A few weeks ago, I started porting over my reviews from librarything to goodreads, not because I’m planning on jumping ship, but I thought that having some reviews up on goodreads would help me win some ARC because I like free books. I moved over a review of a book that I hadn’t particularly enjoyed, but I tried to keep the review constructive. I pointed out things that I thought were factual errors or misleading (i.e. calling Calgary a remote Canadian town) or seemed odd in the context of a novel being in Canada (for example, discussing Quebec seceding from the union, which, since Canada is a dominion rather than a union and every Canadian I’ve ever met in my thirty-plus years of meeting Canadians says Quebec separating from Canada, I found seceding from the union an odd thing to have written in the book). I also said what I found frustrating: long sentences I found hard to follow and too many subplots which detracted from the most interesting one.
So I put up a lone bad review for this book. Other people seemed to enjoy it. I didn’t, and considering I have a post in the works explaining why I didn’t like most-loved-novel-in-the-English-language Pride and Prejudice, maybe I’m just a horrible person to book-please.
Then the author of the book emailed me to take issue with my review.
So is this what we’re doing now? We email people if we don’t like our reviews on a social-reading site? This is not something I’ve had to encounter since my stuff on goodreads and librarything have zero reviews (and on librarything, I am the only one to have added my story).
So I took what the author said, edited my review as appropriate (for example, he said the publisher had put in that Calgary was remote, so I edited my review regarding that, and for some of the other points, I put that the author and I had agreed to disagree). I also put that I had updated my review based on conversation with the author at the bottom, so people know why it changed. The author’s email wasn’t mean, but it still left me feeling off.
Not everyone likes my stuff. I know this for a fact because family members have said to me “I don’t like your story.” Or I’ve had many stories rejected from journals. Then I feel a bit sad, but I don’t send an email justifying some of my decisions to them. Or trying to prove my credentials. It hurts, I know, to have people not like your things, but now all I feel is really wary of posting reviews if I’m going to get, even well-intentioned, emails where people want me to understand that I am wrong. And won’t it look odd, in terms of the author, that I’ve updated my review saying that he contacted me regarding it? Doesn’t that make him look pushy or whiny? If I did the same thing (emailing someone about a bad review), would it be more negatively gendered, like I am definitely churlish and thin-skinned whereas maybe this author is confident and ready-to-stand-up-for-himself? Maybe I should just do like Lee Siegel and stop writing negative reviews all together, only talk about the positive. I admit I could have said more complimentary things about the bad-review book, and I didn’t. But the book frustrated me and that is a valid thing to say in a review.
So I feel bad. Geoff thinks it’s insane that I feel bad because a stranger emailed me. But I do. And maybe I won’t be reviewing much on librarything or goodreads for the next little while.