the reviewer’s universe

authors + rough riders + amazon reviews = kerfuffle

I’ve been very good for the last few years when it comes to Amazon. That is: I have weaned myself away from going over there every day, because (as I’ve mentioned before) there’s really nothing to be gained except anxiety of an astonishing depth and variety. For example, these questions:

Where does my novel rank today overall? In fiction? In historical fiction? In family saga historical fiction? In kinda-romance-kinda-not-women’s-fiction?

How many reader reviews? Really? That many? That few?

What’s the average reader score? Really? And the standard deviation? You don’t say. Any zingers today? What’s an author to do?

And so on.

I am writing this post because apparently some authors actually do answer that last question by calling on their fangirls to ride out and demand justice (as they see it). It goes like this: Reader A writes a review of The Prince and the Everlasting Magical Orgasm that is less than glowing. Let’s say it’s directly negative. Words like: waste and trash abound. PEMO’s author takes exception, and the next thing you know, Reader A’s negative review is bombarded with negative ratings of its own. You can do that by clicking NO next to the question was this review helpful? Which really should read: Will you show some mercy to a reader who disagrees with you? So the fangirls all bombard the review with NO NO NOs, and then at some point a switch is triggered and the review gets dumped.

If the author of the negative review posts it again, the same thing is likely to happen.

If you wander through the Amazon discussions you’ll see long threads on problems of this nature along with a lot of speculation on how those negative reviews disappear. Some suspect author interference, but as far as I am aware, an author who writes to Amazon to ask that a negative review be squashed is patted on the head and sent away. There, there dear. It will stop stinging soon.

The only time Amazon will edit the review is if that review gives away major plot twists. Even then, they try to leave as much as they can when they edit out the spoilers.

If it were possible for authors to snap fingers and demand a bad review disappear, you can be pretty sure there would be no bad reviews on Amazon at all. Either the author, the editor, the agent or sometimes screaming rampaging rough riding fangirls would see to that.

All this is my way of getting around to the topic of a one-star review of Pajama Girls. I wanted to talk about it because it actually made me see something I hadn’t noticed before. The reviewer took offense because she believed the story was about a woman who had secrets and wasn’t willing to share them. Which you know, perfectly reasonable: it says that on the book jacket. But this reader could not reconcile those statements about the character with the fact that when it comes to sex, she’s not repressed at all. In fact, to be clear: she’s in bed with John Dodge two days after she meets him.

This, said the reader-reviewer in a distinctly disgusted tone, is not somebody who is secretive and closed-off.

What took me by surprise was simply this: I didn’t anticipate this problem. I’m usually pretty good at guessing where readers will get hung up, but in this case I overlooked the obvious. Julia and Dodge end up in bed two days after he arrives in Lambert Square, which for some people can only mean that Julia is a woman of questionable moral character, or at the very least, sexually over active and indiscriminate. My personal take on this is that there are many kinds of intimacy and some are easier than others. The ones that are the most difficult don’t have much to do with sex, at least, in Julia’s case.

Let me restate something I have said in the past: if you have to explain what you hoped the reader would take away from the story, you failed. Clearly I failed in this case to make the reader see Julia the way I see her. Which is unfortunate, but almost unavoidable. There will always be readers who just cannot get past some element of a novel, no matter how well done it is otherwise. That’s to be expected. This particular one-star review makes sense to me, even if I don’t agree with it.

There are one-star reviews that don’t make much sense. For example, the woman who complained that her copy of the novel had two pages out of order, and for that reason, gave it one star. But in this case, I see the reader’s problem, and I have to acknowledge it. It would be wrong to ask that her review be taken down. That would be censorship, plain and simple.

Once in a while I go over to Amazon to see what there is to learn from the reader reviews. This time there was something interesting, if not especially pleasant. Now you’re wondering if I clicked “yes” next to “was this review helpful?”

Would you?

anonymity, part 2: cautionary tale

In the spring of 2004, a weblog called Foetry.com made its anonymous appearance. Foetry was not about reviewing poetry, as you might guess, but instead it set out to be the watchdog of the poetry prize and award-giving universe, under the banner: Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants. Naming names. (Every time I read that, I hear the theme music from Superman in my head.)

The claim was that there was rampant cronyism and plain old cheating of a fraudulent and criminal nature going on in the way poetry prizes were awarded. The anonymous blogger set out to expose the wrong-doers, and went about it with gusto.

The furor in the poetry world was tremendous, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Entry fees for contests are all many poetry publications have in way of serious income, but the process has to be fair and transparent. Maybe Foetry was a good idea, but the execution (and I use that word purposefully) was troubling. Suspicions about the motivations of the editor only grew with every new trumpeting of a conspiracy uncovered.

Accusations were broad, loud, and often defied both logic and evidence (detailed examples from an article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education). Many of the accusations were small, but a few were big and messy and litigious. (And how do I know this? Because (here comes the revelation) I know a couple people who were targeted and accused by Foetry, and I know where the facts were misstated or plain wrong. And as it turned out, once the Foetry editor was outed, I know him, as well. Or at least, I’ve met him and I knew his wife pretty well at one time.

Then he got outted.

Alan Cordle is 36, pale and round with thick glasses and soft fleshy cheeks. He smiles often and speaks in a wispy voice, which suits his day job as a librarian at Portland Community College. (San Francisco Chronicle by Tomas Alex Tizon, Los Angeles Times, Sunday, July 10, 2005)

And here’s where the cautionary tale comes in. This mild-mannered university librarian is married to a poet. Not an unsuccessful poet, but somebody whose career was bobbing along at half mast. The librarian was angry on behalf of the poet, and so Foetry came into existence. (There is so much stuff about this whole kerfuffle on the internet, it would be tiresome of me to repeat it all, so here, some links if you’re interested in the gritty details: the archives of the now defunct Foetry weblog; a detailed article at the San Francisco Chronicle; a summary piece from the New York Times Book section; commentary from the Kenyon Review (a major literary publication); and a discussion of the underlying issues. )

Let me cut to the moral of the story, as I see it. The idea behind Foetry was not bad or unreasonable, but the motivations that brought it into being are suspect. The librarian knew that if he were honest about his identity, everything he had to say would be viewed as huffing and puffing in indignation about honors denied to his wife. Of course, he still might have announced his connections right at the start, and if he had then gone on and done scrupulous work, he could have proved his point anyway. But because he was anonymous, he got over confident and sloppy. He let himself go. Unfounded accusations shrilly voiced do not inspire confidence. They just make people really angry, and angry people who consider themselves wronged want to face their accuser. That’s one of those basic rights we take for granted.

So the angry parties went after the anonymous editor, and the anonymous editor got outed, and his conflict of interest cost him whatever credibility he had left. If he did have strong evidence of major wrong doing, who was going to pay attention at that point?

The editor’s anonymity is what garnered so much attention to begin with, because it raised questions in people’s minds. Was this a Big Name Insider, a Whistle-Blower? That titillating possibility got Foetry a lot of press. Was that the whole idea to start with?

The only thing that seems sure to me is this: anonymity was entirely the wrong way to go about this. If you’re going to express an opinion, it’s best to put your name on it front and center. If you’re going to toss around accusations, then you have no choice, if you want to be taken seriously, but to identify yourself and clearly state any conflict of interest.

Better to avoid anonymity, if at all possible.

20. March 2008 by rosina the reviewer's universe reviews & reviewing editorial comment poetry

what you should know about anonymity: yours, mine and ours (in which I admit: I review for PW)

The internet is a wondrous thing. It brings together people from all over the world to discuss and share the things they love: Stamp collecting, horse breeding, politics, antique electric fuses, baseball, the perfect martini, hedgehogs, Sanskrit, Buddhism. It’s hard to imagine a topic that’s not represented someplace, and this is only one facet of the whole enterprise. Sales, marketing, corporate branding, all that has been turned on its head. Banking, investing, selling or buying property — all revolutionized for the consumer’s ease.

And then there are the personal weblogs. People who keep journals about their daily lives for the sake of friends and family. People who start a weblog to keep track of a pregnancy, losing weight, learning a language, battling cancer, organizing a bridge club, caring for a parent with Alzheimers, looking for a job.

The internet is also a free-for-all, a megaphone for every cause, worthy or fabricated. It’s a way to reach out and touch, or reach out and punch neatly on the nose.

I mostly stick to the publishing/reading/book-ish part of the internet. Weblogs by authors and writers, weblogs for readers of a dozen different kinds, review weblogs. Booksellers. Book group organizers. Weblogs by agents and editors. Big name review venues, and teeny little weblogs. Some of them anonymous.

Anonymity is an issue that people talk about a lot, and that they will continue to talk about because there’s a difference of opinion that can’t be resolved. Four years ago Amazon’s lackadaisical anonymous review policy finally backfired and the result was a first page article in the New York Times. Laura Lippman’s concise overview of the whole debacle came down to this:

Why does Amazon allow anonymous reviews at all, especially when there have been numerous reports of vendettas bordering on actionable libel? Legal issues aside, it’s just darn strange as a business practice — and saying the reviews are “popular” is a weak defense. The Paris Hilton video was popular, and Amazon didn’t make that available for downloads. Can you envision any independent bookstore, or Barnes & Noble, handing out Post-its to customers and encouraging them to affix their scrawled thoughts to volumes? Imagine going into a bookstore and seeing little yellow squares stuck to Huckleberry Finn (“An erotic masterpiece,” LF in Montana), Portnoy’s Complaint (“Don’t shake hands with this author” — A reader from Central Park South) and the latest Atkins diet. (“He’s dead, but it might work for you.” Hizzoner, Gracie Mansion) Look, I sign my reviews and I think other people should, too.

In the end Amazon did change its review policy, and my guess is it had more to do with the issue of actionable libel than anything else.

The question of anonymous reviews predates the internet, of course. Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, for example, both publish reviews anonymously. The idea, it seems, is that they want a uniformity of tone and approach, an argument that many people don’t find convincing. Quinn Dalton’s essay on this topic demonstrates how destructive one anonymous review from a respected source can be.

Anonymity means the reviewer has nothing to lose by writing a negative review, and nothing to gain by writing a positive one. Fair enough. But anonymity doesn’t remove personal bias on the part of the reviewer—for or against certain authors, or certain types of books. It just cloaks bias behind a brand name, and is therefore untraceable for librarians and booksellers and the authors whose careers suffer or are nurtured as a result.

I have had my share of mean-spirited reviews, some from Kirkus, some from Publishers Weekly, and more than a few from anonymous Amazon customer reviewers. I’m not talking about negative reviews, which any reasonable author expects and will learn from. I’m talking about the nasty stuff. But I think it was Dalton’s article — read some years ago for the first time — that made me want to pursue the subject.

I do some reviewing myself, right here, but I also write reviews for Publishers Weekly. Anonymous reviews, because that’s the way they do it. I’ve been writing PW reviews for about a year now, two or three a month. I started because I wanted to understand the process from the other side and then I found I started looking forward to what might show up next for me to read. I have never been sent a book by anyone I know personally, or by any author I strongly dislike. I’ve seen a few big names, but more usually novels of authors who are just starting out. Here’s something that may surprise you: even if I wanted to get up to anonymous mischief, I couldn’t. The editors do their job. They make sure that the PW style is maintained and word count is observed. They’ve got procedures in place to make sure I read the book I’m reviewing. Most of all, they stand there ready to step on any excess of negativity. Sometimes I think they are too quick with that, but hey, I’m only the reviewer and let me assure you: I’m not doing this for the money, which is negligible. I do it for the perspective. Last year I asked the editor where he had been when PW’s review of my (I think it was) Lake in the Clouds came out with the never -to-be forgot line color by number cartoon caricatures. “Before my time,” he wrote back. I like the two editors, both male, even when I don’t agree with their decisions about my copy. Because my name isn’t on it, I can live with the changes. Usually.

From this angle, it seems to me that it’s sensible to distinguish between anonymous reviews that are vetted by editors, and those that aren’t. Kirkus and PW might get it wrong; off track, mean spirited, even petty. But the anonymity is only one layer deep. There is always an editor there in front of the anonymous reviewer, and a publisher in front of the editor. There are responsible parties.

There is no depth to an anonymous weblog, no responsible parties at any level. For a certain amount of money, you can cloak your personal information so that even the ownership of the web address remains hidden. And then there are different kinds and degrees of anonymity. I’ve only ever found one list, from back in 2003 (via Joho):

Hiding all biographical facts but using your real name (= shy blogger or professional journalist blogger)
Making up biographical facts using your real name (= liar blogger)
Making up biographical facts while using an obviously false name (= fictional blogger)
Telling the truth about biographical facts while using an obviously false name (= informant blogger)
Telling the truth about biographical facts while using a false name (= witness-protection blogger)
Hiring someone to boast about your life and sign it using your name (= CEO blogger)

Sometimes the reason for anonymity is clear and compelling. You don’t want to get fired, or make your spouse unhappy, for example. GetUpGrrl was one of my favorite weblogs of all time, smart and funny and important, too. Grrl documented her history with infertility treatment, right up to the point where her son was born to a surrogate. She remained anonymous, and in that case I don’t think anyone even thought of trying to out her, because she had the respect, admiration and good wishes of her readers.

But in many cases there seems no reasonable argument for anonymity. Lorelle the WordPress goddess has written at length about this:

You can stay anonymous by not clearly identifying exactly who you are, but help us to understand at least where you are coming from and why we should 1) care, 2) trust, and 3) read. If you are pontificating about the rain in Spain or number of terrorists inside of the United States, I will want to know how you know this and whether or not to take you seriously.

There are also compelling arguments against anonymous blogging at The Aardvark Speaks, and the more in-your-face position of The Gothamist:

Gothamist does not approve of anonymous blogging: We believe all bloggers should stand behind their posts with their real names. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be blogging.

But anonymous weblogs won’t go away. The Supreme Court has made it clear any number of times: anonymous speech falls under the First Amendment rights, and is protected. ((More detail on the legalities at The Electronic Frontier.)) So there’s no question of legality, unless the anonymous blogger causes real harm to someone else.

There are quite a few anonymous weblogs that focus on some aspect of reading or publishing fiction. Miss Snark — a literary agent — wrote a sharply entertaining weblog, where she was clearly trying to be helpful to people trying to get published — but the masses wanted to know who she was, and eventually she was identified as Janet Reid. At which point she stopped blogging, much to the dismay of her many readers.

I have been thinking about anonymous reviews for a long time (obviously, given my PW gig), and trying to sort out for myself whether they do what they set out to do. Which is? I hear you asking, quite rightly. And no, I’m not going to get into the sticky territory of defining the review in all its forms and approaches. But I can ask a different question instead:

Why anonymous review blogs? I can think of reasons that someone might want to be anonymous, but none of them are encouraging. Someone who has not been able to get their own books published, and has an axe to grind with the industry (and published authors); a person with conflicts of interest (such as the husband of the poet, at Foetry) ((I’ll tell this story in another post; a cautionary tale when it comes to anonymity)); a person who wants to be published someday and therefore couldn’t afford to offend people openly; somebody with strong opinions who likes to stir up controversy, but not be held responsible for it.

Are there any compelling arguments for this practice? I can’t think of one, but maybe you can.

19. March 2008 by rosina writerly habits the reviewer's universe reviews & reviewing technology editorial comment publishing agents Publishers Weekly

open communication

There’s another (yet again) clash in one very small, limited corner of the internet, but as it happens to be the corner I inhabit, and as I would prefer this not blow out of all proportion, I am going public right here and now. My hope is that it can all be settled immediately. If you are tired of all this (and I am, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you were) please feel free to pass on by. (WW, I’m looking at you.)

There’s a Yahoo discussion group to discuss Diana Gabaldon’s books. It’s a great community of readers who like to talk about the Outlander series. I have been lurking on that board for years, but I’ve never posted, and there are also longer periods where I’m off doing other things and don’t check in.

A few days ago somebody posted on the forum here to ask a question. I’ll refer to this person as WB. It was a simple question. Had the title of the next book in the Wilderness series changed? Because there was a discussion to that effect on the Yahoo Gabaldon board. Also, the person who had started the discussion seemed pretty critical generally of my work.

So I popped over and indeed, the title of the thread included the words “Donati” “Body Snatchers” and “Spoilers”. Once I read the post I understood: RK (as I’ll refer to her here) had just finished Into the Wilderness, and she disliked it. A lot. She was voicing her opinion on the Gabaldon board, which of course is her right. The “Body Snatchers” reference had to do with her claim that ITW is populated by characters I have borrowed or stolen or adapted from other sources, mostly Diana’s books, and that there’s nothing original or interesting in my work.

Let me be clear: RK is entitled to her opinion. I can’t pretend that it’s nice to be accused of plagarism and lack of originality but I am also comfortable enough in my skin to let my work stand on its own merits.*** So let’s take RK’s opinion at face value: she prefers Diana’s books for a lot of different reasons, one of them having to do with the fact that she feels my characters are uninteresting and recycled.

Back at this forum I answered WB’s original question about the title confusion (no, Queen of Swords was not changing title to Body Snatchers). I clarified what I thought was going on, and I responded to the review, very briefly. As was my right.

Now this is where it gets messy. This is where you really need to pay attention. Fact: WB did not email me me the text of RK’s posts or comments on my work. The Gabaldon discussion forum is public, and anybody who has a Yahoo identity can join the group and read the posts. It’s true that WB mentioned RK’s posts, but that’s it. I see nothing wrong in that; she was asking for clarification, and I provided it. Some of the fen over at the Gabaldon forum were upset, however, and WB heard about it from RK and from others as well. I know this because WB told me.

I am a little confused why RK should be surprised that something posted on a public forum might indeed be more widely read. It also seems less than logical to me to accuse WB of bad etiquette for sharing posts from the Gabaldon forum. After all, RK got hold of my post on this whole mess somehow, most likely because somebody pointed her to it.

So let’s be clear.

1. WB did nothing wrong. She likes Diana’s books, she likes my books, she was confused and taken aback by the tone of something she read and so she asked about it. I went and had a look, and answered.

2. RK is entitled to her opinion about my work. The tone of her review is not what I would call professional or balanced or respectful, but it is certainly strongly emotive. Again: that is her right. She can be as vocally negative as she likes; she can stick her tongue out at me and blow raspberries, if it makes her feel better. Following from that, it’s also true that other people are free to agree or disagree with her, on that board or this one. I have to point out though that anyone who publically reviews a book is in fact opening up a discussion, and that in judging, they will also be judged.

3. I defend RK’s right to be negative about my books, just as I defended Beth’s right to post a negative review of one of Diana’s books. And I must point out again: Beth’s review did not appear here. I did not endorse it because I haven’t read the book. I did open up a discussion on the topic of negative reviews, pointing to Beth’s website. I did make it clear that I admired her for her willingness to put her neck out, and for her obvious love and admiration of the early books in the Outlander series. Apparently some few Gabaldon fans are still angry at me for supporting Beth’s right to post her opinions. I wonder if they will also be mad at me for supporting RK’s negative evaluation of my work.

I harbor no deep resentment toward RK, no anger or need for revenge. On the other hand, I feel no need to try to win her over, as she suggests I should. If anything at all was offensive in her posts, it was this idea that it is somehow my obligation to convince anybody of the value of my work. I suppose I could email authors who have written books that didn’t work for me. I could get in touch with John Updike or Nora Roberts or Jodi Picoult or Stephen King or Toni Morrison and offer them the opportunity to pitch their books to me, but then that would be presumptuous and less than respectful.

Finally, a point I need to make: In the course of all this back and forth, bits were copied from my website onto the Gabaldon forum boards. And I’m fine with that — I make the material public, and people are free to share it as long as it’s not done in a misleading way.

***I will point out that it has been postulated that there are only so many plots out there, and everything is a rehashing of something else. Certainly time travel has been done before, as have novels about Scotland, Revolutionary America, and the War of 1812. I have always said quite openly that I got the idea for ITW from an exercise where I put some of Jane Austen’s characters in the same room with some of Fenimore Cooper’s characters. Sparks flew, and ideas sprouted, and here I am five books later.

24. August 2006 by rosina the reviewer's universe reviews & reviewing editorial comment historical fiction story : plot Into the Wilderness kerfuffle Queen of Swords

You've stumbled across my official website and landed on the front page of my weblog.

My name is Rosina Lippi. I'm a former academic and tenured university professor, writing full time since 2000. Under the pen name Sara Donati I am the author of the Wilderness series, six historical novels that follow the fortunes of a group of families living in upstate New York from about 1792-1825. A new series based on later generations of the same families was launched September 1, 2015 with The Gilded Hour. The next volume in the new series, Where the Light Enters, was released in 2019.

Please see the pinned post for an overview of what you'll find on this weblog, and what has been moved to the wiki (including the FAQ page).