A little context, if't please.
I said this:
Quote:
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The advantage of an author's review is not that they'll necessary like one's book but that they might have a better sense of what one is actually doing. Effectively Amazon is disallowing reviews by some of the very experts whom book review digests court.
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To which Andrew H. ululated:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
Oh, nonsense.
While I'm sure that many authors believe that they are better reviewers than non-writers, I don't believe that at all. In fact, if you take a random look at reviews published by self-pubbed authors on Amazon, you'll begin to suspect that authors are worse reviewers than ordinanry readers. . . .
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One reason I don't visit Mobile Read as often as in the past is because I weary of the preponderance of Booleans who view other members' posts as creative opportunities to Photoshop found language with a hyperbolic distortion filter.
Anyone who isn't invested in being a rectal hook will understand when I say that
might and
some do not mean
will and
all. The point is not that opportunistic cliques of the mediocre and worse will fail to form. It's that, in eradicating all said cliques, you also erase the
possibility of more informed reviews by professional writers who simply like to talk about what they read. The world is full of whipsmart writers who used to be mainstream and are now without work; who, lacking their old forum, are now drawn to Facebook and user reviews.
Does this mean that all people who market themselves as writers are whipsmart? Obviously not. But it does suggest that to eliminate reviews by all writers is to wrongly assume they're all of equal merit.
I could easily do that with casual user reviews on Amazon, since the majority are teeth-grindingly stupid, but that would be a disservice to people who like to read, do not consider themselves critics and have written superb reviews.
If you're Virginia Woolf and don't want to publish a review under your own name because you have thoughts which you feel aren't worth subjecting to twenty drafts (her sweet spot, I've read), why
wouldn't you post it on Amazon instead? And if you're Amazon, why discriminate against all authors by assuming they all have an agenda? By stopping Virginia Woolf from writing an Amazon review, you've deprived the people who read product pages, not delivered the world from a genetic predisposition to a conflict of interests. It's quite easy to cry inherent corruption when you don't belong to the group being targeted, innit?
The point is not that every published writer is inherently better at criticism than every reader. It's that many people who write professionally actually know things which are pertinent to the discussion of the value of books. You might as well tell Virgil Thompson he has no right to publish music criticism because he knows a few conductors a little too well.
The saner approach would be to discipline any reviewers who are shown to follow patterns of mutual praise or bear conspicuous grudges. Both groups -- reflexive praisers and bashers -- are rather large, and each contains a fair number of writers and non-writers. Ban the behavior, not the type of person or line of work. Confusing a person's essence for their job is a bit like mistaking their skin color for their culture.