Negative Reviews are Good

The cavalier brutality of that sentence sends shivers down my spine.

I love it.

I don’t know Johanna Thomas-Corr, but she deserves to be paid double whatever she earned for writing this review.

the praise gutter clogged

When I used to write reviews for books for various online publications that paid me exactly zero dollars for my time and effort, I would run into an interesting problem: no one wanted negative reviews.

I had several editors tell me that they don’t publish negative reviews at all.

Because of this, many reviews I wrote never got published, or they got published in a way that sort of massaged the negativity out of it. Sometimes they became interviews instead.

Now, I’ve mentioned to various people at various places that I was once pretty involved in the indie lit scene in the 2010s. I reviewed dozens of books at online magazines that seemed important though I believe only one still exists. So often, in fact, did I review independent, small press books that I even had my writing plagiarized by Kirkus Reviews¹.

I mention this only because independent books have a review problem: most books are never reviewed by anyone, let alone by someone at a website that real life readers read in real life. Often, when I would review a book, it might be the only review of that book that exists.

This is why editors told me they only wanted positive reviews. The thinking went: it’s hard enough to get attention for these books—why be negative?

The implication being that the book will die a sad lonely death anyway. Why hurt its feelings?

The clever reader will guess what I have to say about this, but I’ll say it anyway:

We develop taste by first understanding what we don’t like. The second step is discovering why we don’t like something.

I say this is the first step because you never need to understand what you like. It’s self-evident to you. I loved Disney’s Beauty and the Beast from before memory stirred within me, for example. I didn’t need to think about it. So bonedeep was my love for that 1991 animated movie that my whole life rests uneasily on its monstrous romance. It didn’t teach me something about myself because I didn’t have to know myself to fall in love. I tumbled willingly into every single frame.

But I remember distinctly my revulsion at Dumbo. I didn’t know why I hated Dumbo so much, but my aversion to it did teach me something about myself. By discovering disgust, I understood what I wanted to avoid. This, in turn, pushed me back towards something like Beauty and the Beast, which then, finally, taught me a lesson about myself.

I hate this but love that.

No more of this, please, but quite a bit more of that.

Over time, as I emerged from the primordial soup of memory’s hole, I began to shape opinions and develop arguments for why my point of view was correct. Sadly, as is always the case, it would take decades for me to understand that my perspective was as arbitrary as shrapnel on a furrowed field in France.

And so when a community of readers and writers only allow space for positivity, it cloisters itself from the kinds of people who are not already immersed in academia or independent literature. We become a cauldron of congratulatory bubbles popping effusively for every dummy who convinced some random guy who opened up a gmail account with PRESS in the username to publish their books.

Weirdly enough, this has also led to a lot of antagonism for Goodreads from authors.

the plebes will have their say

I love Goodreads. I don’t love that it’s owned by Amazon, but I love everything else about it.

I often see complaints that its app sucks or that its UX is ancient or whatever else sad dorks on the world wide web problematize.

But this is exactly what makes Goodreads good. It’s good that Goodreads is an almost unusable social media. Or, it’s quite useful and usable, but it’s useless as a social media platform.

I love it!

Goodreads is exactly what I want it to be, which is essentially a fancified spreadsheet tracking my opinions about books I’ve read. Every once in a great while, someone will comment on one of my reviews. Sometimes they even comment something on topic! And even at these best of moments, Goodreads gleefully crashes to keep you from ever having a conversation in real time with another human.

Make every social media exactly like this.

But the best part of Goodreads is that this is where most reviews actually happen. It’s also, likely, the first place your regular ass reader is going to encounter your book. People will see the ratings and reviews and they might be convinced to pick up your book, even though they never saw a press release about it or any official review published anywhere.

This is exactly why writers hate Goodreads and it is very dumb.

Every few months, authors rise up in unison to complain about Goodreads and the horrible, no good, very bad readers on there. So far has this discourse come that it’s just assumed that everyone who publishes a book also hates Goodreads, which, in turn, causes many new authors to adopt this posture.

I have seen every conceivable complaint about Goodreads’ users, but most often the author will bemoan how someone didn’t understand their book or that they weren’t the target audience for their book.

I mean, it’s good to understand that your book is for someone.

But if you write a book and put it out into the world and actually want it to be successful, you need to understand that some people won’t like it. You also need to understand that it is a very good sign that people not predisposed to love your book are discovering it. It means you’ve managed to escape the tiny bubbles of friends, followers, and professional acquaintances that typically give you 5-Stars more out of habit than because of taste or discernment.

That this upsets authors is mindboggling.

I mean, I understand the desire to only receive praise when you put a lot of work into something. My baseball coach used to be real nice to me in high school² and that sure did feel good, but it didn’t feel nearly as good as when one of the private school coaches came up to me after a game where I struck out ten of his kids and asked me if I was interested in a scholarship.

Because I was an apocalyptically unhappy person and an incorrigible proletariat, I politely told him to go fuck himself, never mind that he was paying me a genuine compliment. But the fact that I remember this happening and not all the times my mom told me I did a good job at anything tells me something about myself.

I valued that stranger’s interest in my hard work because I knew he meant it. Knew he meant it especially because he saw how my hard work could benefit him directly.

My mom is my dang mom.

She didn’t even know what a strikeout was.

And let me tell you something about reviews on Goodreads: I can spot a book that is only reviewed by friends or hangers-on from a glance³. So many of the reviews are maybe a sentence long and feel as if they could be about literally anything. Often, this tells me that the reviewer didn’t even read the book.

But this is the kind of review authors seem to prefer. Better to have a friend marvel at their prose (this is often a tell, honestly) than have some stranger say that the characters were unlikeable.

Why would someone write a review for a book they haven’t read?

Well, because that’s part of small, independent literature, too. Everyone is nice to one another because they want everyone else to be nice to them. They give you 5-Stars in hopes that you’ll give their shitty book 5-Stars in return. And so almost no one gives a negative review about anyone’s books.

But there are only so many ways for someone to call someone a genius without all this praise to become monochromatic and meaningless.

And when you do write a negative review, people get real mad.

Back when I was on facebook, authors unfriended me because of reviews I wrote of their books. Some people would message me privately to ask me to change my review or at least give them an extra star or to ask me why I was being an asshole.

And, yeah, I could have probably been nicer and just thrown them a few extra stars.

But my Goodreads account is for me. It’s not for you or them.

The real problem with Goodreads for most authors is their fragility and their fear of failure.

the circle jerks itself

Reviews are important. As an indie author, reviews are everything to me. I don’t have a marketing budget or a publicist to help spread the word about my dumb little books. I rely on my Goodreads and Amazon reviews⁴ to telegraph to potential readers what they may get out of my books, and I am forever grateful to those who have reviewed my books, even when they're negative⁵ and/or bizarre⁶.

And while I expect each and every one of you to only ever tell me that I am great, I want you to know that I will still love you even if you have the temerity to hate my books.

In all seriousness, be honest when you review books. If you hate a book, say so. This is especially important, I think, if you actually want a thriving independent community or art and artists. A community cannot have taste if they promote every piece of work as revelatory or groundbreaking.

You may hurt some people’s feelings, but who cares? You’re discussing their work, not their personality. If life had gone slightly differently, I most likely would have become a college athlete. My performance would be inarguable. If I let up ten hits and three home runs and walked five people, everyone would know that I was playing like shit. I might prefer that they not say that to my face, but I’d also need to understand that it’s not personal when the people watching the game leaned over to one another and said, This kid sucks ass.

Writers can and should get over themselves.

If you’re unwilling to accept that some people may think you’re a shithead or that you suck at what you claim to be good at, then don’t write in public.

Write all you want but keep it to yourself.

Dark Dispatch @dark_dispatch

There it is. Hasn't been around long enough to know about the CF sock puppet scandal w/ RE, the Silk Fire attacks, reviewers getting stalked & assaulted. But her feelings. Sniff. Have them. PRIVATELY. bbc.com/news/uk-scotla…

It’s good for people to know what they don’t like. It’s good for an art scene to have detractors. It’s good for even well-regarded books to have, as the kids say, haters.

If we don’t know what you hate, we don’t really know what you like or why you like it. And so a scene that only offers effusive praise quickly becomes sterile and claustrophobic. An artistic community without the decency to call out failures will forever allow mediocrity to continue to rise for the simple fact that no one is willing to be honest with themselves or each other.

There are two real driving motivations for this behavior within the independent literary movement I was once a part of:

• Every reader is also a writer. Another way to say this is that there are no fans. There are only other creators.

• It has become so cloistered within the university system that it hardly matters if books do well or succeed on their own right.

To unpack this slightly—if everyone within a community is producing art almost exclusively consumed by that same community, people within that community will seek harmony, especially when their professional success may depend on it.

The important thing, for the university writer, is that the book fills a line on their CV so that their resume looks more impressive to potential employers looking to fill a tenure-track position (of which there are too few for the number of writers applying).

The insular quality of the independent scene, where people go from MFA students to MFA professors or from MFA students to acquisition editors at a professional publisher or book reviewer at a professional periodical, means that your connections matter quite a bit more than anything else. And so there’s much to be gained for you professionally from not pissing anyone off.

Your former student may end up reviewing you in the LA Times, after all. That kid who was in your MFA program when you were coming up might end up being the acquisitions editor at Soho or Graywolf, so it’s probably best to be friendly in case you need them to pick your book out of the pile of submissions and recommend it to the higher-ups.

And while this is well and good for the people benefiting from this cesspit, it is bad for the critical credibility of the community.

break some knees but use the right hammer

Now, I’m not going to recommend that you be mean and cutting just because that’s sometimes fun and funny⁷. Things would likely be much worse if everyone were negative about everyone, turning independent art into a toxic wasteland of vitriol and spite.

But if you hate a book, go on and hate it. Give a book 1-Star on Amazon and Goodreads but be kind enough to explain yourself. Sometimes we learn more about a book from a negative review than from a positive. I know, for me, I have realized that someone’s negative review told me exactly how and why I would love the book they hated.

This is useful.

Because, ultimately, a negative review is not for an author. Authors should be able to determine what is and what isn’t useful from a negative review though. I mean, some people hate your book for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your book, and such reviews can safely be ignored. Every now and then, a negative review will give you useful constructive feedback.

I, myself, learned quite a lot from very specific things from reviews of my book. For example, many reviewers—even ones who gave positive reviews!—did not seem to understand the page-to-page happenings of my second novel (now out of print).

What I learned from this was that the aggressively stylized prose was more a barrier than anything else.

But the review isn’t for you. It really isn’t. Even the positive review isn’t for you.

It’s for the potential audience of readers out there.

Which is, honestly, why I find it funny that so many authors hate Goodreads.

It’s not for them.

Their hate is silly and often childish.

Goodreads is for the communities of readers out there wandering the wild world looking for books to take them far away from themselves or to delve deep inside themselves.

So be honest.

Be negative if you hate a book.

Let people know why.

But don’t give people a positive review just because you hope they’ll someday return the favor.

1. Almost no one would think of Terrence Malick and Cormac McCarthy in the same sentence, but I did when describing Kloss’ previous novel. That they applied it to The Revelator mostly makes me think they didn’t even read The Revelator, but they definitely read my review of The Alligators of Abraham. Of course, like most things, my review is lost to the void of defunct websites from a decade ago.

2. He started being real rude to me when I quit playing baseball due to a semi-permanent injury that caused me to swallow advil like they had a taste.

3. Maybe someday I’ll write a checklist of tells that a book is not being honestly reviewed.

4. Speaking of: I sure would appreciate you reviewing my books.

5. “While it was sometimes intriguing, its style and subject matter mostly just come of (sic) as nothing more than pretentious, and shock for shocks sake.”

6. “I'm not sure what the fuck I just read.”

7. Though this often gets you attention, which is the currency of the internet.