Rediscovering My Voice as a Book Reviewer

 There’s a page on my website that lists all of the books I have reviewed in the times I have spent as a professional book reviewer. Some of these gigs were paid while some of them are unpaid. (The standard in the book review industry is that the free book offered to the reviewer serves as payment. However, when I have been paid for my reviews, I make attempts to not only turn them in faster, but also to make them as thorough and in-depth as possible. There’s something to be said about getting paid for your time and effort!) What people won’t find on there, though, are reviews I wrote for a publishing company seeking in-house reviews of their books.

 

Maybe that is a good thing, because there was one review I wrote of an author’s book which wasn’t very favorable of her book. And, sadly, she later committed suicide.

 

This news of her death was devastating. I did not know her personally, but I did occasionally communicate with her through social media. Her life was so short and she is still very missed.

 

Meanwhile, I was dealing with a personal issue in relation to her death. I didn’t talk about it openly, because I didn’t want MY problems to interfere with the mourning period her family, friends, associates and fellow authors were going through. But, later on, I did talk about it.

 

And I need to talk about it again here, because things have since changed.

 

For a long time after this author’s suicide, I couldn’t review another book. I felt so terrible about the review I wrote of her book, that I started to wonder if it played a factor in what drove her to end her life. I know it probably didn’t, but that was how I felt at the time. It was awful. I was ravaged by guilt. I even vowed to never review another book again.

 

Well, obviously, that has changed. I did start leaving small reviews of books I read on Amazon. They were all very short reviews and I tried my hardest to make them positive. I gave 5-star reviews to books which I really felt did not deserve five stars, but I was worried that anything less would be hurtful to the author. I just didn’t want to make anything negative of those mini reviews that I wrote.

 

Anyway, after several months of this, I found the strength to publicly share book reviews under my name again. I started a book review blog – first on LiveJournal then on Blogger – and then I decided it was time to review books professionally again. First I tried one online book review service, but the owner was pressuring members to review his book (one which I was not interested in reading!) and the editors of the reviews were rude. Plus, it would be several weeks until the reviews I wrote for them finally appeared on the site – although there is one that I wrote several months ago that was never published. I didn’t stick around there for very long!

 

Then I remembered a site my friend, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, had mentioned in her many communications with me through the years: Reader Views. I checked out the site and liked what I saw. I noticed they even had a presence on social media AND they reviewed self-published books. I decided to give them a try and applied to be a book reviewer. Fortunately, I was accepted. The two ladies operating Reader Views are lovely. They have promptly answered my emails, were always kind and considerate, and the reviews I wrote were promptly included on their site and in their socials. I have been happily reviewing books for them ever since.

 

I don’t know if it was the act of writing those mini reviews that helped me to regain the confidence to write book reviews again, but I know it certainly helped.

 

Also, I have been more mindful of the reviews I write. If I don’t like the book, I won’t review it, even if there is one thing about the book that I DO like. (Thankfully, as an ARC reviewer for a publishing company and some authors I know, I have only received books to review that I actually liked.) But if I don’t like the book, I decline the review. I am grateful that this is an option. I know there are ways to still write a positive review of a book you don’t like, but I’m still not comfortable doing that.

 

And I know I am not doing the authors any favors by giving a 5-star review to books that are not exactly 5-star books. I have since changed that bad habit as well. I’m not so negative with my reviews of books I don’t give five stars to, but at least I am now more comfortable to be more honest about how many stars that I personally feel a book should receive.

 

And “personal” is the keyword here. All reviews of books are just that: a personal opinion about a book. They are not meant to be a way of lashing out at an author or a universal statement about what kind of book this author has written. They are only personal opinions about a book. (Sidenote: This is true in MOST cases. I am aware that there are so-called “book reviewers” out there leaving negative reviews of books simply because of what they know about the book’s content, even if they haven’t read it, or as a means of leaving hateful comments against an author currently in the news for a crime or something similar. There was one author who was accused of killing her child and people left angry and hateful comments about her on Amazon where the reviews go, and another author who was murdered ended up having people who knew her leaving sentimental and thoughtful comments on her book pages on Amazon where reviews are supposed to go.)

 

The bottom line is, not everybody is going to like a book. There WILL be readers out there who don’t like the same book that everybody else likes, and readers that do.

 

As to that one author, I DID like her book. The only thing I pointed out were certain mistakes she made about things in her story (they weren’t writing mistakes; they were mistakes about certain items the characters used). But overall, the story itself was good. And I think that as long as the author manages to tell a good story that readers enjoy, then a mistake or two in their story doesn’t really matter.