1-Star Reviews, Emergency Help for Authors

Just got burned with a 1-star review? Here's what to do.

The difference between a critical review and a mean, snarky, or negative review

What kind of 1-star review have you been hit with? Is it just critical, or is it snarky? Can a review be both critical and snarky? When does a review stop being a review and become merely entertainment, drawing more attention to the reviewer than the book?

Some collective wisdom from authors, bloggers, and librarians:

*

Critical reviews are not negative reviews.

Know this distinction. Critical reviews involve thoughtful analysis and synthesis of the work at hand. They support their statements — both positive and negative — with what’s in front of them. They check their baggage at the door.

Negative reviews are not supported by text. Negative reviews don’t tell readers anything substantial about the book, but rather, about the reviewer. It’s self reflective, rather than text reflective.

Kelly J at Stackedbooks.org – read full post

*

I’ve come to the conclusion while there once may have been a division between review blogs that posted snarky reviews (I am thinking of Mrs. Giggles and Smart Bitches) and those that didn’t, I no longer see that division (if it ever existed).

… snarky reviews, I now think, are like any other reviews: good when they are informative, careful, and honest, bad when they aren’t.

Read React Review – read full post, with many examples of snarky reviews

*

Let’s talk about the negative “reviews” that authors have been lashing out at. They often involve animated gifs, swearing, and snark. They’re often quite funny. But here’s the thing, though. When a blogger writes a biased, hilarious, snarky rundown of a book they despised, he/ she is not writing a review. They are writing a post about a book. I’m not saying that bloggers shouldn’t write biased, hilarious, snarky rundowns of books. I’m saying that those rundowns are not reviews. Bloggers who regularly write them cannot expect to garner the same respect and treatment from authors that pro reviewers or non-pro reviewers do. They can’t expect authors to read their posts and learn something from them. And they cannot expect authors to not take it personally. They’ve made it personal.

Author Maggie Stiefvater – read full post

Advertisements

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Information

This entry was posted on March 10, 2012 by in 1-stars, book reviews.

Navigation

Blog Stats

  • 1,219 hits
This site is for entertainment purposes only and the author assumes no liability for the content. This site does not provide psychological or legal advice.
%d bloggers like this:
https://1stars.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/the-difference-between-a-critical-review-and-a-mean-snarky-or-negative-review/
1stars.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-39
59223
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5DVY25PMZ3HDHXCJLVVAQ3ZUWXTXZQ3L
<urn:uuid:4751f0aa-8ad1-4dad-b9fb-b06c9bb29460>
2017-09-22T02:25:27Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:ZRMJC52NNTQUUUQPX3N57WXO7RWMCSWI
<urn:uuid:c3ee24b2-440b-4852-a3b2-0762ada97f36>
https://1stars.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/the-difference-between-a-critical-review-and-a-mean-snarky-or-negative-review/
length
response
<urn:uuid:afa0146d-a05b-4803-82d2-5349a3d6c0fd>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-41-188-142.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-39
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf