One Star Reviewers

What makes a good, book reviewer? And why can some of them be so wantonly damaging? As a writer I know I should listen to the advice about book reviews: don’t read them! From time to time I sneak a look, and sometimes I am delighted with what I read, and sometimes I am disappointed. It serves me right for looking. But I believe that a book review can say more about the reviewer than the book itself. A professional reviewer (one hopes) will give an opinion about style, quality of the writing, content and anything else they wish to say about the book. But I don’t think they would ever make damaging comments about the writer, who they have probably never met, because that would damage their own integrity as a book reviewer. Writers deserve to be criticised if they are sloppy and careless, but the majority of writers probably believe they are creditable and their work deserves some kind of recognition. If you’re a pulp fiction writer, knocking out stuff as a ghost writer, you would probably not have a great deal of interest in the quality of the writing so long as it sticks to the required style and pattern, and meets the publisher’s needs for that particular market. And if a reviewer decided to insult the ‘named author’ of a ghost written novel, they would be very wide of the mark. But inevitably we’re all in the mix together: writers good and bad, reviewers good and bad, and the paying public. But what has happened now that Amazon has burst the publishing bubble? Readers are invited to review books they have read and award a rating. It’s nice to get five stars of course, and really anything from three stars is good. But when some pumped up, self-important reviewer slaughters a writer and awards a one star review, it drops the average that appears alongside the book on the Amazon page, and all because the reviewer believes he or she is qualified to make an informed opinion not only about the content but about the writer as well. The reader of this blog will gather, by now, that I have been subjected to what amounts to a personal attack because the reviewer did not like my work. Unfortunately it goes with the territory, but I do wish reviewers would stop and think that reviews are not to be trifled with: they are an important guide to how well or how badly a book has been written. Slagging off the author simply shows what kind of person you are: not very pleasant.