Once upon a time, in a pre-Internet
galaxy far, far away, I used to buy a lot of books. The process went something
like this: read a few reviews in magazines or newspapers, maybe get a
recommendation from a friend, or sometimes—and stick with me on this one—just
pick something interesting looking from the bookstore shelves without even reading a review! This
method proved pretty effective, overall—a typical run resulted in a few lousy
books, a few astonishingly great ones, and many more that landed somewhere
in-between. A diverse crap shoot—you know, a lot like life in
general.
Then
one day those bookstores started disappearing and the Amazonian conqueror took
over the land—now I could not only buy nearly any book I desired from the
comfort of my recliner, but I could read dozens, sometimes even hundreds of reviews
without any extra effort—a reader’s paradise all in one place!
But
then came the not-so-happily-ever-after ending to the reader’s fairy tale: ever
so slowly, before I even realized it was happening, I stopped buying books. I
would head over to Amazon with a new title, and before hitting the purchase button,
I would naturally scan the reviews. The positive ones tended to say much the same
things, so I often found myself jumping straight to the negative ones. And although
they sometimes tipped me off to a truly avoid-this element, more often than not
the cascade of conflicting perspectives left me feeling so ambivalent about the
book that I’d decide it wasn’t worth taking a chance with my hard-earned money.
Time went by and
I caught up on stacks of unread New
Yorkers, but one day I woke up starving for a novel—a good one, a bad one, a
somewhere in-between one--I didn’t care. So I went and bought a book. Without
reading any of the Amazon reviews. And then I bought more books, and have been
buying them ever since. This method has proven pretty effective, overall—a few
lousy books, a few astonishingly great ones, and many more somewhere in-between.
A diverse crap shoot—you know, a lot like life in general.
Simple
enough for me as a reader, but as an author, such review-rejection is a little
trickier. I don’t know many writers who can resist the siren song of reading
his or her own reviews, and in many ways, the increased interaction between
artist and audience that the Internet allows is a powerful new avenue for
learning and growth. And yet I can’t
help but wonder at the consequences, particularly for artists, of this strange
new world in which everyone can (and often does) comment upon and rate
everything, all the time (and then comment upon the comments…). The best case
outcome of this increased feedback is that it provides the artists with more pathways
forward on that never-ending, obstacle-filled journey of improvement; the neutral
outcome (and the one I suspect is most often the case) is that, like so much
else about online “networking,” a lot of people end up conversing with
themselves in a virtual wind tunnel; but the worst case scenario, which is not
too hard to imagine if one has been paying attention to the careers of certain writers,
artists and musicians these days, is a crippling cacophony of never-ending
voices drowning out the most essential, vital part of this whole process: the
artist’s own voice whispering to his or her soul in the solitude. Flawed and
struggling though it may be, if that voice gets lost in the din, an Internet
full of readers and reviewers and critics and editors cannot rescue it.
Another curious
aspect of the reader review phenomenon is the tendency (of which I myself have been guilty) for authors to conflate such feedback with professional reviews from industry
publications. (Recently, a fellow author even suggested that I
should be concerned about the enthusiastic Amazon reviews for my novel Verland: The Transformation because
potential readers might think that I had somehow manufactured or manipulated
them; although possessing such Svengali-like mind control over my readers would
certainly come in handy, I’m going to give most people the benefit of the doubt in being
neither paranoid nor absurd enough to travel down that route.) But consider that in a simpler time, a
writer’s reviews came primarily from newspapers or magazines; everything else was regarded not as a “review,” but a “response”—a fan letter (or a hate
letter); an “I loved/hated” your book at a signing or store appearance; a
letter to an editor, perhaps—and I often think that it might be a happier,
healthier (and more realistic) perspective to regard feedback on sites like
Amazon and Goodreads as just that: often highly personal, individual reader
responses—and yes, as potentially insightful/infuriating/enlightening/exasperating/worthwhile
as reader responses have always been—but in no way replacing or replicating the
objectivity and purpose of a professional review.
I’m
off to buy a new book now; you’ll forgive me, I hope, for skipping the reviews.
