That's probably true about the writing style. However, if a review is based on having read the first few pages only—which any buyer on Amazon can access by checking the "Look Inside" option for themselves—I think writing a review is not called for. I feel very strongly that if you're going to write a review of a book or film or TV series that you need to experience the whole thing—or pretty damn near the whole thing. If you just pick it up, look at the first couple of pages and then decide you don't like it, I don't think that's enough to warrant a review. I mean, where does it stop? You don't like the cover or the back cover blurb so you write a 1-star review of the book? It's supposed to be a review of the book, not a vote for your first impression. I think it's too easy to disparage other people's efforts online. If the Look Inside function is there, let the prospective buyer make up their own mind. If you didn't like it after the first couple of pages, they might not either. Nobody is getting cheated.
As a rule of thumb that is definitely true, but I find that the Look Inside or previews are a good gauge of the writer's attitude. If you want to know what I mean, look up swankivy's video on Gloria Tesch, who was filmed physicist fighting a girl who said her books are bad.
I disagree. If a book/film/whatever is so bad you can't get through the first few minutes, a bad review is completely justified. If you demand that reviewers have to sit through 80%, or some other arbitrary number, you're skewing the reviews drastically in favour of people who enjoyed it. THAT'S cheating.
Sounds brutal. Two women and white board. The numbers will fly, and they will use all the theories. I usually wait until the end of the book, unless it is a shorts comp. and I am a little bored. Before leaving a rev. It is good to just watch the world dissolve/de-evolve into something that is really that bad. It is just not a fair review to base it on a few pages. Not all start out bad, they manage to slowly spiral down into the badness. Theory: It starts out strong and has you hooked for around 30 pgs. Then they give up because they have your money already. So it must be an all hook and then falls short by the end. (Possibly why I avoid series, as they tend to unravel the further you get into the story line. Another thing would be en-mass writers, as they tend to write the same stories over and over again. And that is great if you have an audience, but that just seems lazy or their readers have become lazy. It makes one wonder how in the hell one can pull off such a thing for so long.) Yes I know I have said this before, but it still holds up in my opinion. Suppose I rather be challenged and engaged with the books I read, and not feel like I am reading something only produced to make a quick buck. Quality over quantity. So it is fairly easy to figure out what to avoid, based on your own judgement. As well as it may/may not be fair to write a review without actually reading a book in its entirety is also up to the individual. Besides some people who leave glowing reviews get a little to gratuitous at times, causing hype around something that may or may not be useful for every reader out there. (Those types bother me because they spoil a lot of the book as well.)
That's my point. The Look Inside feature is there for anybody to see. So a review based on these couple of pages isn't needed, is it?
So you'd be okay if somebody wrote a 1-star review of one of your books, having only read the first couple of pages? Keeping in mind that it carries the same weight as a review from somebody who read the whole book? Or at least most of the book? If so, fair enough. It's easy. We can just bolt through Amazon and read the Look Inside feature of every book that catches our eye and write a review based on it. We could write hundreds of reviews every day, couldn't we? First two pages are great, I'll keep reading. Five stars. Book looks crap. One star. Don't like the author's word choices on the first page. One star. The blurb makes the book sound boring, so I didn't bother to read any of it. One star. I do get your point about a book being so bad that you don't want to read more than a few pages. But I have a problem with people who just love to diss other people's work and destroy an author's reputation. This review system makes it too easy. I have read HUNDREDS of first couple of pages which didn't grab me for various reasons. And a few that made me blink, they were so badly written. I've never reviewed any of them. If I dislike a book right at the start, I don't buy it and don't review it. It's different if you're reviewing something that actually doesn't work ...like you order a new electric toothbrush and it only works for a couple of days and then falls apart. By all means, you don't need to continue to try to use it for a year before writing a review. But books /movies and TV shows boil down to taste and preference. I'll happily promote a book which I think is great, or write a negative review of a book that disappoints me, or doesn't contain what it said on the tin. But I don't give any reviews of books I don't read. I just don't.
Why would you want to do any of that, though? Like... what motivation are you imagining for the people you think are doing this? I wouldn't bother leaving a review for something I'd just read the "Look Inside" of because why the hell should I? But I do leave reviews (Goodreads, usually, rather than Amazon) for books I've bought, started to read, and decided not to finish. Because the reviews are for me, so I can keep track of what authors I enjoy, what stories I've tried. And, yes, they're for other readers too, to help them avoid my pain. If I'm not "allowed" to leave a review unless I've read the whole book, I'd be prevented from posting some of the most useful information I have to share. Critique is for authors; reviews aren't. It'd be weird to review after only reading the Look Inside, but people do weird stuff all the time. It's none of the author's business, really.
Of course I wouldn't be okay, my work is genius and deserves only five stars. Would I think, objectively, that that was their right? Yes. 100%. I don't know who'd bother to review hundreds of Look Inside previews a day, but sure. If they wanted to do that, I don't think it's immoral or unfair. You can tell an awful lot about a book from the first few pages, especially since those are likely to be the ones the author has pored over and made their very, very best. I've never heard of anybody doing that randomly - can you provide some links? I've heard of grudge attacks against particular authors, where a group clubs together to give an author they don't like dozens of bad reviews. I've made my views on that pretty clear in this thread. I've never heard of anybody putting effort into randomly destroying random authors' reputations, which is what you're suggesting. That's up to you. I don't think I've ever reviewed a few pages, either. But it doesn't make people who act differently to you and me wrong. I don't think it's different at all.
Okay, let me put this another way. Have you ever read a book review in ANY magazine or newspaper that is based on the reviewer having read only the first couple of pages and deciding they didn't like it? Or in any literary review publication? Or a TV book review show? Nope. Neither have I. Ditto film reviews. Guess what? REVIEWERS stay for the whole show, no matter how bad they think it is. They then review accordingly, giving detailed reasons for why they drew the conclusions they did. This will help people decide whether they want to buy the book and/or see the film for themselves. Which is what 'reviews' are intended to do. That's what I call a review. Until Amazon came down the pike, I reckon that's what most people would have expected a 'review' to be.
If someone's paid to review then damn right, they have to sit through the whole movie/book/whatever. But a consumer, spending their own money on a product? Nope. Standards are different, and rightly so.
I can see why you'd say that, but at the same time, we can only spend time, this is why in the pre-internet days you'd read the paper for a critic with the same views as you, heck, this is why my bf contributes to Jim Sterling's Patreon. However, a Look Inside is meant to be a hook, if it is sloppy, pretentious or some manner of literary train wreck, and there are plenty of reviews that read better than it, then no, I'm not going to spend my money. I have a personal mantra, where the rules work, play by the rules, where they don't, play the rules. If you know that there are reviews based on previews then the solution is easy, create the best damn hook to reel them in.
I hear what you're saying. I just would never do that. I bought the first book in the Outlander series (a long time ago, before it was filmed, etc.) I fully expected to love it ...Scotland, romance, history, what's not to love? I absolutely HATED it—I alternated from laughing out loud to growling and yanking at tufts of hair. In fact, I only got through 3/4 of the book before I said why am I doing this to myself? and put it in the bin. And yes, it went in the bin, which I never do with books. Did I review it? No, I didn't. I just couldn't bring myself to review something I hadn't finished.
Well, maybe if you HAD reviewed it I could have read your review and then I wouldn't have bothered reading it and going through the same reaction! Thanks a lot, jannert!
Ha ha! Seriously? You didn't like it either? I've been hearing good things about the TV show, and some are saying it's 'better than the books' but that's not much of a recommendation. Actually, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what made me hate it so much.
this would have been so much fun.... how wonderful, a new mouse to play with, please, please, promise me, you will not die like the last one. You have no idea, how sad it made me, when the last one stopped running. The chase, oh, how I can still feel it now. It was like champagne bubbles, an effervescence of life, exploding thru my senses, run my little mouse, run. I feel introductions are in order, due to our pending intimacy in depths of hell, I for the most part, will be the one torturing you. Now remember, the tangled web of thorns, torturing your mind, and soul, in screams of searing agony, are for my pleasure. Your words, and petty attempts at negotiating, will of course be logged for posterity. But, please do continue, I do enjoy torturing small minds, unable to grasp the severity, of the situations they find themselves in. Black magic, oh my, let me get my hat, have you met the devil yet? I can picture you, all curled up in a little ball, begging to be saved from the rage, and induced fear, where even the air you breathe, tastes like the oppression of lost souls. Come closer my little mouse, so I can take you to meet the devil inside of me. Here take my paw, so I can dig my claws in, lest you try and run, from the horrors I have in store for you. Oh, my little mouse, if you only knew, how long it has been, since one as brave as you, has come to play with me.
Listening to reader reviews has opened my eyes in ways that simply reading them can't convey. When people are railing against something you get the notion that it really pissed them off. Things I hear most commonly are those of the female tropes on both sides of the aisle, along with love triangles and insta-love. Many seem to find these tropes to be beaten to death, so that says to me, avoid making female characters damsels in distress or overpowered to such a ridiculous degree. (This is a small example, there are more.) Many voices saying the same things, are quite noteworthy. It means those things are what the writer should abstain from writing. Enough people point out the things they don't like, means they want something new. Not the same old shtick they have been handed time and time again. After you start hearing a dozen or so saying they dislike this or that, it might be time to change up how things are written. The readers are not being mean, they are just sick and tired of how stagnate things are in the books that they read. Do a search on the youtubes sometime about things people don't like seeing in the books they read. You might find something that you are guilty of doing a little too often, as a writer as point of reference. (Who knows your book could be the focus of a review that you might not want to hear.) YA and Romance are quite popular for getting caught in these reviews, at least that is what I have seen. As most people really like those two genres when it comes to posting review videos. But there is something out there for every genre if you look for it.
precisely, as an author, I would take the review, perhaps ask questions, to get a better feel, and try to learn something from it. If it was genuine, then the reviewer will have an ability to express this properly. Experience from maintaining software, and being told it doesn't work, or this is bad, is meaningless. What doesn't work? What is bad about it, what will make it better? What is missing or what is it in your opinion we should change. Now if all the person comes back with is "oh it's just too horrible to fix, you should start over" then yeah I'm going to classify their opinion as worthless and not worth the time to be crying over it. As a reviewer, if you come at me with threats of occultists from India putting the hex on me... then I may just have some real fun with you, and let it escalate, just to see how far I can push you. One to establish a clear cut screw you, and the other to see just how truly insane or idiotic the author wants to get over a review. So the response as written was the basic; I'm insane too, would you like to play this game with me? please, let's have some fun together...
