Category Archives: up for discussion

Up for discussion: writing reviews of books you dislike that are also outside your preferred genres

How do you handle writing reviews of books you didn’t like that are outside of your normal reading genres? This is a quandary I’ve found myself in more often since opening myself up to review requests. I get requests from all genres and try to read a little of everything. I also choose a lot of books from Amazon’s KDP and make a concerted effort to not let myself fall into only downloading one type of book. Though by and large I download a lot more PNR than anything else.

This, however, is a prime example of why I try to force my horizons open. Until about this time last year I didn’t read romance of any sort, paranormal or otherwise. Now it’s one of my favourite genres. I’ve gotten older. My tastes have changed. Maybe I’m a little more of a cougar than I used to be, I don’t know. At some point, though, I had to branch out and give that first PNR a chance.

The honest truth, however, is this doesn’t always work. I’m not going to like everything I try, but does that mean I shouldn’t be allowed to then write a review stating that I didn’t like the book? To clarify the question, does the fact that I’ve historically not liked the genre somehow negate my actual dislike of a book or social permission to express that opinion? What is a book review, after all, but my own personal opinion of what I’ve just read? I’ve never promised anyone an impartial review and don’t even know that it’s really possible to write one.

I recently posted the following review on Amazon, along with a 3 star rating. It is what prompted this particular exercise in crystallising my own opinion through public discourse. I’ve purposely removed any reference to the actual book. The intention here is not to IN ANYWAY disparage the author or her book. It is simply the impetus of the discussion.

I’m not claiming any real anonymity though. It wouldn’t be difficult to scroll through my Amazon reviews and find the one, but the book isn’t the point of this post. What is and isn’t considered acceptable by the review reading public is. Please understand that. This also isn’t a disguised attempt to defend myself against a perceived attack or to have a go at the commenter quoted below. I don’t want to get mired in any ill-conceived author/reviewer behaving badly quagmire.

The review:

Oh God, I wish I hadn’t read that. I don’t know why I did it to myself. I know I don’t like this kind of story. I do. But I was tempted by the sarcastic tone of the description, which I admit runs through out the story and is just as funny. Honestly, I’m not even saying it’s not a good book and everything that women who like mushy love stories and frail, save me from myself heroins appreciate about the genre. I’m just not one of those women.At 27% through the book I posted this status update here on Goodreads,

I’m ~25% in and I know things are going to change, but as of this moment I’ve decided that a more satisfying rewrite of this story would be: Julia was having a bad day, week, month year. Stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire she doesn’t know how to change, Joe stops to help. She is then such a bitch to him that he gets back in his van, drives away and leaves her there like she deserves. Seriously!

The problem is that it didn’t change. Julia remained a completely bi-polar, possibly psychotic witch who did NOTHING to deserve Joe—who was of course wonderful in every tall, blond, muscled, 8-inch, committed, loving way.

To top it all off I don’t get the who lied about being a cop theme that the plot hinges on. First off, so what? He a cop, big deal. Second, he DID TELL HER he’s the chief police. The fact that she didn’t believe him doesn’t negate the fact that he told her. Plus, even if he hadn’t told her he told her enough of what he does for a simpleton to figure it out. It’s not his fault if she’s just too stupid to read the large, neon, flashing, heroic sign he paints for her.

Wylde’s writing is perfectly readable and, like I said, it is funny. But This was definitely not a good match for me.

Within a day two people had marked it as unhelpful and one person commented, “This is the worst review that I have ever read. If you don’t the genre DO NOT BUY THE BOOK!!! Unnecessarily harsh and mean spirited.”

The commenter’s instruction to not buy a book in a genre I don’t like is my point of primary interest here. Am I not allowed to negatively review a book I disliked simply because I admit that I’m not a fan of the genre in general? I’m not a huge fan of contemporary, depression era fiction either but I recently wrote a positive 4 star review of Sandra Brown’s Rainwater.

Now I understand the commenters point. She appears to feel that I’ve punished the book for not being in a genre I like. Something that is obviously not the book’s fault. I’ll also concede that this was a more vitriolic review than I normally write and I have, hence, rewritten parts of it to try and pull it back a little bit. But I’d also point out that I gave the book 3 stars, and in an attempt to be balanced stated that it is funny and the writing is good. I also feel that the points I made about not liking the female character and not understanding the police officer angle are still valid ones. They would be the same even if found in a book from a genre I claim to love. But what are my…well, I don’t want to call them rights as a reviewer, because that would be too weighty a word, but I don’t currently have a better one? So we’ll go with that.

I am, myself, an intrepid author. I understand how important reviews are, good and bad. No one pays attention to a book until it has a few good reviews and a lot of people don’t take your reviews seriously until you have one or two bad ones. As such, I review EVERY BOOK I read. This leaves me in the predicament I found myself in while writing the above review. I could either a) lie and say I liked it when I didn’t, b) write a vague, uninformative review that gave no real information, c) write an honest opinionated review, or d) not write a review at all.

I suspect a lot of people would tell me to go with option D, since ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all’ is a fairly common mantra on the indie book circuit. It’s also one I have been fairly vocal about disagreeing with. A reviewer’s reviews are worthless if all filled with nothing but praise IMO. This, however, is a debate that could easily fill a post or two of its own and I’ll not let myself be distracted. Let me just say that option D wasn’t an option for me. As stated, I review everything I read. To skip over this one would be according it special treatment that I had not reason to offer.

While not uncommon in practice, I doubt anyone would really advise me to take up option A or B either. That left me with option C, an honest and admittedly opinionated review. But what to include? I strongly suspect the, “I know I don’t like this kind of story” portion is the where the trouble arose. I, however, see a place for it there. I choose whose reviews to give most credence to by which reviewer seems to be the most like me. Like many people I have certain reviewers I pay special attention to because history has proven we like and dislike similar things. So informing the review reader which type of book reader I am helps inform them whether or not we might have similar tastes.

That’s my defence for having initially included it. However, like I pointed out, I’ve taken it out. I think it probably prevented review readers from clearly seeing the rest of the review. They may have seen it and immediately assumed everything after it was biased. I can even understand that thought process. It does however ignore the fact that, unless I’m being accused of reading the book just to write a means spirited review of it, which I don’t think I am, something about the book attracted me to reading it in the first place. In this case the sarcastic narrative style.

So the question I’m ending with, the small token of information I’m hoping to garner from you the reader is, am I right? Should I openly and honestly be able to say I generally don’t like this type of story, while also being able to separately declare myself to have liked or disliked this particular story or is that just being naive? Will the former always eclipse the latter? If that’s the case, how would you advise I handle such situations in the future. I see no one complaining about reviews that start out ‘I don’t usually like genre X, but loved this particular book.’ In this case the general dislike of Genre X only serves to heighten the importance of liking the book in question. It obviously doesn’t work in reverse.

Up for discussion: How I choose a free KDP book…or not.

6 Replies

As a reader I love Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. Almost everyday I scour the free book list (which in my case is eReaderIQ, but there are plenty of other aggregate sites out there). I’m looking for new and interesting reads. I’m what you might call a power downloader…actually, I have been called a power downloader. (Yea, that was you Harv*.) As such, I’ve learned a few things about my own behaviour. I’m not claiming universality here. There isn’t any thing to say everyone does the same as me, but I thought it might be helpful to those authors who are putting their work up for free to know what a reader, if not all readers, is doing when looking at it. I thought you might also like to know what is helpful or not. Honestly, I’ll admit to secretly hoping the everyone takes my advice as law and the whole system becomes my perfect whole. OK, I’m not holding my breath on that or anything.

Here are the things I deem worth mentioning, in no particular order:

Not cool.

A good cover is key, but it has to be a real cover. A cool picture doesn’t cut it. Here is an example of what I mean: Last Hope. Nice picture, but not a cover (sorry Ms. Gardner). Everyday I look through hundreds of books, but I don’t have hours and hours to do this. So I scroll through the list looking for interesting covers. If one catches my attention I’ll read the description. Actually that’s not quite right. First I’ll glance at the listed genre to see if it’s one I’m interested in and then I’ll read the description. So it helps if all of the relevant genre/sub-genre etc are listed.

The book description makes or breaks my ‘sale’ but I’ve come across a few annoyances that effect my choice to grab a book or not. First off, this section is for a synopsis of the story, not for praise of the book. I read reviews for that. It really really isn’t a place for so much praise the reader can’t find a description of the book. This has actually become a pet peeve of mine. I’ll pass a book up on principle if I have to work too hard to find out what it’s about. Here is an example: HeartsBlood (sorry Ms. McCray). Someone tell me what that book is about. I actually suspect that certain publishers are more guilty of this than authors, but there it is all the same.

Second, I never have figured out why people think that just because it’s an ebook, and there isn’t a physical back-of-the-book to fit their synopsis on that they can write an essay here. Take a look at any one of my reviews and you’ll see that I often include the synopsis for readers. It annoys me to no end if that synopsis is more than a paragraph or two long. If it’s longer than my review is I’m likely to trim it, but then I feel guilty for altering the author’s work. I don’t need or want a breakdown of the plot. It ruins the story. Just a basic blurb and teaser is enough. KISS after all.

I read reviews, good bad and otherwise. If a book is a maybe, having a few reviews makes all the difference to me. I’ll take more of a chance on something that has obviously been read by others, even if they left bad reviews. Bad reviews don’t always put me off. Well, they will if the main gripe of the reviewer is poor grammar and editing, but if someone just didn’t like the story my interest is piqued. It’s almost a challenge to see if I agree or not. The point here is two-fold, don’t mourn over poor reviews, but it behooves you not to put the book up for KDP until you have a few stars under the title.

It helps me if your book is on Goodreads. I get that this one is almost certainly not a universal. I have roughly 2000 books on my ereader. There isn’t any easy way to keep track of them, but I’ve found the GR shelves very helpful. When I go through eReaderIQ I keep a GR tab open at the same time and do this: click ‘buy now with 1-click’, copy the title, go to the GR tab, paste it in and mark it as to-read/lendable or not. If the book isn’t there I sometimes will add it, but that’s a lot of trouble and I have passed up books just because I can’t be bothered. (If you haven’t discovered GR as an author yet, shame on you. It is one of your best online resources for reviews.)

Familiarity increases the likelihood that I’ll download a book. This is one of those vague tricks of the mind that I don’t really understand, but I know that if I’ve seen a book ‘around’ I’m more likely to grab it. So, I guess all of those blog tours, giveaways, cover reveals, etc do make a difference somewhere.

If a book is part of a series it is helpful to know this. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s in the title, description or just prominent on the cover. But if I download a book only to then discover it is book four in a series and I don’t have book 1-3 I’m unlikely to ever actually read it. I especially like it when all the books go free at the same time but that’s asking a lot, I know. I’ll often try to piece series together, but that requires I remember that I have part of it already and can identify the books as part of the same series. It’s not always easy.

I buy sequels. If I like a series I am more than happy to buy the next one in the series. I have limits though. It’s always hard to rationalise buying more books when I have so many already available to me, so the more expensive a sequel the less likely I am to buy it and I just find it rude when they get progressively more expensive at the series goes on.

Annnnnd lastly, if you’re story is a short story please make it readily apparent. I have more than once downloaded what I thought was a novel and discovered it to be a short story. Just about the only time I read short stories is on car trips, so while it is nice to have a few available to myself, I like to choose them instead of having them surprise me.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of text-time on my own complaints, and lets face it, even if couched as information or advice every item above could be seen as a complaint in some way or another. I’m not so self-absorbed as to not see a few places where my own behaviour might be annoying to authors and I’d be interested in hearing from them. The first is that, though I have every intention of reading all of the books I download (and reviewing them), I download more than I can read in any reasonable amount of time.

I’ve heard authors grumbling that KDP isn’t worth it because lots of people download the book, but no one posts reviews. It might be true. I’m not looking at your download numbers, but I know that I have picked up, read, and reviewed a lot of authors I wouldn’t have come across or taken a chance on if the book wasn’t free. Not just because I’m cheap (which I am BTW), but because I wouldn’t have a reason to look at lists and lists of books I have to pay for. I have plenty of books on my wish list to choose from already. So, KDP gives me a reason to be exploring new authors that I might not have otherwise.

Another bone of contention might be how eager I am to get a free book. The assumption is that I would pay for it otherwise and am therefore cheating the author out of their income. Fair enough. I do download books I wouldn’t pay for. It’s true. I admit it. I bet I’m not the only one who does this. I’m especially prone to download erotica in this manner. My only excuse is that I do it with the eventual intent of reading and reviewing it and probably wouldn’t even know about the book without KDP. But is that enough? I’ve also always been a little curious to know if my download contributes to advancing a book to the too 100 list, and if so is that enough of a bonus to an author to forgive my tardy reviews or cheapskate ways.

So there is the basic breakdown of my own download behaviour. Is it familiar to anyone else or just seem a little too OCD and cranky? Are you a KDP author? I’d love to have your take on the whole affair. What do you do when exploring your fellow KDP publishers? What are your criteria? Anyone just want to bitch me out yet?