Archive for the ‘Book Discussion’ Category

Hello Naughty Readers and Naughty Authors,

We find ourselves here at Naughty in the Backseat with a bit of a dilemma.   How to approach reviews.  I am the organizer of the Book Bloggers and Publishers Online Conference, yesterday a group of bloggers got together to discuss reviewing.  Believe me, writing a critique of an authors work and making your comments visible to readers is no easy feat.  Reviewers agonize over choosing the right words and their desire to help authors get the word out about their books.  Here comes the BUT

We do not work for the author, we are not employed by the publisher, so should we feel like we owe them something while we write up a review?  Isn’t our obligation to give a fair score and assessment to readers?   If a book scores lower then a 3/5 my reviewers do NOT want to hand it over.  Our site does not want to hurt an authors sales with a low score.  We are readers and we appreciate all of the work that goes into writing and publishing a book.   BUT does that mean we should not post reviews on books that were not of a reasonable-acceptable standard or minimum level of quality?

If all reviewers/review sites ignore the titles that receive a low rating and do not post their scores or reviews are we doing readers a service?  I was talking with a reader on FaceBook  and asked her if she would be interested in reviewing for my sites.  Her reply was that she is too honest to be a reviewer.  Review sites just give everything a good review because they want free books.  I was honestly shocked.  Then I went and looked around at the titles that I have read recently.  It is not inaccurate.  I know it is not out of a greediness for free books in a lot of cases, but we are readers.  We love books.  We give our time for the author and publisher to help them spread the word about new reads.  BUT is this love leaving us with the feeling that we have an obligation to the author?  are we biased?   By aligning-empathizing- interacting with authors are we doing readers  disservice?  We could review anonymously at Naughty in the Backseat and Naughty Boys.  We could set a policy to only post the reviews above a 2.5/5.  We could stop using a rating system.

This is a new problem on the site.  Until now we have had very few reviews posting.    I as the owner of these sites and others rarely review since I need to interact with the authors and that does put me in an awkward position.  BUT now we are faced with the issue, a dilemma with reviewing.  So I ask you, what do you think?
- Terry Kate