To Pan Or Not To Pan: On Negative Reviews
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I was thinking recently about negative reviews, spurred partly by Charles Payseur's post on the topic and by the recent Critical Friends episode featuring Aisha Subramanian, Dan Hartland, and Abigail Nussbaum. All these people are much more prolific reviewers than me, but I want to talk about my own experience, because I think when your reviews have a special purpose like Autistic Book Party’s - boosting good representation, calling out and dissecting bad representation - it changes things slightly.
(This is not to suggest that the reviewers above don't think about social justice or representation. Clearly they do! But there's a difference between writing reviews that happen to include that component, and writing an entire blog about representation, often to the exclusion of other topics.)
I do fewer negative reviews these days than I used to. Not none. But fewer.
When I was starting out with Autistic Book Party, I found that I got more attention from writing negative reviews than writing positive reviews. People would comment more - either to good-naturedly argue or to exclaim in agreement. People were energized by calling things out. Even if they hadn't heard of the book, they liked sharing their feelings about what I'd said.
Positive reviews got less attention. Maybe a bit, if it was already a popular book. But when I was like, "This random book you've never heard of has good autistic characters," people didn't get very excited.
I remember noticing this and being vaguely uneasy. I've never liked call-out culture all that much, although I do think it's important to talk about what not to do; and I did that kind of thing more back in the day, when I had friends who were pushing me to do it more. But things get hinky (and bad for mental health) very quickly when we approach criticism like it's only about calling things out. Like writing is only ever a minefield of problematic pitfalls to avoid and not also a beautiful way to create positive things.
That's not why I started writing fewer negative reviews, though.
There's an angle where people will tell you it's not nice to write negative reviews. I think this comes from customer service jobs, where a delivery company will ask you to rate the delivery person from one to five stars, and if you give them less than five stars they'll get fired. (This is a terrible way to manage employees, of course.)
Star ratings on Amazon or Goodreads don't work in this way - you won’t get angrily called to the carpet by your boss because Joe Q. Random one-starred your book on the Internet. Your continued career will depend much more on sales than on stars. But we still have a situation where, the more stars you get, the more the recommendation algorithm likes you; some marketing and promotional opportunities won’t be open to you unless your star rating is at least this high. To a certain extent, a writer's income depends on these things.
Which is not fair, because it goes against my core value of truthfulness. Reviews are supposed to be honest. People are supposed to be able to say true things about what they thought of the book. To tell them that they can't do that because it would be mean and harmful - or to create economic conditions where it makes sense for people to say that - is noxious. It defeats the whole purpose of why reviews exist.
There's a subtler version of this argument, which underlies the shift in recent years from review blogs to recommendation blogs. Readers, the argument goes, are trying to figure out what to read. So what's the point of going on at length about the bad stories? Just skip to the good part and tell readers what the good ones are. Skipping a story is less confrontational than panning it, not to mention less work, and readers will get the same benefit in the end.
This version holds water to some degree. I read recommendations this way frequently, especially for short stories. But it's not the only valid purpose of reviews. Some reviews are useful for their insight and their ways of articulating a story's ideas, even if you never intend to read what they're reviewing. (I love to read Sonya Taaffe's reviews of film noir, for instance, even though I will probably never watch a film noir in my life. I sometimes read video game reviews for this reason, too.) Some reviews are useful for people learning to write (and every writer is always, unendingly learning to write) because they break down why a story works, why and where it doesn't work, what it's trying to do and how the craft of it functions. These reviews are equally useful whether they're talking about what works or what doesn't.
And it's especially the case when you're reviewing for representation. Recommending good representation is important - but it's also useful to break down what doesn't work and why not. If a very popular book has big problems that privileged readers mostly aren’t seeing, then it can be especially useful to point that out and warn people away.
So that's not why I started writing fewer negative reviews.
A reviewer may also be concerned about power dynamics. There's a lot of hand wringing about whether writers have power over reviewers, or whether reviewers have power over writers. Nussbaum from Critical Friends has no patience for this - for the most part, neither writers nor reviewers are especially powerful - and all of them are at the mercy of the big companies that publish, sell, and distribute the books. (Being self-published doesn't exempt you from this, it just means that the big company you're dealing with is Amazon.) Not to mention that they’re often the very same people! But subtler aspects of power and privilege can play out in whose voice gets listened to and whose opinions are considered normal. (Not to mention who is considered "problematic" as a person for what they’ve written - even in progressive spaces which are supposedly punching up, this kind of judgment hits trans women and BIPOC the hardest.)
I'm pretty small potatoes, but I've published five books with a sixth on the way. I'm much more successful now when I first started out - and significantly more successful than some of the people I review.
I don't have an automatic "no criticizing X type of person" policy. I criticize people when I feel it would be useful to criticize them. But as I become more successful I've found myself moderating my tone a lot more. When I first started out, I still tried to be nuanced and detailed, but when I got aggravated about a book, I got loud. I would type in capital letters about throwing a book across the room. I don't do that anymore. I'm 35 now and I have five books out and it doesn't feel right anymore; it doesn't feel professional.
I also find myself trying to be careful when reviewing shorter work - especially short stories by autistic authors who are still learning their craft. There are frankly a lot of these, if you know where to look. And I don't always know what to say about them. My purpose with Autistic Book Party is to talk about autism representation. Does it serve that purpose if I, a modestly successful autistic author, dredge up an obscure short story in an obscure online magazine by an obscure autistic author and say "meh"? "It's just okay"? "There's nothing offensive but the style is pretty clunky"? "I got bored"? My answer to these questions is almost always no. (Sometimes it's also no when I sincerely like an author, but have already reviewed a half dozen or more of their short stories and there's nothing to say that I haven't said already.)
As a result, for shorter work, there are a lot of lukewarm or moderately negative reviews that I simply don't write. I read the stories, I pay attention, and I decide it's best for everyone if I just shrug and move on.
So this is part of the reason why I don't write as many negative reviews, but it's not the whole story, or even the most important reason.
The biggest thing going on here is that I'm just not as fast a reader as I once was - especially for things I'm not enjoying. And, compared to when I started, the number of openly autistic authors has grown exponentially. When I started out, books by these authors could be difficult to find. Now they're everywhere and I can barely keep track. There's more of it than I think I could ever get through.
So, I'm not opposed to picking up the occasional bad book and explaining why it's bad. (Or taking a chance on a book, finding out that I don't like it, and explaining why; or having intensely mixed feelings about a book and typing those out for you.) But there's so much out there that I think I will like. I have totally free choice of what to read and review here. I'm not assigned books by some editorial board. And I am much more motivated to seek out the books I’m excited about, especially when time is short and energy is low (and the books, unless they are ARCs, cost money).
That's all! It's a completely self-interested decision. I wonder how many other reviewers have made the same one.