On ARC Disappointment

That old saw "you can't judge a book by its cover" remains a painful truism.  As a reviewer, I've been put off by covers (please don't even get me started about authors Ilona Andrews Hidden Legacy series covers, which have almost nothing to do with the central story in their excellent books and give me yet another reason to be glad I read a lot on the Kindle). I've been sucked in by covers (witness the spectacular Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert) and endured subsequent labor to finish a book that had such promise entailed in that cover.

The worst of thing that can happen when you're reviewing is to get sucked in by an interesting or beautiful cover only to find the book is just not for you. Sometimes, by lucky happenstance, the book is a publisher giveaway from someplace like Goodreads. They want you to say something about it but it's not like a big commitment. They can't even verify you received the book, for instance. But what to do when the book is from a site like NetGalley or Edelweiss, where you download a digital review copy and make a commitment to review the book? It's very difficult to DNF on these sites because you have to write a review or the book will count against your completion percentage. (And as I've mentioned before, those metrics really do impact your chances of getting the ARCs you want.) So what do you do? Reader, the struggle is real.

This is an issue that I have often discussed with my friend Alex (of Alex Can Read). When you're a newbie reviewer, you don't want to burn your bridges with a publisher by accepting and then not reviewing their books. You have to say something. You can avoid a bit of trouble by looking at early reviews of books on offer, and if you have trusted reviewers you follow who review it for significant outlets like Kirkus Reviews, etc., you can get a feel for whether it's a book you want to request. But still, sometimes it's a brand new author, and no one has reviewed it yet and the cover and synopsis appeal to you and... before you know it, yikes. That's happened more than once to me lately. There's another aspect of the bad ARC situation- the impact on a new writer.

Last year, because my kitty Pushkin got sick, I wasn't able to attend a session on Book Blogs that took place at WorldCon 75. The rather ominous abstract was "Blogging/vlogging about books has caused some recent controversy. Some authors have claimed bad reviews in book blogs have resulted in poor sales. Book bloggers and authors discuss the importance and power of book bloggers/vloggers." That's right, reviews can be controversial and make authors blame the reviewer for their lack of success.* And I have to say... in some respects it's true. You become really aware if you follow enough reviews, of the power of a negative review, which is actually in some instances stronger even than the power of a good review. This fact can make me cringe when it comes to reviewing ARCs of new authors. Back before I had the blog and was trying to be all fancy and professional about reading, I used to just drop books I didn't enjoy all the time, with no notation of DNF on Goodreads. I'd often return it on Kindle if I disliked it and knew I'd never finish reading it. Now I do list books I don't finish, but I try to be quiet about it if it's a book by a new author. I'm a firm believer that the more an author writes, the more likely they are to get better at writing. Look at Alice Hoffman or Kristin Hannah, each of whom gets better with each book. They weren't as fabulous as they are now, early on in their writing careers. So, in the spirit of second chances and not crushing dreams, some books that I've been listing on my Goodreads Currently Reading shelf have quietly been tucked away onto the Did Not Finish Shelf. It's important to realize that it doesn't always mean it was a bad book. But it might not have been the book for me, or because I wasn't in a situation where I'd made a commitment to review it, I wasn't going to slug it out to the end and tell you all about what was wrong with it. In any case, if I said I was reading something, and it disappears, and you never see a review go up, go check out the DNF shelf. If you want to know what happened, message me and I'll be happy to tell you why.

*I do want to say that I take exception to publishers that try to manipulate the review environment by actively trying to prevent negative reviews of books being posted. I've had one instance in the past six months where I was absolutely sure that the publisher was trying to suppress negative reviews of a book I read as an ARC. The book was heavily promoted, and Amazon did not post my negative review (this was not a new author) for several weeks, while the book went on to win a category in Amazon's Goodreads best of 2017.  Amazingly, the book was a finalist before it was even released and had more votes (almost three times more) than it had reviews when the winners were announced. Caveat emptor!