Maybe a little clarification
I’m not entirely sure my last post came across as clear as I wanted it (this is why writers do multiple drafts). So I want to sum it up a little better.
1. Stacia is horribly, sadly correct in her blog post.
2. Which is less about reviewing and more about the fact that in becoming a published author you lose some measure of your freedoms of opinion and action. This isn’t any different than losing your right to drink all day Monday because you get a job that schedules you to work every Monday. Every job has a code of conduct, particularly ones in sales and customer service, both of which publishing can fit into. At the day job if I see a person buying a book I didn’t like I can’t necessarily dissuade them from buying it because I don’t know if it’s their favorite author.
Real life example: We had a decent sized line and the guy in front came up to my register and put Bush’s book, Decision Points, on the counter. For the whole transaction (which was drawn out because he clearly wanted to talk about his purchase) he talked about how ridiculous Bush was, how he had a lot to answer for, and how he hated Mitch McConnell as much as Bush and thought it was funny that Bush blamed things on McConnell. The customer professes he’d never buy Bush’s book for real reasons, and no one should because the man was a joke.
No kidding, next guy in line was also buying the Bush book because he admired the man and wanted to learn more about him. If I had agreed and gone on a rant against Bush with my first customer instead of just “M-hmm”ing politely I would have immediately pissed off my second customer. Yeah, we made a ton of jokes about Bush’s book being written in crayon, or being a seek in find, or marveling at the lack of pictures…in the break room and when the store was closed. You don’t say that kind of thing in front of a customer because you are not there to judge the customer’s tastes.
This doesn’t mean you have to praise a book you don’t like. You can even say you didn’t like it to some people if you’re good at reading them, or you know what kind of reader they are. But the internet strips all of the nonverbal communication between speakers making it much harder to read people and for them to gage your words.
Combine that with the strange sort of skewing you get when you are deemed a “person of worth” or an “expert” in your field and it can lead to disaster. When you can put published on your bio and published well people immediately start taking you more seriously. At WFC I was on my first panel and there was an immediate, noticeable difference to my WFC experience with random people before and after. Before I was just another excited fan attendee trying not to have a panic attack because I shared an elevator with Ted Chiang (three times!) or made a fool of myself in front of John Scalzi (how about “hi” instead of just “I’m a big fan of your wife”. Really, not as clever as I thought it sounded.) After, people came to me wanting to talk about things or just tell me they enjoyed the panel.
The fact that you get treated differently is something that is hard to explain because it is different with every interaction. But I feel that Stacia was only trying to warn people that you DO get treated differently and people also take what you say differently. Reviewing is only a tip of that particular iceberg, but true to metaphor, it’s the most obvious bit.
More people have directly fought me, ridiculed me or attacked me about my reviews AFTER Rot came out. More people have directly fought me, ridiculed me or attacked me about my rants, opinions and even casual comments that had nothing to do with them since Rot came out. If there was one thing about being a published writer that I was not ready for it was this.
3. Also it’s really weird having people treat you like a pro because they know you’re published and people treat you like you’re a joke of a writer because it’s with a small press or they haven’t heard of you, sometimes in the same conversation.
4. It’s not just bad reviews either. I said at Stacia’s blog and here that reviewing has absolutely counted against me because multiple people thought I was more valuable to their press/magazine/whatever as a reviewer than as a writer. Not to mention things like the writing time I lose to reading for review, maintaining BookLove and editing for MonsterLibrarian. (These are all worth it, in my opinion, because I know every time I spend my time working on these projects that I’m not just working for myself, but for other people who also work very hard to help other people find great books. The fact that I review not just for myself, but for the benefit of librarians and booksellers makes a huge difference when considering the whole to review or not thing.)
In short, the publishing world needs good reviewers a lot more than they need good writers (or at least it seems that way from this side) so it’s very easy to get wrapped up in a reviewing career and lose sight of a writing one.
5. You are still free to try to be the exception to the rule. Every career works differently and that includes yours.
6. But in the end it’s about unpredictability. You don’t know how someone is taking your reviews especially online. You never know who is reading them (or having them emailed to them). You don’t know what remarks they will interpret as bad, even if you didn’t mean it that way. It’s about improving your odds, being aware of how things work and making the best-educated decision you can.
I get next to no comments here. But I get hundreds of regular hits a week (which isn’t a lot, but to me it is). So I really, really have no way to know who is reading my blog.
7. By the way I got my publisher because of reviewing. (They would say it’s because of the book, but this is my blog.) I reviewed a few of Skullvines’ books and was very impressed. I heard they signed Karen Koehler, who I also knew through reviewing and considered myself a fan of so I asked them to consider Rot. You know how that turned out.
The potential for good is there, but you really shouldn’t be completely unaware of the potential for bad too. And that’s all this whole musing was about, weighing the potential for good against the potential for bad and still not knowing which side to come down on.
