There are several reasons for wishing to be nice when reviewing books (not least as a form of insurance against being clobbered by someone you trash when they review your book!).
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I’ve been reading Phillipa K. Chong’s “Inside the Critics’ Circle”, in which she attempts to discover the process by which books get reviewed. It’s a very interesting read. I haven’t finished it yet, so am not in a position to review it as such, but I was struck by the extract cited below.
Just to give some background, Chong has focused on fiction book reviews, though I suspect the issues she unveils probably apply to nonfiction books too.
Book reviews may not always help an author economically (ie may not lead directly to more sales), but are helpful in that they denote a book, and therefore its author, as worthy of note. (Interestingly, it’s a well-known fact that in order to have Amazon promote your book through its algorithms, you need to have at least twenty reviews from verified purchasers; some people even say you need a hundred.) Certainly as far as nonfiction is concerned, books rarely make the author a lot of money, at least not directly. My own experience in this regard is that I have earned more from article writing than book writing, but the books (especially Make Time with IT, Managing ICT, and Every Child Matters: What it means for the ICT teacher, marked me out as an expert in the field of education technology.
All of which makes one of Chong’s research findings all the sadder. She carried out a survey of book reviewers:
“[Other respondents] observed that women writers face unique barriers compared to their male counterparts, including getting review attention. But rather than pushing for more inclusion through some collective effort, again I find critics expressing personalized strategies to tackle this broader reality. Specifically, given the belief that women writers get fewer opportunities than men and therefore any opportunity carries that much more weight, a few critics indicated that they actively abstain from reviewing first books by women to avoid potentially having to write a less than glowing review of a woman author. ”
Book reviews get authors and their books some attention. It’s the book world’s version of Oscar Wilde’s observation that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
It also strikes me as patronising to women, and therefore in its own way misogynistic, to seek to protect them from genuine criticism of their books. I don’t even understand it anyway. When I am invited to review a book, I don’t check the writer’s gender.
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