Complaining is never fun, but I want to do just that for a minute. It’s about negative reviews. I rarely write them. That’s because if I’m not enjoying a book, I put it down. On the rare occasion that I post a DNF post (not a review), it’s because there was a specific problem that caused me to put it down. It’s NEVER because I don’t personally agree with the subject or values of the book because that’s just unfair. And if I’m going to DNF a book and write about it, I’m not going to make any calls on character or plot development because I wouldn’t know anything about that if I didn’t read the whole book. It just makes me mad when reviewers and bloggers write awful reviews for books they didn’t like because they didn’t like the subject. If you don’t like the subject, why would you read it? The real reason I get livid when I read some negative reviews is the complete disrespect to the author that some people have. Some reviewers word things in ways that may be honest opinions, but are harsh and inappropriate. Basically, I’m trying to say that if you’re going to write a negative review, fine. It happens and people should know about a book’s faults. If you’re going to write a post about a book you DNF, fine. Sometimes there are reasons we DNF that others might want to know. Either way, don’t be a jerk. It just makes you look petty.
Have you ever been enraged by a negative review?
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4 Responses to “Raging: Negative & DNF Reviews”
I have never been upset by a negative review. In fact I don’t normally read book reviews until I am finished with a book and then I go through other book reviews. I don’t normally run into outrageous reviews… and if I do I just go past it. Though I am sure if I was the author of that book I would want the person to write why they didn’t like it not use a bunch of non-sense.
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I don’t read many reviews of books I haven’t read either unless I’ve just never heard of the book.
I fully agree with you. I don’t mind negative reviews as long as they are well reasoned/justified. We have those and post those. That said, we’ve had situations where someone requested a title by a narrator they did not like, then told us they couldn’t write a review as they didn’t like it. Why did they request the title to begin with? I can think of a couple of recent incidences (including one person you know – I’ll share it privately on FB, if you are interested).
I know another blogger that we think the world of who has one particular (MAJOR) narrator, a friend of ours, that he simply can’t stand, yet he reviews a sh*t load (technical term for “many”) of titles narrated by this friend. In nearly all cases, he disses the narration, with a disclaimer that he doesn’t care for this narrator. Why would I care to listen to 10-20 hours of an audiobook that was narrated by someone whose work I despised? Why would I do it 25+ times?
There is nothing wrong with negative reviews. You certainly know where I’m coming from. The key is to clearly and specifically state the negatives and also acknowledge if there were any positives. In this brave new world of audiobookland, the performances are all over the map, as are the production qualities. Have a great weekend!