100% agreed. It’s silly to take things personally. A writer who never develops a thick skin with regard to criticism is going to bleed a lot. I don’t expect everyone will love my work and honestly, if they said something with meat to it, I will extrapolate and I will improve. So they’ve done me a favor. If they say stuff like, “It was stupid and boring, I don’t believe in ESP and all that,” then I am probably going to decide there’s nothing I can learn from that review and move on.

I love readers talking about books. It means people are reading and that’s a good thing, if you ask me, since I love to tell stories. When my book comes out in May, I’ll send it to Bam and Mrs. Giggles, probably Dear Author and Karen Scott too. If they all hate it, they have the right to say whatever they want and I’ll be cool with it.

This is interesting, and something I’ve wondered about. Would you be willing to elaborate a little? I understand if you’re not, but, as I said, it’s something I’ve been curious about, especially after the Anne Stuart kerfuffle.

As to snarky reviews, I think they are perfectly legitimate if the reviewer supports her opinion with examples. Why can’t a reviewer say a book just plain sucked if they follow that statement with a litany of problems and complaints about a work?

I am so glad you said this, Jane, because it’s so true.

Reading is fundamentally a shared/communal activity — perhaps moreso than writing, although this depends on the writer’s process, I’d think — and talking about books is such a critical aspect of that for me. I love that smart readers can talk about how different elements of the genre work and don’t work for them — how some are tired and how some have certain social significance that’s worth noticing. I love how smart readers point me to things in a book I missed and challenge my own reading of something. I love how smart readers can talk passionately about characters without losing the perspective that they’re fictional constructs, and I love that smart readers can provide me with tons of recommendations for books I might not otherwise know to buy. Participating in critical discussions about Romance (which is not the same thing as criticizing them) is, IMO, one of the ways I’ve come to deepen my appreciation of the genre, from understanding how certain tropes have evolved into prominence to appreciating how small novelties can have big impacts. To be able to share the experience of reading a book with other smart people who can critique a book and still love it or the genre from which it came is a great thing, IMO. For me, a lowly reader, it’s not about courage or about authors doing better or about hoping an author will see a comment; it’s about tropes and trends and sharing with other readers the highs and lows of reading books in which we all share an interest. For me, at least, it’s first about books, and then about how I and others are reading them. I suspect that the people who like to talk more deeply about Romance novels are the same people who didn’t sleep through their English and/or lit classes in high school and college — and that it’s probably impossible to communicate adequately why it’s so engaging.

Although the stakes are oh so much lower here, the discussion of critical reading of Romance reminds me a little of the debates over whether dissent can be patriotic. The question here is whether critical readers can be fans (in the language of the column, are we “support[ing]” the “genre we love”?). Of course my answer to both debates is that criticism can communicate just as much loyalty as unabashed praise, and that the best situation is where you have a measure of both.

FWIW I do read reviews of my books. The good reviews — and that can include ones that didn’t like the book — usually help me learn something about my work. For example, a while back I realized that a reoccuring complaint about my characters was that they thought too much. Ever since then I’ve worked to make them say the things they’re thinking and cut back on introspection. I haven’t read that complaint lately, so for me those reviews were actually positive.

cheers!

It’s just me, talking with my girlfriends over coffee at the kitchen table about the latest thing I read. Am I going to bring up the wonderful, tender moments that made me catch my breath? You bet. Do I gush over wonderful characterization or plot? Of course. Am I going to call out WTH? when I read something I find incomprehensible? Yep. Will I tell readers about the thud as I threw the hated thing against the wall? Yes, I will.

And there you have it–why so many readers blog. We’ve created on-line friendships that foster these types of discussions and if we talk to friends in person about books we loved or hated, why wouldn’t we share this with our on-line friends too?

Reader blogs are for the most part for other readers. Authors are always welcome but they need to be prepared to hear/read things they may not like. Kind of like eavesdropping in on two friends talking books over coffee–you might not like what you hear.

It’s for reader affirmation. You aren’t crazy, fellow reader, I didn’t like it either. Or you are crazy, fellow reader, this book was the shiznit.

But it isn’t about getting the author to write to tailor her story to the reader’s preference. The reader is identifying what worked, what didn’t to a) help other readers and b) get it off her chest.

I don’t think c) influence the writer comes into play at all because we can’t influence writers. MANY writers that I have seen online regularly say that they don’t take reader’s comments into consideration. I think that’s good. Authors should write from their author heart without a reader looking over their back.

But readers should be able to converse with other readers, no matter the tone, if they want to. The online community of readers is so bright, vibrant and interesting, that it seems natural to want to share our thoughts with each other. The old form was email loops and listservs which graduated to public message boards and forums which now has evolved to blogs and comments. Personally, I love the blogs, the different flavors, from the positive to the negative. All this chatter means that we love this genre. We love it and we are grateful to the authors who make it alive.

Every blogger I’ve visited has praised their favorites and criticized their least favorites. Kristie J and I rarely agree on a book. She likes it and I don’t and vice versa. Heck, my blogging partner Jayne and I rarely agree. I recall giving Hot Dish a C or C- and Jayne thought it was a riot. Do I think that Connie Brockway should have written Hot Dish differently so that I could have enjoyed it more? Heck no. Jayne may not have liked it then. Should Pamela Clare’s Hard Evidence be changed to feature a less (imo) TSTL heroine? No, because Kristie J and other readers found the character-in-jeopardy story very appealing. Who’s right? We all are. We all are right in that the book either worked or did not work for us. Which means that the author was right for some and not for others.

I can’t repeat enough that the reader review is nothing about the author but everything about the book and the reader’s reponse to it. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing evil or malicious about it. Bam’s reviews? Hysterical and entertaining for both the good and the bad books. You can’t have one without the other. I think the romance community would suffer a huge loss if all the blogs because positive. Why? Because many readers would leave and some really good books may be swept aside as dross because of the lack of word of mouth from those controversial bloggers.

Any snarkiness comes out of my natural smartass personality. Some will find it funny, and others will find it juvenile and annoying. That’s fine. Any book reviews I do (and there really aren’t many) are not intended to be literary discussions. It’s just me, talking with my girlfriends over coffee at the kitchen table about the latest thing I read. Am I going to bring up the wonderful, tender moments that made me catch my breath? You bet. Do I gush over wonderful characterization or plot? Of course. Am I going to call out WTH? when I read something I find incomprehensible? Yep. Will I tell readers about the thud as I threw the hated thing against the wall? Yes, I will.

And I’m not going to stop. If and when I manage to publish, some other blogger is going to do the same to me. That will be just fine.