Do you give honest bad reviews?

I won't do reviews of books I don't finish, but I will use them as good bad examples in critical essays.

I give honest reviews, but I don't simply say "This was terrible" and that was it.

I recently read a self-published book I got for a beach trip...and it was terrible.

The writing was bad - the first chapter had so much exposition that I didn't really know what the point was. It read more like a travel guide than a novel.

The motivations for the characters was strange and the plot was meandering.

I can overlook some of that as creative differences, but...

I can't overlook clear structural flaws. For instance:
"No guns," I said.
Nothing wrong with that, right? What if I told you the book wasn't written in the first person. The author randomly mixed in first person as if first person had been the original tense and then he changed it.

The book clearly hadn't been put through a rigorous editing process. That is forgivable...if you aren't asking money for your flawed product.

I get that authors are eager to see their work published, but the self-publishing world is full of dreadful works that are given rave reviews by friends and family.

You should give bad reviews, especially in cases like this.

I gave an honest 1* review on Amazon to a self-published book, and got myself stalked on-line for my trouble.

Several people, who I presume are the author's friends and family, went to every review I'd ever done on Amazon and down-voted them and posted that I was nothing but a loser 30-year-old guy with acne living in his mother's basement.

As far as on-line stalking goes, that's pretty mild. But I did delete my review, and won't be giving honest feedback on any book I deem worth less than 3 stars. It's not worth the backlash.

And for the record, I am not 30, nor a guy, nor living in the basement. I'll cop to the acne, dammit.

I don't review anything. I don't usually even fill out online surveys for companies I buy from. Unless I feel really inspired to say something or support someone, I have better things to do with my time and energy.

Reviews do sometimes influence what I buy. If I have little to go on about a book or a product, I will read reviews and let that information guide me. But especially regarding books, I've learned that bad reviews rarely mean that I won't like the book. People have so many varying reasons for liking or not liking, and they may not at all match my reasons.

I never go out of my way to review things, good or bad. I don't believe my individual opinion is worth that much under most circumstances.

It depends. Usually I move on and don't bother rating it even, but there was one book that was an anthology (I've forgotten the name and the editor) of original voodoo/zombie stories written back in the 1800s. I was partway through it when I realized the editor had sanitized the stories. Instead of presenting them as is complete and unexpurgated, the editor decided to censor anything they though might be considered the least bit offensive to readers today. So I wrote an extremely angry review blasting that editor, because I don't think its the editors job to "protect" the sensibilities of the readers. I think we're all mature enough to realize they had different viewpoints back then.

Typically I will review a book that is at least 3 stars and state my opinion. I only review books I've read all the way through, and I don't bother with reading something I hate.

The only time I've passed around 1-star reviews is when a book in a series is dramatically different from the rest of the series in a really bad way. I take it personal.

I absolutely leave negative reviews. I do so regularly (though thankfully not often - perhaps once a quarter or less is a book so bad that the balance of my commentary falls on the negative side and almost never is it so bad I need to rant about it).

I review books for myself and for the people who follow me. I can best serve the people who follow me by being explicit about not only what I like, but what I dislike and why it makes for an unenjoyable personal reading experience. That way, they can decide how best to use my reviews in their own reading choices. Sometimes they share my taste. Sometimes they tend to love what I hate and hate what I love, so my negative review may be an endorsement.

I will also absolutely review a book I didn't finish, assuming I got far enough into the story to get a feel for the plot. If a book's bad enough that I stop in the first 10 pages or so, no. However, I'm one of those people who, even if they're not enjoying a book, will start skimming because I still need to know how it ends (and life is too short to let other people tell me how to read ).

Overall, I do try to avoid extreme language and include the positive and the negative in any review, regardless of overall tone. Tastes vary wildly, and a strong romance but weak action might (er, WILL) turn me off a book, while I known plenty of people happy to forego action for a good romance. But I see no point in pretending I didn't dislike a thing. As the latest example, like when a manga series turned into tentacle porn suddenly for one volume (and then immediately went back to its old way). Sometimes you gotta warn people.

Amadan said:

I think I have figured out why you keep going on rants about how reviews are worthless and nobody pays attention to reviewers. You are talking about professional book reviews.

I think you're still wrong about nobody paying attention to them, but for the most part, we are talking about amateur reviews by readers on places like Amazon and Goodreads.

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Thanks for picking up on that. I was about ready to respond when it hit me that he wasn't talking about the kinds of reviews the rest of us are.

So in that regard, I read negative reviews. I base my buying decisions on them. I figure I can be a judge if whether it's good enough according to my standards that I don't need someone telling me how great it is.

But if a negative review points out flaws that would bother me, or uncovers a spoilerish thing that happens in the book that would impact my reading experience (positive or negative), then that review has done what it needed to do.

If the book is so bad to the point of angering me despite all its fantastic reviews, I will still move on. One man's trash is another man's treasure. It just sucks when you know it's absolute crap yet the masses think it's the best thing since sliced bread.

On the other hand, after reading a book I really enjoyed, I like to read its bad reviews just to get a broader perspective.

I leave honest reviews, both on my blog and on GoodReads/Amazon. That being said, I do 90% of my reading on my iPad kindle. Since I am a little bit cheap, I always download the sample first. If I don't get into it, I don't buy it p, and thus don't read it or review it. Therefore, most reviews I leave tend to be 3-5 stars, because I had to kind of like it to buy it in the first place. I do the same at bookstores, and always read the first 15-20 pages before I decide whether or not to buy.

I read A LOT of books, and I always buy the ones I plan to read/finish because my blog focuses on small publisher/press books, and I know every sale counts. But so far in 2015, I've already read 16 novels. My budget just can't extend to anything I think will be utter crap!

Myrealana said:

I gave an honest 1* review on Amazon to a self-published book, and got myself stalked on-line for my trouble.

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I actually avoid reading self-published works because of the retaliatory attitudes of authors who have enough friends in their network to make you sorry if you leave them a bad review. So I circumvent this problem by not reading their work at all.

I leave negative reviews all the time, including 1-star reviews. But it's only for products that have gone through a rigorous process of editing, testing, etc., to ensure quality before it ever hit the market.

I don't think I've ever left a review for a book. That kind of surprises me, because I take the time to review most things honestly, good and bad.

I would never write anything other than a positive review. I couldn't sleep at night if I knew something I had said could possibly hinder an author getting a sale. When it comes to beta reading, hell yeah I'm honest. But in public view, if I don't have anything nice to say, I stay quiet.

The lowest review I've left was a 3-star. This happens when I want to like a book but I was thrown off for some reason. For one book, I hated the ending although I loved the story. And this book was highly reviewed with lots of readers sharing 3-star reviews and felt similarly about the ending.

The second book I gave a 3-star was because I had borrowed the book from the library without previewing it online first (which I almost always do before reading the whole thing). On the jacket it mentioned monsters but a couple of chapters in I realize that the monsters are just vampires. I was expecting creatures of all kinds. I flipped through to see if monsters might come. Never did! I did not finish and left a review for monster-lovers like me... with a mild toleration for vamps.

I don't think I've ever read a book that I thought should get a 2 star review. I'm selective about what to read next, maybe that has to do with it

Lhowling said:

I don't think I've ever read a book that I thought should get a 2 star review. I'm selective about what to read next, maybe that has to do with it

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Might also depend how you interpret the stars. At Goodreads, they say a 2-star review means "it was okay" while a 3-star review means "it was good". For me, saying a book is "good" means it's a book I'd recommend to someone else... and I read lots of books I wouldn't recommend to others.

Captcha said:

Might also depend how you interpret the stars. At Goodreads, they say a 2-star review means "it was okay" while a 3-star review means "it was good". For me, saying a book is "good" means it's a book I'd recommend to someone else... and I read lots of books I wouldn't recommend to others.

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Ooh, good point! I hadn't thought about it that way.

Captcha said:

Might also depend how you interpret the stars. At Goodreads, they say a 2-star review means "it was okay" while a 3-star review means "it was good". For me, saying a book is "good" means it's a book I'd recommend to someone else... and I read lots of books I wouldn't recommend to others.

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I view Goodreads' 5-star system to really be a 10-star system, where 1 Goodreads star is equal to a 6-out-of-10 book, i.e. their 5 stars cover the top half of the out-of-10 scale.

The reason why I think of it this way is because 6/10 is probably the lower limit for me actually finishing the book, and that's the lowest ranking I can give it on Goodreads. And 5/10 is probably the lower limit that a trade publisher would ever put on shelves.

Books can go lower than that, but I'd never get through them. To me, a 0/10 book would be something that is essentially unreadable, where even individual sentences don't make grammatical sense. A 1/10 book would be one where some sentences might make sense but they do not have any logical connection one to the next. These are the sorts of books that would only be written by a prose-generating computer program, someone writing under the influence of serious mind-altering drugs, or someone who is mentally very unwell.

Generally, any book you buy is going to be much better than 0/10 or 1/10 stars, even it's terrible, and since few people are interested in those books, it makes sense for our rating system to only cover the not-terrible books in the upper half of the range that people are interested in hearing about.

Captcha said:

Might also depend how you interpret the stars. At Goodreads, they say a 2-star review means "it was okay" while a 3-star review means "it was good". For me, saying a book is "good" means it's a book I'd recommend to someone else... and I read lots of books I wouldn't recommend to others.

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Agreed. I have left plenty of three star reviews on books I enjoyed (though if I post those reviews on Amazon, I typically go up to 4 stars, based on their rating system difference).

I try to leave a review whenever I rate a book, and I'll say what I found to be good and bad. I figure that even if I leave a bad review, if I say why I didn't like it, (or why I did), I may be helping a reader decide if the book is for them. If they're irked by the same sort of thing, they may pass, and then that's one less bad review for that book. If they like the thing I disliked, they may go on to pick up the book. I know I've picked up at least a couple books to read because a negative review said things I knew were things I typically enjoyed.

I enjoy writing reviews and will review no matter how I feel about a book. I've given reviews from 1-5 stars all the time. However, when it comes to the case of not being able to finish, I don't usually rate it or leave a review. I don't think it's fair to review a book I wasn't able to finish, because I didn't take the time to read everything there. It's like basing an argument on only the opening paragraph of an article. If the book is so bad that I can't finish it, then I will be honest about that. If I want to say something about the book, I usually push myself to finish it so I can form an opinion on the whole book and formulate a fair review.

When it comes to books, I've left 2-star reviews, but rarely. I don't worry about writer retribution but I do worry about the writer's feelings.

If I find a piece that's badly written, badly formatted, or both, and I bought the novel because of all the glowing 5-star testimonials on the Amazon page, I think it's far to warn other readers of the reality I've experienced. I try to say exactly why I felt the story was deserving of this lesser rating.

My review is almost instantly voted down, of course, and probably not seen very often.