I know, I know, we’re all getting tired of it. But this entry is as much about preserving my thoughts (and some links) as anything else.
First, after Maggie Stiefvater made waves by claiming that real reviews are little academic papers the co-Head-and-Chief of MonsterLibrarian (who is a real, academic librarian with a degree working on continuing education) responded, comparing some of Stiefvater’s own reviews from “respected” sites.
I have to be honest, the ML heads (who are good friends and awesome people) and I were all pretty upset. They’re both educated librarians by trade. I’m not, but my mom and aunt were teachers, I was a volunteer librarian in school and I’m a former bookseller so books and reading have been a vital part of my life for as long as I can remember. But credentials aside ML’s goal is academic–to help librarians build their collections in the genres that mainstream publishing culture and education often overlooks.
We consider ourselves and our site at least semi-professional and try to conduct our interviews and reviews as such. But we’re also an all volunteer staff doing this in our spare time (which is why sometimes updates are slow). furthermore, Kirsten makes an excellent point in her review comparison, showing that many respected review venues often only give short blurbs of a review, most of which is plot summary. So “respected” comes from their circulation numbers and their name recognition.
Over on Dear Author there’s a good article that suggests the attempts to set “reviewer rules” is an attempt on the part of individuals to set rules of legitimacy–and therefore be able to disregard a reviewer opinion as illegitimate. (So in one sweep consoling oneself for a poor review and getting a stab back at the reviewer one feels insulted them.) This is a very, very good conclusion.
I’ve been thinking since I read it that it goes further than that. It used to be, not long ago, just a few years but that’s a life time in publishing time, that in the romance and horror community there was a lot of peer pressure to be blindly supportive of your fellow authors. To respect the effort they put into the work that was published with a good review or nothing.
This same idea spilled over (and still does) into the submission level, with people easily becoming furious at editors and agents for sending for rejections, or even personal rejections with no useful information. This rage has always existed. It just didn’t happen as publicly as it does not. I understand why someone wants feedback. It’s hard to come by, and even harder to get good (or even just useful) feedback.
But that’s not the job of the editor or agent (which is why it’s a gift when you do get it). It’s the job of critiquers, or peers.
Now there’s been a shift where a lot of the behind the scenes “work” of building a career is either more visual or skipped thanks to the ease of self publishing. Mostly, it’s skipped. There’s little drive to seek out opinions of peers when you can just throw the work on Amazon and get paid to get feedback. But the process of learning about what to expect as your career progresses is gone. That’s what “Putting in the work” meant five years ago. Not toiling until some imaginary clock dinged and your turn to be published came up. It was about learning what to expect and how to conduct yourself through your career.
So a lot of the people starting small presses and self publishing and seeing blooming careers with small presses and self publishing have never gone through this basic learning level. (Side Note: The better published you are the more likely it is that you’ve already learned this, or you have more layers–ie agent, experienced editor, experienced peers–between you and the public to help you learn/cushion you from this.) Which means that same beginning gaffs are more widely seen.
(What are those gaffs? Well there are plenty of other blogs about that, but in short it comes down to thinking you’re owed something. You know, owed a publication because you wrote the story, or a good review/reward because you submitted it enough to get it published. You aren’t owed a damn thing. If you want to publish you have to write a story someone wants to read. That’s the heart of how it works.)
So what used to be seen by editors and and agents is now seen by readers and reviewers. And, the kerfuffles recently involving reviews all come down to the art/product divide and human nature. We work, and want a pay off for that work. Nothing wrong in that. But artistic endeavors aren’t retail jobs. You can’t just show up, put in your assigned hours and get your paycheck. Artistic endeavors are skewed because the value of the product changes through a huge mess of conditions, one of which is the opinion of the consumer. (That would have been the opinion of the “gatekeeper” in the older model of publishing. so, perhaps we should consider that the “gatekeepers” didn’t just keep books from being published but also protected fragile artist egos from being shattered by the fickle consumer.)
The consumer will never be able to see how much work the writer puts into a book, mostly because that varies a lot as well. Some find it easy. Some toil for years. Some work hard to craft the best story they can. Some jump on a bandwagon or bang something out for a friend’s anthology. The ease of publishing works as an equalizer which means the person who spends two years writing a book, a year submitting it and a year waiting for it to come out is available along side the person who wrote a book in a month and formatted it through a meatgrinder.
And some books are never enjoyable even when the authors spends ten years on them, and others would have been great if they’d only gotten a someone to point out the huge plot hole in the middle.
But the belief of fair reward for fair effort (which is skewed as well based on the personality of the believer) demands that there be feedback, and ego wants it to be positive. So when it’s not it’s always, always hard to take. No one’s saying it’s not. Mistakes hurt. But often times expecting the consumer to react positively to a poor story, poor editing or poor formatting is the biggest mistake.
On the consumer side I expect my burger at McDonalds to have the toppings I asked for on it and be warm and fresh. I expect the camera I buy to work. I expect the gas I buy to make my car move. I expect the books I buy to represent the author and publisher’s best work. I can accept a story doesn’t always work for me. I cannot accept that a professional’s best work is filled with editing and formatting errors., any more than I could accept a print books with pages misprinted or falling out. Enjoying the story comes down to taste more than anything. My fellow ML reviewers have certainly given positive reviews to books I found tired, cliche and boring to the point of being insulting. I admit I sometimes have really high expectations of books.
All reviews, even academic are opinions. That’s it. You, the writer, don’t need to insult, attack, or try to dismiss the legitimacy of a review/reviewer. Here’s a secret–the other consumers do it already. People dismiss one star and five star reviews all the time and buy anyway (or skip anyway). You don’t need to say a review doesn’t count. You don’t need to make up legitimacy rules for reviewers. You don’t need to respond at all to discount a review. You need to look at your sales, look at the people who did like the book, and furthermore look at your own feelings about the book and let that discount a negative review for you.
The truth is we don’t think we deserve feedback or sales. We think we deserve money, happiness, flattery and fame. We’ve been taught by Hollywood and the rich-get-richer culture that we deserve yes men and fame and fortune. That these things are OWED to us. Then that skews our own expectations and goals into demanding and expecting to receive things that are completely out of our control.
We cannot control whether we’ll hit it big or not. But we can control how clean our manuscripts are. How much we write, what we write about. We can control who we submit to. We can control our story quality by being educated about what readers like and don’t and practicing our craft regularly. We can control our expectations by educating ourselves on what is normal in the publishing field.
So in short, the key is to stop trying to micromanage the things beyond our control and refine those things we can control.
