Sorry folks, I'm backing down, doing a u-turn, throwing in the towel... I've removed the Gene review from the site, I've apologised to Mr Pavlou for publishing it in the first place (which I realise shouldn't have done in its original form), I've apologised to Mr Lovegrove for publishing something in a public forum which has probably damaged his reputation far more than mine (and let's face it, as a literary sf author his career basically lives or dies on the strength of his reputation, and he's a bloody good literary sf author, too), and I've made a decision.
As of the end of the month, TAO will no longer accept books (or graphic novels, or anything else) for review.
I can understand his frustration and desire to just walk away from the entire mess. I can sympathize. But as I come from a journalism background, giving in to the catcalls simply irks me to no end. When you write something, you invest a great deal of yourself into that work, and there's a degree of personal identity wrapped up in it. I understand that as well as anybody. But when a book is submitted somewhere for review, that free review copy is not payment guaranteeing a positive review. It's not payment for diddly squat. The reviewer owes the author nothing.
Reviews are, to put it bluntly, free advertising. Authors hope that even half the review copies their publisher send out get reviews--positive or negative. Anything to get the book's name out in front of the book buying public. Fame works well as a sales driver. Infamy works pretty darn well, too. Anonymity is the sales-killer you want to avoid. No book will sell if it's unknown.
I've written a bunch of reviews in my time. Most of them are good, simply because I'm selective in what I read and tend to avoid things that give me a queasy feeling the first few pages. But I have written some negative reviews. In every instance where my review has run on SFSite (the only one I've ever tracked) an immediate spike in the sales ranking has followed for the book in question on Amazon. And the spike has been comparable whether the review was positive or negative.
When a person writes a review, they are expressing an opinion. In a positive review, some of that opinion will clue in a reader somewhere that what the review likes and sees as a virtue in prose is not what the reader is seeking. And a sale is lost. Likewise, the flaws outlined in a negative review--even one that's passionately negative--will convince someone to check that book out, because their interest has been piqued. For example, consider John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, hailed as a modern literary masterpiece. Many people love it, worship it. Personally, the only use I have for that godawful wretched book is to wipe myself after a particularly nasty bout of dysentery--and then only if Mr. Wipple was all out of Charmin. Different strokes.
Voices of Vision will start getting its own reviews before long, and while I hope everyone will love what I've put together, I know that someone--perhaps several someones--will take exception to my interviewing style, subjects, questions, or perhaps even the typeface used in the page layouts. I don't know what they'll find, but something will turn them off my book, and they'll write a dismissive review. And it will hurt when I read it, and I'll take it personally and be unpleasant to be around for a few days. But I won't write a scathing letter questioning the reviewer's parentage in response. All I ask is that they spell the name of my book, and my name correctly, because I, too, want that next-day spike in Amazon sales.
What makes the fact that The Alien Online is abandoning reviews particularly sad is the apparent fact that Mr. Pavlou fully deserved the review he received, if reviews of his previous novel are to be believed:
Stripped down to comic book proportions for the big screen, with a deafening soundtrack and a teenage audience anesthetized to a vocabulary largely dominated by four-letter cliches, this often gruesome tale might make a middling SF adventure flick. The often ludicrous dialogue and the ham-fisted handling of human relations and motivations, however, make for an unfocused novel, one patched together like Frankenstein, with every stitching line, every unnatural feature, unblushingly exposed to the most casual glance.
Now Playing: Electric Light Orchestra Balance of Power
There's a huge difference between a bad review and a hatchet job. That review had no journalistic integrity worth defending, regardless of what anyone thinks of Pavlou's book.
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