As visitors to this site may or may not know, I am an occasional reviewer of books and films for Strange Horizons. By virtue of holding such an august position, I am also a member of their administrative email list, which up until now has largely limited itself to occasionally belching out an email full of interesting books which are invariably spoken for by the time I get round to asking for a review copy. However, in an interesting change of pace, this evening it contained an email with the following links:
• "A Reviewerfesto Presented as an Excursive Essay Which May Actually Contain or Consist of a Review" by Gabe Chouinard.
and
• A post on Gabe Chouinard's Blog.
These articles lay out a discussion ranging over a series of different blogs and websites which are notable for two particular reasons. Firstly, they comment on the bread and butter of this here Blog, namely genre reviews and Secondly, because the people involved in these discussions include some of the Big Beasts of genre reviewing. For example, Gabe Chouinard is an editor and reviewer who has been published by the likes of Locus (as close as the SF and Fantasy fields have to a trade journal) and SFSite (arguably still the Big Swinging Dick of genre review sites) and commentators include Niall Harrisson (the review editor of Strange Horizons and co-Editor of Vector the British Science Fiction Association’s critical journal) and Lou Anders (another widely published genre journalist and editorial director of Prometheus Book’s Pyr imprint).
What has gotten these Big Beasts so hot under the collar is Gabe’s pitiless broadside at the state of online genre reviews, which he classes as unprofessional, overly charitable and generally lacking in analytical weight, knowledge and judgement.
As someone who reviews a lot of genre myself, I instinctively agree with this assessment. Quality of online reviews varies wildly and not just from site to site but between different authors on the same site. Gabe doesn’t really dwell on why this should be the case but he suggests that sites should pay for reviews so as to eliminate the problem. The problem with that suggestion being that there’s probably not a website out there that can afford to pay people for reviews.
So, in the spirit of community-mindedness I’ve thought of a few ways in which websites can bring out the best in the reviewers they have, because the proliferation of bad reviews is the fault of reviewers AND the websites that publish them.
• Be nice to newbies – I can’t list the number of times that I’ve approached a website with a review and met with stony silence. You might not want someone’s review today but who’s to know what that writer will be like in a year’s time? If you piss them off when they’re young, they won’t write for you when they’re older.
• Be cool to your established reviewers – Reviewers aren’t machines, they’re people and we’re far more likely to want to do that extra draft or rethink that last paragraph if we have a decent relationship with the person writing the reviews. Social skills will make everyone feel better about the work they’re doing so exchange a few lines of dialogue beyond “Thanks” and “You need to redraft that”.
• Give Feedback – While some websites do give feedback it’s astonishing the numbers who don’t. The amount of feedback you give will ultimately depend upon how much quality control you want over your content and how close a writer is to what you really want but even simplistic feedback such as “more jokes”, “try and keep them a bit shorter” and “you should cut down on the length of your plot summaries” can make a world of difference. Of course, the best feedback is of the detailed kind and those websites who get their editors to help with the final draft are definitely on the right path.
• Give Free Stuff – One way of making sure that someone will write for you is to give them free stuff. Be it DVD, book or a pass to a film screening, you’re tapping straight into their work ethic if you give people free stuff. The funny thing is, there’s actually a lot around and often all you need to do is ask.
Of course, some writers are just going to be lousy and beyond redemption but for those of us who aren’t, all it takes is a little management to get us pointed in the right direction.
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