Rhyanna
http://childrensbookwinp.ning.com/profile/Kressalyne
http://lion_sheart.tripod.com
Keep the Light of Hope Alive, Smile and Pass it on.

I agree that it’s dangerous to try to review and get published at the same time. You risk offending the people whose favor you need to court, and you risk that situation biasing your reviews.

I always try to be polite when I don’t like a book, although there have been two or three exceptions (out of 600 reviews, to put that in perspective) where I loathed a book so much that I was really hard on it. My feelings were just so strong that it wouldn’t have been honest to do otherwise.

I’m rather curious about people’s feelings on positive vs. negative reviews in general—something I blogged about last week. I always try to be very open-minded with respect to the books I read and even try to note when something I don’t like would probably appeal to others. That said, though, for every author who has thanked me for a fair (yet not entirely complementary) review, there’s at least one who has sent me hate mail for daring to dislike even a tiny aspect of an otherwise amazing book that I said wonderful things about.

So yeah, if you are in a position where you have to worry about offending other authors and editors, it might be best not to review. But if you’re polite and honest and open-minded and don’t mind that you’ll inevitably burn a few bridges, then do what you want, even if it’ll make a few people mad.

Janine, I think you’re very sweet

That is the absolute truth.

Janine bends over backward to be fair to the authors and the books she reviews.

Janine, I think you’re very sweet–and I don’t mean that in a snotty or snarky way. Sincerely.

Nora

Maybe romance skipped a stage and that left readers (depending on their other fandom experience) with different expectations about how authors interact with fans and other authors– that’s not say that there haven’t been notable feuds. If you have a chance you might pick up Camille Bacon-Smith’s Science Fiction Culture. She’s an academic who has also written some good horror/fantasy.

I just searched and you can find a decent sized chunk of SF Culture on Google Book Search if you feel like sampling it.

A few years ago I wrote a book, a regency-set historical, with my sister. We had a riot writing it together; it was a great experience and brought us closer together. Throughout the process of writing it I worried that my online name would proceed me and I would not be able to get it published with anyone who made the connection between AAR and me. And in the end we didn’t publish it, but mostly because it was too long and too complicated and because we, in our ignorance of British legal history, made a blundering plotting error that resulted in a massive rewrite and a happy ending that was perhaps a bit untraditional (it was either that or set course full sail ahead into Historical Inaccuracy waters). We sent out some queries, got a few rejections and one “I’d be glad to read another manuscript from you, but this one is a no.” And because my sister had another baby and I was going through a full course of infertility treatments and another script was not forthcoming, we decided that was good enough. Maybe sometime in the future, another book would be born of our mutual imagination, but we could be grateful for the good that came of this one. Last year I threw it up on Lulu.com just to get it in real book format for my own personal bookshelf. That was kind of neat. Ah, technology…

It sounds like you had a very good experience writing this book, even though it wasn’t published. I think that sometimes the process of writing can be its own reward.

Another salient point was my own speculation that perhaps my skin would be too thin for publication, that in truth I could dish it out but not take it. Who knows? While I don’t think the book=baby comparison really works, it’s hard not being defensive about anything of your own creation. And writing a book takes hours and hours and hours of yourself. It’s very personal.

I agree that, from an emotional standpoint, it’s very hard not to be defensive. But from a logical standpoint, it’s simply not rational to expect only praise and no criticism. The book has not been written that everyone has loved and no one has criticized. Even the Bible gets picked apart by some, and that’s the most venerated book in the western world. It’s tough, I’m not saying it’s not tough, to hear criticism. But it’s also a sign that the book is reaching readers, that it’s making an impact, that it’s ciruclating in the world. Which is what the goal of being published was about, no?

As far as whether writers can review and reviewers can write, I think the combination is possible. Reviewing is writing – thinking about what you’re reading, really examining it, and then writing it down, hopefully in an interesting way.

I think that’s an important point. Even a reviewer who isn’t a novelist is still a writer.

Personally, I find it hard NOT to write about books I love or that tweak me in interesting ways. It builds up in my head, what’s going on in those pages, and I have to get it out.

Yes, that happens to me as well. I love to discuss books. It’s very hard to shut up about them.

However, as I was in the process of writing, I found it getting harder and harder to read with enjoyment because I would get sidetracked by all these issues of craft to the point at which I found it difficult to get into books because I was looking at everything so critically. I missed reading for enjoyment.

I am lucky, I think, that for the most part I still enjoy books very much. And when I don’t, I can usually judge that from a couple of chapters and then I don’t read further and don’t review those books.

Of course now I have much less time to read or write, and I’ve had a challenging time finding books that wow me, so I’ve been less active as a reviewer (Sorry, Jane!). But that may be just temporary. Time will tell.

Like Jane, I hope you will return to reviewing more actively, because I really enjoy your reviews. I think they were a big factor in turning me on to Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s books.

I’ve been looking for good snarky reviews for months. Can anybody point me in the right direction? It may be that I haven’t been blog-hopping as much, just recently, but I haven’t seen a snarky romance review for ages. Where are all these legions of Snarky Reviewers hiding?

I don’t blog hop that much so I am probably the wrong person to ask. I sometimes see snarky reviews on Amazon, though.

Nora Roberts,

A year or two ago, I read an interview with an author who snotted all over an established writer in the same genre. He’s old and tired, I’m fresh. He doesn’t do proper research, and I do. He’s crap, basically and I’m gold. I found it so unprofessional, the comments, the slap him down to build me up that I thought: I’ll never buy a book you’ve written, you arrogant asshole.

I have read interviews like that too, and I wonder if perhaps an interview is not the best venue for criticism? For one thing, the author is at the mercy of the interviewer, who may edit their words. If the interviewee says some positive as well as negative things about a fellow author, perhaps only the negative things will end up in the interview. Also, in an interview, the interview subject is asked to talk all about himself, so interviews can make their subjects seem self-centered or navel gazing even when there’s no criticism involved. I imagine that being interviewed by the media is an art onto itself.

DS,

In SF&F, Fantasy, mystery and horror most published reviews I have read are nearly always by author-reviewers– and they also have longevity. I will occasionally refer back to Anthony Boucher’s reviews of mystery novels and he died in 1968– I had to look that date up and noticed that he had also been awarded an Edgar for his reviews. I’ve been trying for a week to find a statement made by Theodore Sturgeon and I keep being distracted by his comments on writing sf although a lot of what he reviewed is long forgotten.

It sounds like you have some wonderful books in your collection. I would love to have an anthology of reviews by romance authors, with each author reviewing a favorite book and explaining why it is a favorite. I think that would be a treasure trove, and it wouldn’t even require anyone to write a negative review.