A rather facile post at Writer Unboxed: Good News About Bad Reviews

There is so much that a post with this title could do, which this post doesn’t do. This is a trivial post that declares, “A review that expresses a negative opinion might make your book appeal to other readers.” This is true, but if that’s all you’re going to say, why even bother? Let’s try to do a little more with this basic topic. How about –>

Top Ten Reasons Bad Reviews Could Be Good:

1) Just as the linked post points out, one person’s negative opinion could of course make the book sound appealing to other prospective readers. This is common, as I think we all know. It works like this:

“I couldn’t get into this book because the sentences were beautiful, but the pace was far too slow” = Response: Oh, I usually like books described as slow-paced.

“Literally nothing happens” = Response: Great, I’m totally in the mood for slice-of-life.

“Not nearly enough spice” = Response: Thank heaven, finally, a romance that doesn’t insist on describing in excruciating detail what goes where! Worth another look.

And so on. This is basically always going to happen with practically any review that includes any thought at all from the reviewer. Anything other than “Cover was torn, one star.” (Which I have in fact seen; I think most authors have a couple one-star reviews in this basic category.)

2) The occasional negative review makes the rest of the reviews look honest.

If a novel has quite a lot of reviews that are all very brief and all glowing and all vague, that looks fake. Incidentally, Amazon will come down hard on anybody they suspect of review manipulation, so I’m not sure exactly how easy it is to get away with buying fake reviews these days. Buying real reviews is not rare, but it sure seems like a bad idea to me. If you google “Where can I buy book reviews?”, you find quite a few services that will be happy to charge you a shockingly large fee in exchange for, quote, honest reviews, unquote.

Speaking as someone who picked up several starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist for traditionally published books, I personally feel that the reviews Kirkus sells to self-publishing authors are, basically, a scam. Or at best entirely too scam-adjacent. There are lots of reasons for this, beginning with the huge fee, but not stopping with that.

Oh, I think I drifted off topic there. Never mind. My point was, negative reviews make the whole set of reviews look more honest, ALTHOUGH really solid, thoughtful positive reviews over 50 words (or so) do the same thing and are even better for the purpose.

3) If a review says a book is “too dark” or “too graphic,” some readers may take that as a challenge and therefore pick it up.

4) If a review says, “I loved it, but the author REALLY NEEDS to learn how to use lay and lie,” then the author might read that and learn how to use lay and lie, thus improving the reading experience for all her readers forever.

As a side note, the review will sit there forever, so the kinder method would be to email the author and say, “I love your books, but for crying out loud, can’t you sort out lay vs lie?” I personally am too inhibited to do that. If I knew the reader personally, I might, but otherwise, probably not.

As a side-side note, there’s a “report” option for Amazon ebooks via which a reader can report typos and other errors. I HEAR that sometimes Amazon will unpublish the book and this would be bad for the author, but I don’t know how often that sort of thing happens? I’ve only had the “fix something” panel light up once at KDP personally, when an exceptionally alert reader spotted a typo in Tuyo after the book had been out for four years. I fixed it and that was it, no problems.

5) “I can’t believe a book THIS BAD is even possible” can obviously cause readers to buy the book to see just how terrible it is.

I don’t recommend this as a sales strategy, but I mean, it’s a possible way negative reviews might get readers to buy a book.

6) The review specifically mentions a trope that is a draw for a significant number of readers. That is, the words “prison break” or “ghost story” appear in the review, and at once a certain number of potential buyers perk up.

I’m pretty sure this has happened for me, but I can’t think of the specific instance.

7) There’s a “Team A” vs “Team B” dynamic of some sort, this appears in the reviews, and some number of readers become curious about which team they’ll wind up rooting for.

I grant, plenty of readers are tired of love triangles, but I bet plenty aren’t. Also, there are probably other sorts of “Team A vs Team B” things that would work, although love triangles are certainly what spring to mind.

8) A negative review mentions a different author in a way that is intriguing to potential readers. That is, “Reminds me of Patricia McKillip, but with too many talking cats.” Then readers who don’t mind talking cats and do like McKillip think, “Great!” and pick it up.

9) Negative reviews boost the number of reviews just as much as good reviews. Sheer numbers of reviews produce a credibility all their own.

10) A negative review strikes other readers as unfair or off-base, and inspires those other readers to write their own reviews contradicting the negative one.

***

Whew, fine, ten turned out to be a lot. I was trying to think of actual plausible reasons without repeating myself too much or getting too silly. I was starting to think I wasn’t going to get there, but then I thought of a few more after all.

While on this topic, a few related posts certainly spring to mind, so:

Why authors shouldn’t read reader reviews

Why Authors Should Listen to Readers: About the importance of reading reader reviews

Why Every Writer Should Be Writing Book Reviews

I used to post more reviews at Goodreads and Amazon. I gradually stopped because of concerns about the appearance of tit-for-tat review swaps and review manipulation. The thing is, if authors genuinely like each other’s books and review each other’s books at all frequently, I don’t see how to avoid the appearance that you’re swapping reviews. I don’t know, maybe it would be safe to go through my “recent reading” posts and adapt some of those to post as reviews — but only for authors who haven’t ever reviewed my books. Not like such authors are in short supply.

However, I do believe that I become FAR more analytical when I’m writing a review. I see TONS of stuff I wouldn’t have consciously noticed if I hadn’t written the review. I think that alone is at least interesting and possibly useful, so I lean toward agreeing with the third of the linked posts above: Writers ought to be writing reviews.

I used to visit and read FAR more book review blogs than I do now because, as my TBR pile threatened to implode and become a black hole, the last thing I really wanted was a lot of reviews of great-sounding books. I used to visit Charlotte’s Library routinely — she reviews MG books, especially novels involving time travel, of which there are A LOT, apparently. Glad to see her site is still going. So is Fantasy Book Cafe, another one I used to visit a lot. I should glance in at both of these sites from time to time.

If you’ve got a favorite book review site, how about dropping it in the comments?

The post Negative reviews appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.