I receive a lot of review books, but I have never once told lies about the book just because I got a free copy of it. However, some authors seem to feel that if they send you a copy of their book for free, you should give it a positive review.
Do you think reviewers are obligated to put up a good review of a book, even if they don’t like it? Have we come to a point where reviewers *need* to put up disclaimers to (hopefully) save themselves from being harassed by unhappy authors who get negative reviews?
Ha, I think we all know where this question is coming from.
Do I think that reviewers are obligated to review books positively, because they came for free? Absolutely not.
Should reviewers have to put up disclaimers explaining this? They shouldn’t have to, but it might be a wise decision anyway — just to have something in print to fall back on in case of nastiness.
I think that any author who is expecting positive reviews only because they put a lot of effort into writing something, or because they or their publicist spent money sending books out to people to review, is very inexperienced or deluded or both. Just because something took a lot of effort to create doesn’t mean it’s any good; just because something came for free into a reviewer’s house doesn’t mean it’s any good, either.
If our whole schtick as book bloggers/reviewers is to talk about the books we’ve read, good and bad and ugly, then we should be doing that in an honest fashion regardless of how we received individual books. And if you know that you can’t be objective about a book, because your bff wrote it, or you met the author and he is oh-so-nice and funny, or anything, your review should start with “This is a biased opinion because” and continue on from there. Or it shouldn’t be written.
I think that if we want to take ourselves seriously as a community, we have to be more than a marketing machine spewing always-positives. If a book sucks, I usually say so. And if a book is super amazingly good, I say so even louder.
Now, I’ve personally made the decision not to accept review books anymore. But I still will be reviewing the books I’m reading for school and for pleasure, and I will still be writing honest reviews. It’s an integrity thing, I think.
Yeah, I don’t get the “I spent a lot of time writing this” as a reason to expect a good review. I don’t even understand that. Sometimes you spend a lot of time on something and doesn’t work out.
Yeah… you do see that argument out there, though.
What a dumb argument! I mean, if we (your readers) thought you were only providing positive reviews because you were receiving free copies of books, we couldn’t trust anything said and reviews would be rendered useless.
The “I spent a lot of time writing this so treat it nicely” argument is also FREQUENTLY made to teachers. Some teachers cave. Most don’t. Reviewers are like teachers but what they think the public reads. if you don’t want teacher-type comments made public, stay away from writing for the public.
When I was in the classroom, I heard “I spent a lot of time writing this so…” many times. It never worked. Still won’t.
Terrific post. I think that for an author to expect that every reader will love their book the way they do is so completely unrealistic. I appreciate honesty when I read book reviews and I’ve tried to be honest in my own.
Great post. I read lots of blogs and have read lots of good books based on recommendations from other bloggers.
I think it is probably hard for some authors–especially new authors–to read a review objectively. They are better off staying away from reviews in that case.