Image: Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly’s blog has named the Worst Book Ever, and it’s pretty bad. But the Amazon reviews of Microwave for One are themselves delightful little vignettes of fiction:

It used to be that I got home from work and the only thing I’d want to put in my mouth was the cold barrel of my grandfather’s shotgun. Then I discovered Sonia Allison’s Chicken Tetrazzini, and now there are two things.

This book is all you need for all the cooking you will ever do. Yes, even when you’re cooking for more than one! Impossible you say? Well, I thought so too, but that’s wrong!

After years of mastering the art of microwaving for one, not needing anything else, I was shocked to hear a sound of what I vaguely recollected being my doorbell.. When I opened the door, I was surprised be face to face with the frankenstein monster I had created decades ago. Back then he ran away real soon after his creation, probably due to malnutrition, leaving me alone yet again. Now, after all these years, he had finally returned to say hello. And he wasn’t alone, he had brought his new family: a young sexy wife and two weird but lovely children. Of course I was happy with the prospect of all the possible attention I could get, so without thinking I invited them for dinner.

But soon I realized they were going to be starving to death. What was I thinking? I can’t even cook for two, how am I supposed to cook for five? This was madness! It just couldn’t be done! Only one of us would eat tonight, that was it.

When I shamefully brought this painful news to my guests, this genius monster of mine had the perfect solution: just have some more delivered! And he just mentioned it so casually, like it wasn’t the greatest idea of the century!

So, right away I called in for a special delivery: four more microwaves! Now I can cook for five people ANY day! This book is AWESOME!

And then there’s this one, most timely for a book published in 1987:

I found this book on the kitchen counter of an elderly woman’s house after serving her foreclosure papers. I needed something to read because while we waited for the ambulance to arrive, she had the audacity to collapse before signing away the rights to her property.

I assumed that this ‘microwave’ was a trendy new style of cooking. I’ve had liquid nitrogen prepared uni; I figured using a ‘microwave’ would be another way to elicit and accentuate the subtle flavors of this dish. Most importantly, I wanted to be the first to share my discovery at the country club.

Suffice it to say, I found no recipes for any of the basic foods. No recipes for wagyu beef, Kobe beef, Chilean Sea Bass, toro, arugula, or any of the other staples of a balanced diet.

Instead, I found mystery meats such as ‘chicken’, ‘ground beef’, and ‘casserole.’ The only ingredient I recognized was bacon, but once our servants prepared them in our ‘microwave’ (it turned out we already had one in the servants’ quarters!), the bacon became so stiff that the servants couldn’t even wrap it around the filet mignon for our Chihuahua’s dinner.

I find it appalling that there are so many positive reviews for a cookbook that excludes myself and the fellow job creators of my class. However, I have been inspired to put my servants to work on a book of recipes for the ‘microwave.’

My title: Microwave for the 1%

It’s hard to believe, but there must be worse books out there than this. Any suggestions?

• What writers can learn from “bad” books
• Charles Baxter discusses when bad reviews are useful—and when they’re just “Owl criticism”
• Possibly worse than bad cookbooks: bad sex scenes.

But some book reviewers take a different tack. Author Ben Winters explained why he gives everything five stars on sites like Goodreads:

The problem isn’t that “amateurs” are doing the reviewing: the opinions of regular old readers or playgoers or whoever can be just as valuable, and usually more passionate and interesting, than those of the jaded professionals. But in a world where Amazon sells everything from books to lightbulbs, then asks the consumer to rank his purchase from zero to five, I worry that we start to forget that a book is different than a box of lightbulbs — for the simple, cheesy reason that it emerged from the soul of a human being, and not from a light-bulb factory.

And Nina Sankovitch, of Read All Day fame—whose reviews earned her attention from the New York Times, CNN, and other media outlets, as well as a book deal of her own—explains why her reviews always seem so nice:

Now that I am reading one or two books a week, I don’t review everything I read. I write reviews of what I’ve liked. I don’t write good reviews: I write reviews of good books. [...]

If I were being paid to review a set list of books or being held hostage to reviews (”Review Swamplandia! by tonight or no soup for you!”), I would write more negative or mixed reviews (”the writing in Swamplandia! is gorgeous but the point of the story gets lost in the acres of saw grass and the hugely yawning gape of Leviathan”: soup please?). But I am not being paid and I am hostage only to my own book addiction. And so I pass on recommendations of great books.

Here at FWR, we have a similar philosophy. In reviewing books by debut and emerging authors, our goal is to highlight books that are worth reading. Sure, we may have criticisms of what we read, but on the whole, if we review it, we think it’s worth bringing to your attention.

So can “nice” reviews still be useful? We think so.

Last week, a personal book-review blog called BigAl’s Books and Pals posted a review of a self-published novel by Jacqueline Howett. Howett took exception to the review and posted a series of ranting comments, eventually deteriorating into obscenities—but not before the thread had gone viral, and not in a good way. Some insist that any publicity is good publicity, but the writing blogosphere unanimously agrees that Howett shot herself in the proverbial foot with her behavior.

But for writers who don’t have public meltdowns over bad reviews, is any publicity good publicity? How do bad reviews affect book sales?

David Brooks’s new book, The Social Animal, is part scientific research, part fiction: a kind of Malcolm-Gladwell-esque pop psychology theory told via allegory. Some critics have praised it, but plenty of others have been less positive, including some pretty mixed reviews from the Wall Street Journal and Brooks’s own New York Times, and this scorcher from Salon, which includes this recommendation:

I did manage to work my way through the whole book, however, by an expediency that I recommend to anyone else who must suffer through it. I simply chanted to myself, “Die, yuppie scum, die,” when I reached the end of each page, and it made the time fly by marvelously well. In addition, there is a blissful moment of catharsis when you reach the last page and one of the characters does die, although it isn’t in a tragic explosion involving a tennis racket, an overdose of organic fair-trade coffee, and an assassination squad of rogue economists at Davos, as I was hoping.

When you’re as well-known as David Brooks, do negative reviews like this hurt your sales? After, all, Dan Brown is pretty universally mocked by critics, but his books still sell like hotcakes (as Brown, a lover of cliches, might put it—while counting his millions of dollars).

So for a big-name author, is all publicity good publicity? A study to be published in the journal Marketing Science (via) takes a look at the effects of negative reviews in the New York Times on authors’ sales. But the findings are not what you might expect:

Regardless of whether the book was written by a new or established author, being positively reviewed significantly increased sales; a positive review generated between a 32% and 52% percent increase in demand [...] In contrast, estimates indicate that the effect of negative publicity depended on existing author awareness [...]. For books by established authors, a negative review led to a 15% decrease in sales (this estimate is slightly imprecise due to the relatively small sample size). For books by relatively unknown (new) authors, however, negative publicity has the opposite effect, increasing sales by 45%.

In other words, bad reviews hurt established authors, but any reviews—good or bad—helped relatively unknown writers, boosting sales by almost half. The study’s authors cite this example:

Relative to not being covered, being reviewed in the Times increased a book’s sales, even in some instances where a reviewer panned the book. The book Fierce People, for example, was written by an new author and received an unambiguously negative review (e.g., “the characters do not have personalities so much as particular niches in the stratosphere” and “He gets by on attitude, not such a great strategy if the reader can’t figure out what that attitude is”) yet sales more than quadrupled after the review.

So for new writers, making it into the New York Times will help your sales, even if Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani rip you a new one.

If bad reviews just demoralize you, however, “nice thing” book reviews might be right up your alley. GalleyCat’s Jason Boog posts one nice thing on Goodreads about every book he reads and invites you to do the same.

If you want to hate Brad Meltzer in paperback, please do so at your local indie bookseller.

(Via Kathryn, via InkyGirl.)