If you are a supporter of independently published fiction, chances are you were introduced to the subject by an independent author. Whether it was a friend who published their book, an indie author offering you an ARC copy, an author posting about it, or something along those lines, most people pick up their first indie book because an indie author introduced it to them.
This can be a wonderful thing, but in some ways it can also be a negative thing. The closer an author is to their community, the harder it may be for the individuals in that community to give honest reviews for that author’s books. After all, they don’t want to hurt the author’s feelings or their sales - especially if they’re friends or related to the author.
This is an understandable plight. I have been friends with indie authors since my early teens, and it was then that I first ran into the difficulty of writing honest reviews. I was worried that if I liked the books I was biased (a topic for another day), and that if I did not like the books I would hurt my friends. What I wish I knew then is that writing dishonest positive reviews could hurt them more than the honest negative ones would.
In this post, I want to talk about why that is. A Mixed Pool of Ratings is More Believable
If an indie book has nothing but 5-star reviews and there’s only twenty reviews total, that doesn’t look as good as a traditional book which is split fifty-fifty with good and bad reviews but has hundreds of reviewers total.
Because who knows, if that indie book had hundreds of reviewers, the majority of them might be bad, and there just aren’t the numbers for it yet. At least with the traditional book you know that 50% of readers enjoy the book 100% of the time. But say that indie book had twenty reviewers, fifteen of which were 3.5-5 stars and five of which were 1-3 stars. That looks like a much more honest and like a better balanced pool of reviews overall - even if that number would be different if more people read it. It looks more accurate, and so its good reviews are easier to trust thanks to those five poor ones.
In short, negative reviews are an important part to any book's life. Negative reviews are real, and a lack of them is unconvincing. They balance out the positive reviews and that makes for a well rounded overall rating.
Your Cons Might Encourage a Potential Reader
A potential reader might read your negative review, find that they aren't bothered by your cons, and think "Well, if that's as bad as the book gets, then I'll give it a go."
For example, formatting, spelling, and grammar are all things that reviewers are used to covering when it comes to indie work. For some people, any one of these three things being below a professional standard is a deal breaker.
For me personally, if I find a book with good reviews for the story and characters but negative reviews for the technical side of things, I'll probably still read the book.
This can apply to other areas as well. Some people might give a book poor reviews because it moves too slow, others might decide to read it because they like slow books. Some people might give it a poor review because it has unlikeable characters, while others might decide to read it anyway just for the plot.
In cases like these, one man's con is another's pro.
Inflated Reviews are Damaging In my experience, it is very easy to notice an inflated review. If you did not love a book but you review it as if you did, your heart just won’t be in it the same way it would be for one you truly did love. This makes it seem like you’re trying to protect the author and his or her book from criticism, which leaves the potential reader with the question “Why?”
It is then easy for the potential reader to assume the answer to that question is “Because the book isn’t good.”
This may then make the potential reader discount other positive reviews - especially if there are several that may also be perceived as inflated.
This is especially true when the potential reader figures out that a good amount of the reviewers personally know the author, another thing which is rather easy to pick out.
Conclusion
In editing, I realized that this post may come across as a list of reasons why you should write negative reviews. While I do believe negative reviews are important, please note that I do not discount the value of genuinely positive reviews. These are incredibly important as well, but they are self explanatory and didn't warrant directly covering.
Overall, I want to emphasize the importance of honest reviews. Honestly positive, honestly negative, and honestly indifferent. Whatever the case may be, publishing your true thoughts and impressions of a book is incredibly important and helpful to the author and book in question.
All the indie authors I know greatly appreciate well balanced and honest reviews. The negative ones help them to see where their writing can improve and the positive ones help them know their strengths (in addition to being generally encouraging).
Not to mention reviews, good and bad, sell books. At the end of the day, writing an honest review is one of the greatest things you can do to support an author.
So now I would like to encourage you to go forth and review indie books with the comforting knowledge that, regardless of how you feel about the book, you're supporting an independent creator.