s name is enough to encourage people to pick up a book. That’s probably a subject for another column2, but suffice to say that I don’t think anyone is served by a negative review of a small press book people are unlikely to purchase without some positive buzz.
2) I don’t think the book is good. Or, worse, I find it downright unreadable. My sweat glands are popping open just thinking about it. I have received ARCs from small presses (some I’d never heard of before) where the books were so poorly written and/or edited that I could not make myself finish them. Life’s too short and I’d much rather spend my scant reading time with novels I enjoy. As Warren Zevon said, “We buy books under the mistaken assumption that we’re also buying time to read them.”
If I’ve agreed to accept the book for review and I decide to punt3, how do I respond? I could drag my feet, pleading scheduling problems, until I’ve missed the deadline. There are books I want to read that I don’t get around to for weeks or months. However, that’s a double-edged sword, because what if I really was too busy to meet the deadline? The implication in that case might be that I’ve read the material and found myself unable to say anything positive about it.
This is where I’m stuck. I’ve been working on this essay for several days now—and I actually had the original idea for it two months ago— and I still don’t know how to respond to scenario 2. Maybe I’m too nice, or too eager to avoid uncomfortable discussions. I could say—in truth—that the book wasn’t to my liking but that’s just one person’s opinion, but as a writer I know how hard it is to hear any negative opinions about something we’ve labored over for months or years. So, Storytellers Unplugged readers, if you have any advice, I’m all ears.
1Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished. I also have a reputation for footnotes.
2Though I expect this statement will generate more comments than anything else in this essay.
3Excuse the gratuitous sports analogy. I’ve been watching a lot of football lately—when I should have been writing, though in truth I was probably also reading and/or revising at the same time.
Ha ha! Great essay, and timely for RJ and myself. We’ve been wrestling with reviews for the past few weeks. Both of us reviewed books that were great for some people but not perfect to our liking.
In this case, we decided to play up the aspects we didn’t like as something that other people might enjoy (such as a lot of action, or a different genre, or “classic” in place of “stereotyped”). I think these still give an honest assessment of what readers can expect without being mean. It describes whose tastes will be filled by the work rather than just saying the reviewer was left unsatisfied.
As a reviewer, you have a greater responsibility to be honest to readers than to be kind to authors.
On the other hand, if something is just unreadable, what can you say? Nothing.
Julia
Excellent choice of topic. I can hardly wait for the comments and advice to flow in. As for me, I used to do it all and called it paying forward. Now that I am bankrupt…
–J.
I’m a tough sell on reading someone’s book. I have no problem saying what I think, but this often gets me in ridiculous arguments. Recently I reviewed a book for CD that I thought was overwritten, poorly edited, and overall not ready to be published. The author sent me a sort of scathing respones in my personal e-mail, which I politely rebuffed, explaining the way the game is played to him…and we ironed it out, but as Bev points out, life is short…reading manuscripts takes way too much of it. I will do it for a friend, or someone I work with regularly – but not on an out-of-the-blue request. If you have a good, defensible opinion, I say state it and be done with it…it’s easier and less time-consuming, and in many cases will erase your name from the potential readers list of the author’s next book (lol).
DNW
I’ve stopped reading material from aspiring novelists. It wasn’t a step I wanted to take. As a full-time writer, one thing I really like to use my volunteer time for is helping writers, and I’m a firm believer in the value of feedback, writing groups etc. But things…changed after I was published.
You’re right about story credit worries and lack of time, but even more than that, here’s what stopped me:
1) realizing that my criticism now carries more weight, more credibility, something I’m not comfortable with (I’m a writer and a reader, not an editor)
2) realizing that some of those people asking me for feedback don’t want feedback, they just want…
a) to share their work with a writer they admire (and when I give even mildly negative feedback, they’re crushed)
b) a recommendation to my agent/editor
That last one is the most frustrating. After several rounds of reading a novel and sending back thoughtful and detailed feedback, only to get “great! so you’ll pass it on to your agent/editor, then?” disillusionment sets in pretty fast.
Now I reserve my “helping writers” time for answering questions, offering encouragment, giving workshops and moderating (but not participating in) an online writers group.
This is kind of a double-edged blade, at least as far as blurbs go. I generally have to chuckle at blurb requests, which I get now and again, because I really don’t think my name’s gonna carry any more weight than any of my cats’ (Chester, Charcoal, and Dusty, just for the record). On the other hand, when a publisher sees fit to take one of my books, there’s inevitably a request to include any and all blurbs that I can to help with promotion. I hate asking someone with a notable name if he or she would read at least a portion of my book and give it a blurb if they deem it worthy — because I know at least as much as the next guy about the limitations of time. If there were another 24 hours in a day, I could still use them all and need another dozen.
(By the way, looks like I’ve just sold THE NIGHTMARE FRONTIER. Anybody wanna give it a blurb?)
–M
PS — The publisher hsan’t asked for any this time.
As a reviewer, you have a greater responsibility to be honest to readers than to be kind to authors.
I’m delighted to see that in print. It’s the way I try to approach the reviews I do. I’m at the ‘opposite end’ of the spectrum to most here in that I am not a published author. I’m ‘nobody’– just a gal who figured she was capable of putting together a 1/2 decent review once in a while.
I work hard at the reviews I write. They don’t write themselves even if I totally love the book, because I always feel that I’m writing for 2 audiences, the potential reader and the author/publisher. Let me be honest: as a ‘nobody’ part of what motivates me is the notion that one day an author/publisher will come across my review of his work and say,”You nailed it!” and suddenly people will be saying, “What did Terry’s review say; if she liked it then I’ll like/hate it…”
Dreamy stuff like that. Stuff that’s not too likely to happen if I report that the character names drove me batty and the infodump stood out like a cockroach atop the cherry on an chocloate sundae.
And then there is the reader. My review needs to tell them what to expect from the book, good, bad and indifferent so that the surprises are only in the plot, not the cringe-worthy dialogue or the lousy editing or the stupid names the author obviously thinks make the characters memorable.
Or maybe not. Because maybe the audience that cruises the website that hosts my reviews only want to know if the babes are hot or how many space battles there are per chapter.
Or maybe they see me start to discuss lousy editing and click away thinking, “Who’s she, anyway, and what does she know about whether a book’s well edited or not?”
So I try to find the happy medium. I dole out the plot as cryptically as I can and keep the ‘negatives’ to a minimum ususally expresed as my opinion so the author (I should be so lucky) can say, “Ya, well what does she know?” and the reader can say, “who cares about typos, if there’s sexy captain and lots of gun play that good enough for me.”
I just wonder sometimes where my responsibility to myself fits. The part of me that that shudders as I read never quite makes it to the review.
“By the way, looks like I’ve just sold THE NIGHTMARE FRONTIER. Anybody wanna give it a blurb?”
“Meow meow meow The Nightmane Frontier, meow meow meow MEEEEOWWWWWWWW!” –Charcoal
I hope it helps sell books.
Teresa,
I don’t know how faithful I am to my own principle as stated above. I find it hard not to wrap up “mediocre” as “maybe it was just me!”, which doesn’t do much good for the reader.
“I dole out the plot as cryptically as I can and keep the ‘negatives’ to a minimum ususally expresed as my opinion”
As I said above, this temptation is a little debilitating to a review. “I KNOW Book A rocks, but I FEEL that MAYBE Book B is just POSSIBLY not for me, but that’s just my own opinion!” This does not provide much direction to the reader, see? Furthermore, as a good essayist will point out, the word “I” really has no place in a review. The review is assumed to be totally subjective, totally the author’s opinion anyway, so “I thinks” make it sounds wishy-washy. You can imagine a prologue to every review which states “THIS REVIEWER’S OPINION IS:”.
Not criticizing you, Teresa, just working out my own struggles with the situation. I think the best thing is to critically specify weaker points but to allow that some readers won’t mind those shortcomings. (That’s really a revamp of what you said about hot chicks and space battles, so you’ve definitely got it under control!)
I’ll finish by saying to everyone that I’ve written all of two reviews, and those only in the past two weeks. So if you think my opinion is uninformed, you’re probably right!
Julia
I don’t know that you have the right of it, Julia. There are two seperate things here. If it’s just a quick review, all it will have is important plot points, slant, etc…but if the review is the reviewer’s opinion, then owning that opinion isn’t a bad thing. A lot of people, for instance, HATE the PW policy of not naming the reviewers of the books they review, because this leaves people open to attack something, spout whatever opinion they might want without taking any responsibility for it. PERSONALLY, if a reviewer is going to say “The plot reeks of milktoast” I want to know that THEY believe this…so I’d say if it’s not a very personal commentary, not using the word “I” might be a good idea, but in reviewing something seriously, I write a review as what it is – my own opinion, based on my experience, expertise, and taste.
DNW
As a reviewer, you have a greater responsibility to be honest to readers than to be kind to authors.
I knew the book review comment would draw attention!
I have no problem with writing an honest review of a 1) small press book that I liked for the most part or 2) any major novel release. However, I don’t see myself wasting time writing a predominantly negative review of a small press book by a newcomer.
For me, it’s not an issue of honesty to readers vs kindness to authors. In the small press, there are no readers, unless a book gets some positive word-of-mouth. For me to write a negative review of a small press book by an unknown author is a little like a tree falling in the forest with no one around.
I’d rather spend my time writing positive reviews of books I like than discouraging people from buying a novel they probably haven’t heard of.
That’s my philosophy, anyway.
David,
Agreed. Those are the only points I let “I” come into it — where I feel there is actually a clash of elements between the text and my own personality/beliefs/etc.
In an upcoming review, I wrote: “I can’t abide narration from a zombie’s p.o.v.” This style just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but because I recognize it as something personal, I inject my person. I can’t state “zombie p.o.v. stories are awful” as a generalization, because I actually enjoyed one in the anthology I was reviewing. And I admitted it.
I don’t think “it’s my opinion” or anonymity should be used as shields to protect sh*t-slinging. Going back to Bev’s essay, I think I simply couldn’t write a review for a work I hated.
And agreed that you should “own” the review – but doesn’t the byline state that it’s yours? I like a little bit of person in maybe the first and last paragraphs to establish the reviewer’s (and readers) relation to the text, but starting every other sentence with “it seems to me” or “I personally find” is weak (to my viewing
). It’s a matter of dosage, but it’s also a matter of reviewer’s style. It could work.
Julia
I find that I have a different style for each review I right, and it is strongly influenced by the book under consideration. My reviews of hardboiled mysteries are terse and succinct. Reviews of Bradbury are flowery and colorful. Sometimes I am completely absent, and sometimes I am very present.
I think I simply couldn’t write a review for a work I hated.
I do it rarely. The most memorable occasion was a Tom Clancy novel that offended me. I’ve read Clancy for years and noted a trend in his books that was worrisome. It came out full-blown in the book under consideration (the last Clancy book I ever read). I knew the book would fly off the shelves, however, by reputation alone. I wanted to be heard on the subject, to vent my spleen, so to speak. My righteous indignation.
I felt much better afterward!
I try to review what is assigned to me, love it / hate it / care-less-about-it
Um…Bev? ” review I right, “
Heh…
D