“Everyone’s a critic” used to be a joke; now it’s a fact. You may take populist pride in the Web’s profusion of user-contributed reviews; you may wish Yelp had never been invented. Either way, if you create stuff or sell things, you’re going to get written about.
Authors have probably been dealing with this new world longer than any other creative group, thanks to the early introduction to user reviews that Amazon.com gave the publishing industry, beginning in 1995. There has never been a shortage of disdain for the phenomenon from professionals — most recently with Joe Queenan’s satire in the Wall Street Journal last week, imagining classics getting savaged by the unwashed Amazon masses: “Their courageous sniping from behind the bushes, emulating Ethan Allen and the Swamp Fox back in 1776, reaffirms that democracy functions best when you fire your musket and then run away.”
At this late stage in the decline of the media business, however, authors can’t be too picky. The opportunity to be reviewed by professionals — however bittersweet it may be to begin with — is increasingly rare. Newspapers and magazines review only a tiny fraction of the books published each month. These days, we are all going to be reviewed by one another, for better or worse. So which is it?
I had a great experience with the Amazon reviews for Dreaming in Code, and so far, the same is holding for Say Everything, though the volume to date is lighter (my hunch is that people interested in blogs are more likely to have their own blogs and to post their thoughts there). Right now there are four reviews of the book: two highly positive, two quite negative. Plainly I’m happier about the former than the latter. The resulting average star rating isn’t as stellar as I’d like.
But if you read the reviews, you see that the positive reviews are carefully written posts from people who seem to care about the topic. The negatives, on the other hand, well — you can see for yourself: one is hard to make much sense of, and the other is by someone who declares that “most bloggers write solipsisms and only for themselves. Worse yet, most are also obnoxious and ignorant.”
My belief in the value of “everyone’s a critic” stems from my confidence in everyone’s ability to scan a batch of posts and sort out what’s of use. People often complain, “Gee, doesn’t that take work?” Well, no, not that much — if you can skim posts you can take the pulse of the pro and con contributions pretty easily. The other big complaint is that reader reviews are too subjective, and you end up with a lot of contradictory chatter. That’s not precisely wrong, but it really describes any set of reviews. (The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer for Say Everything, Tom Goldstein, thought my book was “snappy,” while the Seattle Times critic said it was a “slog”.)
I should add that Amazon, though still dominant, isn’t the only significant platform for user book reviews. There are Facebook apps for sharing “What I’m reading” notes, and there’s GoodReads, a social network for sharing what you’re reading and what you thought about it.
You never know what you’ll find, either. I headed over to GoodReads and found Wired’s Steven Levy, weighing in on GoodReads’ page for Say Everything: “Really well-reasearched and artfully presented… Scott is very sensitive and perceptive, and doesn’t merely hash over tired controversies, but brings sharp insight to the blogging saga.”
Craig Newmark recently wondered whether user review sites would be “the next big media/advertising disruption”; I think that disruption is already underway. Compared to the old model of hiring, paying and editing professional critics, these sites are cheaper to operate and able to be far more comprehensive in covering things like local restaurants or, for that matter, books.
Can they substitute for the work of the best professional critics? Of course not. But they provide plenty of value, and I don’t think authors or anyone else should be afraid of them. We can cherish what good we find (not just the positive reviews but the negative ones that actually engage with the work) and screen out the pointless chatter and the drive-by snarking — confident that others will be just as adept at that as we are.
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I would greatly appreciate it.
Besides sites like Good Reads, there are also review websites like Reader Views, the online version of the Historical Novel Society, and PODBRAM - all of which honestly review books by new, POD and boutique-press published authors, a good few of which are really, really, terrifically good. (Not all, of course, Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of everything is c**p ... but the 10% remaining is good, and if it weren't for Amazon reviews, or PODBRAM, or such - no one would ever hear about them!)
R
I've never asked friends to post Amazon reviews. Reading that others do so now makes me feel naive. The idea just seems a little uncomfortably close to sockpuppetry to me. Like, you're not actually putting your hand *inside* the sock, but you're sort of eyeing the sock hopefully.
I don't mean to sound unduly harsh to others who have done this; selling books is hard! You do what you can to get the word out.
I agree with Lea and Silk: that it works much better once there is a large enough sample size.
And I would really love it if Amazon adopted Silk's idea that they "threw out the highest and lowest ratings, as in Olympic judging." That's actually reasonable enough that they might do it at some point.
It would weed out a certain number of the people arriving with an agenda, either way: included the author's friends, and people with a bias against the book/topic, including competitors and people with a vested interest.
It's surprising how many Amazon reviewers fall into the latter category. Sadly, that was apparent with your two neg reviews: they weren't reviewing your book at all and didn't appear to have read it. They were reviewing blogs. They hate blogs, saw you wrote a book about it, and took your page as a place to vent their anger and show you bloggers. Really useful to a potential buyer--especially since anyone interested in your book is almost sure to be interested in blogs, so the anti-blog sentiment will have no impact on their thinking.
The review won't sway them, but the average rating might: especially if they see the medium rating and therefore don't click to your page to find out anything more.
So let's start a movement to lop off the high and low scores.
I can get 99 compliments, and the one insult still keeps me up at night. I know that's a problem to discuss with my shrink, but it's also reality for me, and a lot of friends.
So the good news is, Amazon creates a lot more reviews, some quite lucid and enlightening. The bad news is it creates a lot more reviews, some really mean-spirited and juvenile.
I will say though, that GoodReads and LibraryThing have been better experiences for me. I actually got more reviews on GoodReads than Amazon, but with very little of the venom. There were some bad reviews at GoodReads, but they sincerely didn't like the book. The people with an agenda seem to go to Amazon to stake their position, as it gives them the biggest megaphone. GoodReads reviewers were just interested in whether or not they liked the book.
Far too many "professional" critics are far too full of themselves to deliver a decent and unbiased review.
I'll sort through the crap to get to the honest reviews, Amazon style.
That you went into the heads of the people involved, including the killers, people will sometimes react to you as if you 'understood' the killers -- and sloppy reading will make them think you identify with what was just 'said' by one of them, as paraphrased from their notes.
There's an immediacy of the writing that some just won't like, but that is their problem. I liked that a strong sense of empathy you have gets me thinking from the viewpoint of the current subject of a paragraph or chapter. It takes me TO the scene and instead of reading ABOUT the people as separate from them, we can feel what they are thinking, right or wrong. It doesn't give us the proper way to think about any reaction (most of the time, since you do have definite thoughts on right and wrong and an abhorrence of what they did).
Your being so affected by one bad review out of 99 would indicate, to me, that you have some doubts at times, about choices you made, and then someone else, in effect, reinforcing those doubts, will really get to you.
My take, as someone who read your book and have not reviewed it yet, is to really consider it finished and by the great majority of accounts (and my own reaction), an extraordinarly effective telling that nevertheless won't be to all tastes. I've seen some of the reviews and there are people who just have a different take on what happened and emotions will always be high. Don't give them so much power. They are *inevitable* and are blips unless you dwell on them.
As for tossing 5-star ratings, mine would be a 4-3/4 rating, which rounds to 5 stars and I would be quite upset if someone tossed it as meaningless.
Just as you won't agree with those who don't like other books you've loved, it's just disagreement and sometimes from minds that really don't try very hard to understand from others' perspectives. It just really does not matter.
Re Amazon reviews, I do pay attention, but mainly to how people state their disagreements - I give really no credence to nastily negative reviews.
I had to pause my reading of your book several times because there was so much to feel from it, though told without undue sentimentality. I might differ slightly in writing off Eric's hideous thoughts with the label 'psychopath' as well as finding Dylan mainly manic-depressive and -somewhat- less evil (no one could shoot people the way he did w/o more severe inner flaws), but your detail from all sides is fascinating and thorough without geing 10,000 pages long. It's a book that will stay with me a long time and I especially appreciated the care you took with the aftermath and the people affected.
Seriously, I'm often impressed with the quality and thoughtfulness of the amazon reviews, and I *do* use them occasionally. Of course there are the agenda-driven ones or the essays written by stupid people thinking they're smart, but you're right that most people can separate the wheat from the chaff.
see? Scott, that sales rank means nothing. your book is NOT 70,000 in sales. that is the number of timjes people LOOK AT THE BOOK"S PAGE on amazong.....it merely measures LOOKs, but not BUYS........rich people game the system.......and a smart blogger can also game the system, that way...i am surprsied the NYTImes has never reported this...i told a reporter at the TImes about this a few years ago and he said so yes you are right, so what, why do u want to spoil the party? See?
What is your source for this allegation about Amazon rank reflecting views instead of sales?
(I'm guessing the NYT never reported it because it's not true.)
I have watched the Amazon numbers closely this spring and summer and they correlate very closely to the bestseller lists published a week later by NYT, PW, USA Today, etc.