GOOD OR BAD, THE BEST REVIEW IS ANY REVIEW.
September 1990
A friend of mine had a novel reviewed this past Sunday in The New York Times Book Review. The review was prominently featured and took up most of a page.
That’s the good news. The bad news? Well, the reviewer hated the book, and said so in a particularly mean-spirited fashion.
It’s hard to know how to react to that sort of thing, whether to offer congratulations or sympathy. On the one hand, my friend had just received a lot of ink in a very important medium. On the other hand, the ink had been rather unceremoniously dumped on his head. What’s the proper response? Should he rage or rejoice?
My friend was quite philosophical, managing to detach himself from the criticism and regard the review as ultimately beneficial to the book. It was better, he figured, to be reviewed at considerable length, albeit unfavorably, than to receive a scant paragraph of undiluted praise somewhere on a back page. And, he pointed out, there were several passages in the review that would sound laudatory when quoted in advertising or on the paperback edition’s cover.
How much do reviews matter? What real difference do they make?
If you ask people in publishing, you get a wide variety of responses, but I don’t know that they have much in the way of solid underpinning. The narrator in Donald E. Westlake’s A Likely Story observes that people in publishing are almost boastful in proclaiming that they don’t know how the business works, and many people have told me they don’t know how reviews influence sales.
One fellow who seemed to have some real data on the subject was a reviewer for a newspaper in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the course of an interview several years ago he confided that he’d done his own research to determine what effect his own reviews had on book sales locally. He went to bookstores and inquired.
It turned out that any book he reviewed experienced a slight increase in sales irrespective of whether he liked it or not. And he also learned that, whenever a photograph of the author ran with the review, the review’s impact was substantially increased. It didn’t seem to matter whether his review was a rave or a pan, or what the author looked like; if a photo ran, the review sold books.
I thought that was interesting, and set about trying to figure out why it should be so. Did a look at the author’s face create a bond between writer and reader, so that the reader wound up trooping off to the bookstore to pick up the work of an old friend? Did the photo simply increase the readership of the review by drawing attention to it? Or was there something about the book that subliminally influenced the newspaper editor to run a photo with it but not with some other review?
I wouldn’t want to invest too much time in fabricating a theory to explain data that might not amount to anything. Maybe it only works that way in Grand Rapids. Be that as it may, ever since then I’ve taken care to see that my publisher sends out photos with review copies. What could it hurt?
Reviewers have more power in certain other areas than they do in the book biz. A Broadway show will often succeed or fail on the strength of the review it gets in the Times. The right article in the right medium can have a monumental effect on the career of a visual artist.
Book reviewers are less influential. There have been instances where a review, or a group of reviews, propelled a writer into instant bestseller status but this hasn’t happened often. (A favorite example is the case of Ross Macdonald, author of a series of private detective novels featuring Lew Archer. Macdonald had a strong and loyal following, and a fine critical reputation for years, but he had never come anywhere near the bestseller list. Three journalists compared notes, found that he was a favorite author of each of them, and decided on the spot to make a star of him. Three well-placed raves—along with a sort of “Why I Live at the P.O. and read Ross Macdonald” essay by Eudora Welty—somehow did the trick. Thousands of readers read Macdonald for the first time and from then on, everything he wrote was equally successful.)
Booksellers have told me that a good review in an important newspaper or magazine translates instantly into heightened sales for the book in question. A good notice in the Times Book Review will increase sales throughout the country; a review in the daily Times will move more books in New York but fewer elsewhere. My own book, Out on the Cutting Edge, received a good shot in the arm when I was lucky enough to get a favorable review in The Wall Street Journal; the manager of a mystery bookstore told me that the book’s sales leaped immediately in response, and that sales of all my paperbacks were elevated for several weeks, almost certainly as a result of the Journal review.
While a great review can do a lot to make a book, a bad review won’t break one. A quick glance at the bestseller list will almost always reveal the names of authors who get rotten reviews all the time, and who hit the list with everything they write. All the negative ink ever spilled won’t keep a reader from continuing to read someone he likes. And why should it? If I’ve had a good time with Paige Turner’s last five books, why should somebody else’s opinion dissuade me from picking up her new one? The louder the reviewer screams and the more space his review covers, the more he’ll succeed in making me aware that Turner’s latest epic is waiting for me.
And this is at least as true with a book by a new writer. Don Marquis, the author of archy and mehitabel, once likened publishing a volume of poetry to dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. Now, 60 or 70 years later, that’s as true of fiction as it is of poetry. There are so very many books published every year and so very many other things people have to do beside sit around and read that most books, and certainly most first novels, are universally ignored.
The great likelihood is not that one will be treated shabbily by a reviewer but that one will be overlooked altogether.
This being the case, a bad review is a great deal better than no review at all. A bad review calls to the attention of the reader a book he might otherwise know nothing about. A few days later when he stands in front of a whole wall of books he may recognize yours swimming in a sea of unfamiliar titles. More often than not he will remember only that he read something about it, not what that something was. This brief flicker of recognition may be enough to make him reach out and pluck the book from the shelf.
From there on in, you’re on your own. Either the book will engage his interest or he’ll put it back on the shelf where he found it. The title, the jacket, the blurb copy, the quotes on the jacket, the opening paragraphs, the page he happens to flip the book open to—these factors will determine whether or not you can mark the book sold.
But none of those elements has a chance to work their subtle magic if you can’t get him to pick up the damn thing in the first place, and a bad review, even a lowdown, in-your-face rotten review, might do that much. And that’s true even if the reader remembers that the review was negative, because he’ll pick the book up to see what the fuss was about and feel free to make up his own mind. It’s not like a play, after all, where you have to part with 50 bucks to find out if something’s as lousy as Frank Rich says it is. You can preview a book free of charge by flipping its pages, and buy it or not on the basis of your own impression.
At least one author has attempted to capitalize on his bad reviews. Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was both a critical and a popular success. His second, Barbary Shore, had rather less impact with both groups. His third, The Deer Park, was positively savaged by the critics. Mailer responded by taking the worst phrase he could find from each of a slew of reviews and composing an ad that he published in The Village Voice. It unquestionably brought him more attention than a comparable ad filled with praise, and I can only assume it sold books.
In my own case, I’ve been treated very decently by reviewers over the years. I don’t have much in the way of horror stories. And, when I have borne the brunt of a bad review, I can’t really say that it’s bothered me all that much.
The manner of my entry into the business may have something to do with this. I wrote paperback originals for quite a few years before my first hardcover novel was published, and my paperbacks almost never got reviewed. When they did get a mention in a paperback column of some minor newspaper or other, I knew it was not going to have any discernible effect on sales.
Consequently, the handful of reviews I got over the years pleased me when they were favorable and didn’t bother me much when they weren’t, because I found them easy to shrug off.
By the time I was being published in hardcover, I had developed a reasonably thick skin where reviews were concerned. In most instances I’ve been able to get my own ego out of the way and be pleased or displeased about the review depending upon the effect it’s likely to have on sales.
I had this equanimity tested some when Random Walk was published in the fall of ’88. The advance notices, the trade reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, were both extremely bad. This was not a great surprise in Kirkus, familiarly known as the Mikey of reviewing media (“Give it to Mikey. He hates everything!”), but PW reviews books favorably more often than not, and had always given me good notices in the past. They hated Random Walk, and said so.
Then the book came out, receiving a tepid notice in the Times Book Review, a thoughtful and enthusiastic review in Fort Lauderdale, and a blanket of silence everywhere else. For years everything I’ve written has been reviewed for good or ill all over the country, and Random Walk wasn’t getting noticed anywhere.
I’m not sure what happened. It may have been that a great many reviewers received the book, read it (or as much of it as they could stomach) and decided they’d be doing me a kindness by saying no more about it. It may be that they never got the book in the first place. My publisher swore that 200 review copies went out, and maybe they did, but maybe they didn’t.
Oh well. I’m not sure reviews would have made much difference. They’d have merely sent readers rushing to buy a book that didn’t get on many store shelves to begin with, and that had a lousy cover and stupid blurbs, and that—let’s face it—they might not have liked no matter what, because it was a problematic book that never did fit into any convenient publishing categories and that not every reader is going to be nuts about.
You have to be able to shrug these things off. If you let yourself be reached on a personal level by what reviewers say about your books, you are giving faceless strangers power over your life, to which they have no earthly right.
A couple of weeks ago another writer I know was agonizing over a bad review. It appeared in Entertainment Weekly, and what possible adverse effect she thought a review in that publication could have on sales is beyond me. While I’m willing to believe that some of that magazine’s readers also read books, I doubt that they make their book selections on the basis of the reviews in EW.
No, it seemed fairly clear that my friend was responding emotionally rather than rationally. She was letting a reviewer’s negative reaction activate all the secret doubts and anxieties she had about her books’ real worth, and about her own merit as a writer.
You can let bad reviews throw you, but why? A reviewer is just a person, and more often than not just another writer like yourself. His reaction to your book is the product of many factors, including his own personal taste and the mood he was in when your book came into his hands. It’s fair to say that a bad review is a rejection slip for a book that’s been published. If you’re being published, you’ve probably been at this long enough not to let rejections spoil your day. Now you can learn to shrug off reviews in the same fashion.
Every writer has horror stories. Reviews where there was clear evidence indicating that the reviewer never read the book. Reviewers who seemed to like the book, but who never managed to say so in a quotable way. Reviewers who missed the point in any of a dozen ways.
Never mind. Experience soon shows that there are two kinds of reviewers in the world. There are the intelligent, perceptive, influential ones, the ones whose opinions count for something. And there are the no-account useless dimwitted hacks who don’t know anything and to whom no one ever pays any attention.
It’s easy to tell them apart, too. The first class consists of all reviewers who praise you. The second class consists of everybody else. So the hell with it. Enjoy the good reviews, leave the bad reviews unread, and go back to work on the next book.
That’s what you should be doing anyway.