Pity the poor book reviewer. Authors love him if the review is good;
revile him if there’s the slightest hint that a book is flawed. Underpaid, (if
paid at all) and usually characterized as a failed writer… “If he’s so smart,
why doesn’t he write his own book? And why isn’t it a best seller?” I have been
asked many times if reviews matter. After having written just shy of a thousand
book reviews for many publications, I think I have an answer: Maybe. Sometimes.
It depends.
Amazon publishing and book selling certainly changed the
landscape of traditional book reviewing. For hundreds of years book reviews
appeared in newspapers and journals and sometimes magazines and pretty much
nowhere else. These publications, some impressive and powerful, some not so
much, were the most important places (and usually only places) to get the word
out by publishers and authors that a book had come on the market. For the last
fifty years or so, the three most important publications were Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal.
If you got a good review from all of these three, your book was pretty much guaranteed
to do well. Even if it didn’t sell as many copies as you hoped, you had excellent
blurb material for the softbound version when it came out, and publishers were more inclined to accept your next effort if your first received this sort of
critical reception. Of these three, only Publishers
Weekly remains really relevant.
Then along comes Amazon and book reviewing becomes something
new, more a matter of numbers rather than content. Reviewing is no longer the
sole province of professional reviewers – who are often authors themselves --
but the territory of regular readers as well. If you love a book or hate a book
you can go on Amazon and express your opinion, and other readers can make
decisions of whether to buy and/or read a book based on what someone who is
more like them has to say. These reviews have become one more weapon in
Amazon’s powerful arsenal aimed at the heart of mainstream publishing. Almost
all the self-help independent publication gurus advise that you do everything
possible to convince people to give your book a good review on Amazon. The more
reviews, the thinking and advice goes, the more copies you’re going to sell, and
then the more good reviews you’re going to get. This, of course, has led to
cheating and inflated numbers, a subject that I’m not going to go in to, but in
general I think that this conventional wisdom is correct: Amazon reviews lead
to Amazon sales.
But how about reviews for the really big guys, writers like
Stephen King, Brad Thor, Donna Tart, Tom Clancy, etc. Do those people really
give a shit? It’s my experience that they actually do. I’ve reviewed and
interviewed some of the biggest in the business and they have always been
seemingly happy to oblige my requests, been free with their time and willing to
answer questions that they’re sick of answering. It seems as if the universal desire to be loved and
Some years ago I went to the National Book Festival in
Washington and stood in line to have a book signed by Neil Gaiman. I confess, I
haven’t read his work extensively, but readers love him, and I really liked his
book, The Anansi Boys. Here are a
couple of lines from my starred review. “If readers found the Sandman series creator's last novel, American Gods, hard to classify, they will be equally nonplussed—and
equally entertained—by this brilliant mingling of the mundane and the
fantastic.” And… “But it's Gaiman's
focus on Charlie and Charlie's attempts to return to normalcy that make the
story so winning—along with gleeful, hurtling prose.” So I decided to go to
the book festival and ask him to sign my ARC (Advance Readers Copy) of his novel.
I went with my wife, and we were both nonplussed to see the line
waiting to speak to Gaiman. It must have stretched as long as a couple of
football fields, but I settled in and it inched forward. It took two hours to
get to the signing table, and along the way I met many Gaiman fans who all had
something he had written to sign. They were all impressed that I had a review copy of Anansi Boys, and it was passed along up and down the line to be looked at. You
had to hand your book to be signed to one of his festival helpers, and when she
set it on the table in front of him Gaiman appeared puzzled and looked up at me
with a frown. I said, “I’m your ____ _____ reviewer.” He stood up, (he’s really
tall) came around the table and hugged me. “You wouldn’t believe how much
you’ve changed my life,” he said. Well, that was a nice surprise.
He said that before the review I gave him, his publisher saw him
in as an up-market comic book guy, a writer who wasn’t basically serious. After the
review, they decided to deal with his work in a more serious manner. One
immediate pay off was that they were no longer going to put a lightening bolt
(a “goddamn lightening bolt,” were his words) on the covers of his books to
point up the otherworldly, fantasy aspects. We shook hands and he said if I
ever needed anything, to let him know. As I walked away, the folks in line
looked at me, awestruck. Well, maybe not awestruck, but with admiration. As did
my wife, who had witnessed the whole scene. Suddenly the critic gets some
respect. It felt good.
So in answer to the question, do reviews matter to the Big
Writers? The answer is yes, maybe, and it depends.
You just never know.
Can't make myself read him.
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