Reviews: All About The Book-Tempting?

Matt Cavanagh– better known to most as Womble from Run Along the Shelves – tells us about the other side of the book fence: what’s it like being a reviewer?

Lauren has asked me if I could talk about how I approach reviewing and that leads to all sorts of interesting questions for me to try and answer.

In the old days, reviews were the realm of the mainstream press and magazines – but over the last hundred years that has morphed into a vast ecosystem of reviews. A review can be many things: in a magazine that’s paper or digital, such as Locus or Interzone; a blog like my own; part of a collective like Strange Horizons or Nerds of a Feather; a social media account; a YouTube channel; a TikTok video; a podcast. There are even those simply adding their thoughts on their Goodreads account. They can be long or short, humorous with gifs or full of analysis, and there is no single way any of us will approach a book in the same way. This means we all have different readerships, and that evolves just as much as the internet and social media does. A few years ago, Twitter was very much the place to be – but increasingly that feels a dying platform in terms of engagement, and new places for the conversation are popping up all the time.

So then what is a review? Big note: we are NOT marketing – we are for readers. Publishers do like reviews as they help give books attention in a crowded field, but in my experience they accept fair and honest reviews because they know that not everyone will like a book. A review is not for an author – we should not be telling authors how to write, what they missed or should have written about instead. Nor if we accept a review copy does that mean the author is owed a glowing review.

The best description I’ve ever heard about what a review is was from the late great Maureen Kincaid Speller, who said: “The question should always be: ‘What is this piece of fiction doing, does it work and if not, why not?” This is where we get into the truth of the review – that this is me working out why a book has made me feel this way and trying to then make my audience understand those feelings as best as I can. I love discovering what made me love a book and trying to think of which readers would be tempted into reading it. Conversely, when I don’t like a book it’s more a sense of disappointment that this isn’t to my tastes most of the time, rather than the author should be stopped from writing all together.

(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

As any reader does, reviewers bring our own tastes, knowledge and life experience to reading and that interplay is always unique. No book will work for everyone, and you’ll find people hate amazingly popular pieces of work and love things that you would personally not touch with a barge pole. Often finding reviewers close to your tastes helps! What I will say is reviewers do tend to know their genres well and read a lot so as time passes, we do have a feel for what does and does not work – but even now we may have disagreements as to which fits in which bucket.

If you’re thinking about approaching a reviewer to look at your book here are some quick hints:

• Please read any FAQs or contact guidelines. If a reviewer stresses that they don’t read x or y, do not send them that kind of story.
• Read a reviewer’s work and get a feel for their likes or dislikes. How does your story fit?
• Please think about saying why you think your work is worth a look. A link to your Amazon page or simple book blurb isn’t always going to be enough to stand out.
• Publishing timescales are weird but bear in mind most reviewers have a schedule and a TBR pile tumbling around them. I am already pencilling in dates for 2025 – asking for a review next week is not always going to be possible.

Check Matt’s latest reviews over on Run Along the Shelves.