“Everyone’s a critic” used to be a joke; now it’s a fact. You may take populist pride in the Web’s profusion of user-contributed reviews; you may wish Yelp had never been invented. Either way, if you create stuff or sell things, you’re going to get written about.
Authors have probably been dealing with this new world longer than any other creative group, thanks to the early introduction to user reviews that Amazon.com gave the publishing industry, beginning in 1995. There has never been a shortage of disdain for the phenomenon from professionals — most recently with Joe Queenan’s satire in the Wall Street Journal last week, imagining classics getting savaged by the unwashed Amazon masses: “Their courageous sniping from behind the bushes, emulating Ethan Allen and the Swamp Fox back in 1776, reaffirms that democracy functions best when you fire your musket and then run away.”
At this late stage in the decline of the media business, however, authors can’t be too picky. The opportunity to be reviewed by professionals — however bittersweet it may be to begin with — is increasingly rare. Newspapers and magazines review only a tiny fraction of the books published each month. These days, we are all going to be reviewed by one another, for better or worse. So which is it?
I had a great experience with the Amazon reviews for Dreaming in Code, and so far, the same is holding for Say Everything, though the volume to date is lighter (my hunch is that people interested in blogs are more likely to have their own blogs and to post their thoughts there). Right now there are four reviews of the book: two highly positive, two quite negative. Plainly I’m happier about the former than the latter. The resulting average star rating isn’t as stellar as I’d like.
But if you read the reviews, you see that the positive reviews are carefully written posts from people who seem to care about the topic. The negatives, on the other hand, well — you can see for yourself: one is hard to make much sense of, and the other is by someone who declares that “most bloggers write solipsisms and only for themselves. Worse yet, most are also obnoxious and ignorant.”
My belief in the value of “everyone’s a critic” stems from my confidence in everyone’s ability to scan a batch of posts and sort out what’s of use. People often complain, “Gee, doesn’t that take work?” Well, no, not that much — if you can skim posts you can take the pulse of the pro and con contributions pretty easily. The other big complaint is that reader reviews are too subjective, and you end up with a lot of contradictory chatter. That’s not precisely wrong, but it really describes any set of reviews. (The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer for Say Everything, Tom Goldstein, thought my book was “snappy,” while the Seattle Times critic said it was a “slog”.)
I should add that Amazon, though still dominant, isn’t the only significant platform for user book reviews. There are Facebook apps for sharing “What I’m reading” notes, and there’s GoodReads, a social network for sharing what you’re reading and what you thought about it.
You never know what you’ll find, either. I headed over to GoodReads and found Wired’s Steven Levy, weighing in on GoodReads’ page for Say Everything: “Really well-reasearched and artfully presented… Scott is very sensitive and perceptive, and doesn’t merely hash over tired controversies, but brings sharp insight to the blogging saga.”
Craig Newmark recently wondered whether user review sites would be “the next big media/advertising disruption”; I think that disruption is already underway. Compared to the old model of hiring, paying and editing professional critics, these sites are cheaper to operate and able to be far more comprehensive in covering things like local restaurants or, for that matter, books.
Can they substitute for the work of the best professional critics? Of course not. But they provide plenty of value, and I don’t think authors or anyone else should be afraid of them. We can cherish what good we find (not just the positive reviews but the negative ones that actually engage with the work) and screen out the pointless chatter and the drive-by snarking — confident that others will be just as adept at that as we are.