Hildegarde

This morning I got an e-mail from a friend of mine, an actual person in actual publishing, that said something I’ve been sort of hearing on and off for a few years but never really took in before:

Print reviews, in magazines and newspapers, now seem to have absolutely no effect on sales.

To the extent that reviews have anything at all of an effect on sales, those reviews are online.  I’m not clear, quite yet, if he meant formal online reviews by online reviewers who make at least a long-range hobby of it, if not a career, or stuff like the reader comments on Amazon.

Oh, and while we’re on that one–what do I have to do to get some of you guys to post reviews of my books on Amazon?   I mean, please.  I end up with six people who hated the book for reasons I don’t understand, one perpetual pain in the ass who has “reivewed” every single one of the things as negatively as possible without having (as far as I can tell) having read them, and Harriet.  And I love Harriet, but she could use some help here.

Anyway, I read this e-mail, and it occured tome that I’ve bought exactly one book, ever, because of a reviewer’s judgment on it.

That’s one.  Singular.

The review was in the New York Times Book Review, and I don’t remember what the book was, except that it was some kind of thriller by a writer I’d never heard of.

I went out and bought the book the same day, because the review was so bad, it felt like a hatchet job.

And I was really angry on the writer’s behalf.

Unfortunately, the hatchet job was entirely justified.  So there was that.

That was almost two decades ago now.  Greg wasn’t born.  Matt was amall.  Bill was alive.

That said, I have in the years since sometimes bought a book because I saw it reviewed, but never because the reviewer did or didn’t praise it.   Reviews have mostly served to tell me one of two things:

Either there was a new book out by an author I get everything from

OR

There was a new book out by an author I didn’t know on a topic I cared about. 

Beyond that, reviewers seem to provide me with no information I’m interested in. 

My taste in books is idioscynractic, and unlike a lot of people I don’t read nonfiction by choosing only one side of the political divide and holding fast to it like letting go would mean giving up my oxygen.   I read Thomas Franks and Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson and Katha Pollitt.  Life is more interesting that way.

But it occurs to me that I don’t know anybody else who buys books on the recommendation of the New York Times, say, or The New Republic.   And one of the things I like about The New York Review of Books is that you don’t have to read the books they review, the “reviews” are actually long articles on particular topics with books to serve as jumping off points.  And the articles are interesting, if politically predictable.

But the thing is, I don’t know anybody else who makes decisions about which books to buy on the basis of what reviewers have to say about them.  Most of the people I know who get recommendations get them from friends, or their librarian or local bookstore person who’s known them forever, or on online forums like rec.arts.mystery. 

Maybe this was what my friend meant by reviews “online,” I don’t know.

Okay, maybe I should have asked more questions before I started writing this.

But here’s the thing–my friend sounded as if he hated this idea, as if it wasn’t a good one.

And I don’t know why not.

The problem in publishing has always been, it seems to me, the near impossible task of finding the target audience of a book and letting them know the book is there.

Maybe online reviews, peer to peer reviews so to speak, are taking over from the professional kind because they do a better job of telling readers what books are out there that they might want.

The problem with professional reviews, from what I’ve read over the years, is that, at least for me, they always seemed to be concerned about things I didn’t care about, and not at all concerned about things I did.

They also tended–in the high end review vehicles–to rave about books I would almost always find pedestrian when I actually got hold of them. 

And let’s face it.  As a reader, I’m far more receptive to the kind of fiction that makes a lot of noise in elite publications than a lot of readers are.

In the end, different readers are looking for different things in books.  What’s a “good read” to one person isn’t to another.

Lots of readers will say, as Bookwyrm did yesterday, that their choices are character driven–but not all readers want the same thing in their characters. 

I tend to be strongly draw to books with a sense of place, but it has to be the right kind of place.  I want urban, not rural.  I want sophisticated urban and not gritty dying industrial city.

And if I can’t have that, I want Greece.

I was never able to discover this kind of thing, except very peripherally, by reading book reviews.   And since my idea of a great book and the average reviewer’s were not really in line, I wasn’t able to find out of the book was “good” either.

So I think I’ll go with the idea that peer to peer reviewing–rather than professional reviewing–seems like a good idea. 

I’m not much interested in having a reviewer “form my taste,” which was part of the older system, and my guess is most other people aren’t either.

I am interested in finding new authors that I’d like but haven’t read, and I’m interested in finding readers who have never heard of me but might like what I do.

I figure we can get into the whole educated taste thing in other places, where it fits better than in the simple retail selling of books.