The internet market for books has become a hotbed of authors and reviewers behaving badly. Suzanne McGee, who cancelled her book-reviewing blog after an attack from a writer, urges a sensible approach

The day that I stopped reviewing books on my own blog was a Tuesday, if I recall correctly. It was the day in 2012 that I returned home from covering a conference in downtown Manhattan. I stuck my hand into my large metal mailbox to see if I had mail. I didn’t feel any paper. When I pulled out my hand, instead of holding any letters, I found it was covered in dog shit.

This fecal matter had been wrapped in a piece of paper on which had been printed out language comparing me to the infamous Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I recognized the comparison. It had appeared on an author’s blog accompanied by my full name, an entertaining little video snippet from the film, a considerable amount of rather hostile language and a threat to name the villain in her next novel after me.

This was all because I had read the author’s debut novel and disliked it intensely. I reviewed it. I didn’t tweet the review or otherwise share it. I didn’t contact the author or follow her. It certainly hasn’t affected her sales or her subsequent success.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Just keep it out of the mailbox. Photograph: TNT Magazine / Alamy/Alamy

There is no industry that combines ego and economics like book publishing, however. It is now customary for authors to regard any negative review as a vast threat to their livelihoods and future book sales. After my review, the author chose to follow me on Twitter and – bizarrely – to request Facebook friendship. When I didn’t bite, a blizzard of hostile messages from anonymized accounts began to show up on the site where the review was posted and elsewhere. Eventually, I reached out to her publicist, and it stopped. Some, it turned out, came from the author; some from her husband; some (probably) from her fans. I neither know nor care precisely who figured out where I lived and dumped dog shit in my mailbox.



But now I no longer blog. I do, however, still review books. And I do so under my own name, as a reviewer for Amazon Vine.

So last few days of debate over book reviews and authors’ reactions have been, ahem, entertaining. Even enlightening.

First, Margo Howard. Never having been an avid reader of advice columns, I had only been vaguely aware of her. I only knew that her latest memoir, Eat, Drink and Remarry had ended up in the Vine for All section of Vine. Amazon recruits Vine reviewers and then gives us first crack at books. Some last only minutes, like Anthony Horowtiz’s new novel, Moriarty. Hundreds of others that don’t find eager readers fall into our targeted “queues”. Howard’s book was snapped up quickly, by memoir readers looking for what promised to be a light read.

The problem? Those early readers apparently had the poor taste not to like the book, and said so. And Howard took her disdain for the reviews, the reviewers and the entire program to the New Republic, which was happy to give her a platform to vent her spleen. “Who were these people”? she wondered of the Vine reviewers. “Dim bulbs”, she concluded, who deliberately sabotaged her book out of a combination of envy and evangelical zeal for judging her decision to have an affair with a married man. Amazon, she raged “gave them the tools, through Vine, to damage my book for the casual browser.”

Let’s put to one side the fact that the top reviews of the book are no longer negative opinions by Vine participants, but one-star reviews by others who have bought or borrowed the book since its publication. “Write, Rewrite and EDIT – PLEASE!” implores one “verified purchaser”.

The reality is that the internet has democratized book reviewing, just as it has every other form of commentary that leads to a purchase decision. If you travel, you go to TripAdvisor. For a restaurant, you visit Yelp. No longer is classical music reviewing the sole domain of critics for Gramophone and the like. Music aficionados share their experiences, blogging and commenting wherever they can find a forum. This creates a system where one reviewer doesn’t wield power, but potential consumers can look at many different points of view.



So why should books be any different? Are not books written to be bought and consumed?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest There’s a feud behind most of the books at the great libraries of the world -- but for centuries, those battles didn’t live on the internet. Photograph: Andrew Fox / Alamy/Alamy

Howard has an answer. A book reviewer, she argues, is a profession, with “reviews done by other writers. Good sense would seem to militate against any group of people unschooled in creative and critical reviewing coming up with a worthwhile review.”

But this is conflating reviewing and literary criticism. Reviewing is what we all do, to some extent, when our friends are looking for a book to read and ask us for our opinions. Whether it’s published in many newspapers, forms the content of a blogpost, a review on Amazon, Goodreads or another site, or simply forms the basis of a chat in a bookstore, it’s all part of the same phenomenon. What do you like? Why did you like it? What do I, as someone who is about to invest my hard-earned money in this book, need to know before I click “buy”?

Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement and chair of this year’s Man Booker Prize committee of judges, is the chief proponent of the view that book bloggers and amateur reviewers are bad for book culture, worrying that “the mass of unargued opinion” may “choke off” literary critics. What he fails to realize is that the two groups are addressing entirely different audiences. Is an accountant in Dubuque with a penchant for Clancy-like thrillers or a mother of three in Austin trying to figure out which romance novel to read next going to find what they want in Stothard’s universe? No. Even Howard’s memoir probably wouldn’t get much of a chance in Stothard’s ideal ecosystem, either.

Jennifer Weiner gets it. The novelist, writing a riposte to Howard, points out that the democratization of book reviewing has caused the boundaries to break down between what Howard approvingly thinks of as the “real” critics (real, in the sense that they are officially employed as reviewers) and us amateurs (including, presumably, people like me, because while I’m hired to write, I’m not hired to review.) It wasn’t just readers who liked these new reviewers, but publications (bloggers appear on the pages of the New York Times and other “traditional” forums) and publishers, because suddenly, there were myriad new ways for authors to reach their audiences.

Of course, that comes with all kinds of new risks attached, for both the author and the reviewer, as the weekend’s other book reviewing-related drama illustrated.

I’ve been aware of Kathleen Hale’s edgy and sometimes fantastical essays for a year or more, my favorite being her quirky response to Ruth Graham’s attack on YA (young adult) novels that are read by adults. Instead of taking a huffy, righteously indignant approach (a la Margo Howard), her essay was a flight of fancy, bizarre and entertaining. Brilliantly creative, I thought.

And then I read her chronicle in this publication of what she herself admits was “hitting her personal rock bottom” when she stalked her own negative reviewer. Detail by detail, Hale details the process by which she figured out that “Blythe Harris” wasn’t the reviewer’s real identity. (Many online reviewers don’t use their real names, some for mundane reasons – their employer or church won’t approve of their reading habits – and others for more serious ones, that they have an abusive ex looking for them or, like me, they’ve had an unpleasant experience in their past. As of this moment, we have no idea what might be the case for “Blythe”.)

She conducted a background check. She visited the reviewer’s home; peered into her car and chronicled what she saw there; she called her twice at work, once using a false identity of her own.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest There’s a reason many online book reviewers choose to stay anonymous, and it’s not because they’re imitating Princess Lee Radziwill at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS

In spite of her acknowledgment that of behavior, Hale now appears more excited by the attention than understanding just what line she crossed. Criticism of her column, she argued recently, comes from people “who didn’t read the piece and have little-to-no understanding of journalism.”

News flash. I read the piece. I do recognize that her article was an opinion column. I also know that what she did wasn’t investigative journalism, as some have claimed. If anything, paying for a background check and doorstepping her target is the lowest form of tabloid journalism. What was she hoping to achieve?

When I read her column, my mind flashed back to my own dogshit encounter. And it also flashed back to an essay by Hale that had crossed my path briefly last year and that has been making the rounds a lot in the last few days, in which she describes how she took revenge, as a 14-year-old, on a fellow teen who had accused her mother of sexual abuse by pouring hydrogen peroxide over her head in a movie theater, and later stalking her on Facebook. (The charges against Hale’s mother were dropped.) Even then Hale’s attitude – that she was claiming to be just as messed up as the teenager she had attacked – niggled at me. What rang true were the words of a police officer she quoted. “You’re the lucky one,” he told her.

Hale is lucky, and talented. Her second book will appear in the spring. She has a unique and distinctive narrative voice and at a very young age, has achieved what many writers yearn for. But she hasn’t yet realized that not everyone who dislikes her quirky, offhand tone is attacking her, personally, or is envious of her success, because they, too, yearn to be published writers. Just as Howard fails to understand that disliking her memoir doesn’t mean that reviewers dislike her for being rich.



The world of online reviewing is still in its infancy, and book sales are not robust, so authors are struggling with the new rules. In place of the cozy culture that used to exist, where a book and its reviewers would all meet at book parties weekly, it’s an anonymous place.



That doesn’t mean the old-fashioned system was wonderful for authors or reviewers, either. Richard Ford responded to Colson Whitehead’s negative review of a story collection by spitting on him; Ford and his wife fired bullets into a copy of one of Alice Hoffman’s books after Hoffman dared to express their displeasure of his The Sportswriter.

Clearly, some reviewers do cross the wrong line – not the one separating them from literary critic, but the one separating them from loon-who-should-be-locked up. Horrifyingly, author Charlaine Harris received death threats last year from amateur reviewers and bloggers based on the way she chose to end the long-running Sookie Stackhouse vampire novel series (the inspiration for True Blood.)

Before all the kerfuffle surrounding Hale’s essay began over the weekend, the average review for her novel, No One Else Can Have You, was a respectable 3.5 stars out of a possible 5 stars. It was polarizing, but that’s not surprising, given her writing style. Today? It’s 3.1 stars. Hale believes “Blythe” tried to sabotage her career; judging by the drop in her reviews, she may have done a better job of that herself.

If anything useful has emerged from all of this, it’s a debate over the role that we, as amateurs, can play in the ongoing chatter about books.

My own view? No one on Vine picks up a book to read because we think we’ll loathe it and – bonus! score! – it gives us a chance to beat up on whoever wrote it. That’s irrational. To keep participating in the program, we need to review every item we get, and we know that ill-informed reviews (such as those written of books that the reviewer clearly hasn’t finished) often are treated scornfully and greeted with lots of “unhelpful” votes. No one wants to be that reviewer. What we do want is the chance to read books that excite and interest us, and then tell as many people as we can about them when we finish. I’m lucky to be a Vine member because it means that when I find a book like that, I have a slightly bigger platform.

I’m under no delusion that I’m part of any literary elite or wield much market power of my own as a reviewer. At most, maybe four or five people might buy a book that I like, I calculate, and another dozen or so might get it from the library. My negative reviews, I suspect, have much less influence. The author whose book I criticized has gone on to publish several more. And yes, the dry cleaner removed the dogshit from my sweater. So it’s all good.

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