Sometimes both “hats” (I hate that term, but it common and easy to understand) are hard to wear. So from the mind of someone caught between in a rather public way, let me offer a few words.
Reviewers are #1 READERS. They are your audience, they are just vocal (and I hope) well-read members of your audience. Almost all the reasons I had for becoming a reviewer revolved around being a reader. I wanted to expand my horizons, record my thoughts of what I read, contribute to the reader-sphere and figure out why I liked the books I liked. Even my quest to build my own audience base comes down to me wanting to relate to readers.
In my opinion the best authors are widely read.
Whichever side of the author/reviewer divide you fall on you can (I hope) understand why we read. The love there of. The search for awesome, satisfying fiction wherever there’s a page and two covers. It’s a voracious desire, even if our reading habits don’t keep up. So if you understand that, you likely also understand the utter disappointment of a book that doesn’t deliver.
Readers ALWAYS bring something personal to a book they’re reading because they have chose that book for THEIR entertainment or THEIR information. If it doesn’t sound even the least bit interesting you cannot get a reader to pick up your book. Readers cannot forget who they are, especially since by the nature of reading it takes a period of time to complete the book and we do not live lives that allow for sitting down and reading the whole book at once. For example it takes me 6-20 hours of reading for me to finish a book and this is considered fast reading. I can finish a book in a day, if it is engaging and I do very little else. So by the nature of the activity there will be interrupting. The book will get put aside for minutes, hours or days. The reader will stop reading to live their lives and as such books simply do not sweep people out of their identities and into the book. Readers can suspend disbelief, but they cannot suspend their own opinion and personality in order to assume the one the author wishes. At best readers can eavesdrop and sympathize. We can connect, but not become.
While I believe that there are no taboos in fiction when you get into offensive and argue-triggering ideas, concepts and events an author must convince a reader that there is point, a purpose, to the story they are being told. I read and reviewed Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl, which was absolutely filled with racism, sexism, addict, hate speech and other highly offensive material. Like Natural Born Killers and most Tarantino films the story is out of control to begin with. It’s dangerous, almost a parody of human behavior at it’s worst. It’s Jerry Springer, with a point, completely over the top and almost a farce of real life. The point is that it’s sadly not an inaccurate reflection of humanity, but by making these things part of an overwhelming narrative the author makes the statement that such human behavior is a over the top farce in and of itself. Now suddenly this highly offensive narrative had a point–making fun of such extremes even as it uses them as tools in telling a greater story.
In short if you go this route, or that of high sex, high blood or gore, it should have a point vital to the storytelling itself. Even Lolita had a point. the best horror stories might be violent and gory, but the the gore isn’t the end all, it’s the dressing up of the point, and in the great novels the gore, like the language is used to manipulate the reader into believing certain things vital to pulling them into the story. The storytelling should not be effective without the use of racism, abuse, gore or sex (Think Palahniuk’s Choke, where the sex is absolutely vital to the telling of the story) if you are going to use it in your book.
As a reader I have a huge problem with romances wherein the hero rapes the heroine. Rape is not attractive. It is not romantic. I cannot stand romance books where the hero rapes the heroine (or vice versa).
However when I read horror the rules change completely, because horror is supposed to make you uncomfortable. A relationship between a heroine and hero that includes rape and beating and even drugging would be acceptable to me in a horror book because it could very easily be a tool to make me feel terribly uncomfortable.
That leads into my next point; Because readers always bring themselves into the story readers will always go into a story with expectations. Some come from the genre (I expect horror to make me feel uncomfortable, scared or creeped out, for example), or from a knowledge of the author’s previous books (you can see an example of my own expectations from an author’s previous books in my review of Prey by Rachel Vincent, where I had to confess that I expected the series to lose its bite as readers got more attached to the characters), or from recommendations they’ve received from friends or online. This will affect a reader’s experience as well–and worse you can’t control this.
On to disappointment. No matter what the reason–the story not being what they wanted, the storytelling not being good, technical writing problems, or even just a story being good, but no spectacular–readers hate to be disappointed. Very rarely does someone buy a book wanting to hate it. Even books that have bad reviews might have elements that some readers like. Some readers literally cannot get enough of certain things (vampires, zombies, love stories) and will read and probably enjoy almost every book with those elements that they can get their hands on. Which is something I keep in mind when reviewing a book I didn’t personally enjoy. Rare is the book that no one can enjoy.
But readers are not against you. We want to enjoy your book. We want it so much we try to push aside ourselves aside to enjoy your tale. (This is suspension of disbelief. We know CSI is NOT accurate, but we pretend it is so we can enjoy the story they are telling, not the sheer heavy details of accuracy. No one wants pure accuracy in speculative fiction, because then fact checking becomes more important than storytelling.) It’s upsetting for us when we don’t enjoy your work, and yes, we do wonder if it’s just us. It’s a reviewer’s job to analyse:
1. Do I like it–Yes or no.
2.Why or why not?
3. Where are the bits that cause me to like/not like it?
4. Are they because I couldn’t connect with this story/these characters or are they do to poor writing? Or both?
5. Would other people like it? Why or why not? And, what kind of people would like it?
6. (Not all reviewers consider this one, but critics do) What value does this book has in the greater context the genre, the author’s career, the current state of the world and literature?
Most books I read are good, but not spectacular. My top complaint is not being able to connect with a lead character. This is completely typical of reviewers, readers, agents and editors. We all do this because we love it. We read because we love it. (For the most part) We are not your enemies, or your opposites. There should be no professional divides. We ARE your audience. We are your street team. Every single reader is not just a sale, they are a potential word of mouth recommender.
We are not reviewers, we are vocal readers.
You can find another great take, from an author point of view here where Mike Shevdon says:
If the reviewer liked or disliked the book, if it horrified or amused them, caused them to stay up late or throw the book at the wall, that is down to their personal experience of the book. They have made the effort to place themselves in an open state of mind that was receptive to the authors imaginings.
