What’s wrong with these two sentences?

We will keep the book in our stacks for another two weeks. If you decide to order a review after that time, we will ask you to send another copy.

That’s from an email Chad Post of Three Percent received recently from ForeWord Reviews.

Yes, you read that right: “if you decide to order a review.” ForeWord Digital Reviews, as the email explained, charges authors to have their books reviewed:

Digital Reviews is our new review service for books that meet our standards for worthy books, but which we can’t cover in our print magazine. Each issue of ForeWord only allows us to cover a few great pre-publication books, and many books come to us that we’d love to review if we had the space. Our Web site has lots of space!

[...] Digital Reviews are different from ForeWord reviews in that they are a fee-for-service review. A $99 fee covers the expense of writing and posting the review.

As Post points out, this means that “the only reviews on the site are ones that are bought. That makes for a very skewed representation of what the new books are… ” Here’s my question: isn’t a paid book review pretty much like… an ad?

What do you think? Are fee-for-service book reviews as helpful to readers (and authors) as the more-typical, non-sold ones? Would you trust a “bought” review?

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.

Image credit: Flickr - lism.

Criticism has never been an easy field, but now there’s a new risk: legal action. New York University law professor Joseph Weiler is being sued for running an negative book review. Writes Weiler:

Last week, for the first time I found myself in the dock, as a criminal defendant. The French Republic v Weiler on a charge of Criminal Defamation. [...] As Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law and its associated Book Reviewing website, I commissioned and then published a review of a book on the International Criminal Court. It was not a particularly favorable review. You may see all details here. The author of the book, claiming defamation, demanded I remove it. I examined carefully the claim and concluded that the accusation was fanciful. Unflattering? Yes. Defamatory, by no stretch of imagination. It was my ‘Voltairian’ moment. I refused the request. I did offer to publish a reply by the author. This offer was declined.

Three months later I was summoned to appear before an Examining Magistrate in Paris based on a complaint of criminal defamation lodged by the author.

The verdict is due later this week, on March 3. (Via, and.)

As Onion-esque as this sounds, the case does raise serious questions about what the role of critics is today—and what it will be in the future. As you can imagine, the role of the critic in the era of the internet is very important to us here at Fiction Writers Review. (That’s part of why we’ve been discussing criticism all week in our features—don’t miss the musings of Charles Baxter, Stacey D’Erasmo, Keith Taylor, and our own Jeremiah Chamberlin.)

Huffington Post blogger Anis Shivani recently spoke to eighteen major critics for their thoughts on cricitism today and how to keep book reviewing relevant in the future. Contrary to what you might expect based on the handwringing about Twitter, Facebook, and the ever-threatened Death of Print Media, most of those consulted encouraged critics to embrace the current cultural situation and, yes, even the internet.

Ron Charles, fiction editor at the Washington Post, comments:

Book reviewers who hope to be relevant to a new generation of readers will have to [... p]ut those reviews in places where young people are looking. Get over it: They don’t subscribe to newspapers, and they’re not going to. Aggregate book reviews with other entertainment news that young people are interested in and make those reviews accessible on mobile devices. Find ways to blend book reviews with social media that young people are using

Likewise, poet and critic Rigoberto Gonzalez sees the vast potential of online reviews:

Like many reviewers, I bemoaned the compromised quality of editing and fact-checking on the Internet, but I believe that will change as it becomes clear that these entries are part of a critical dialogue and not just opportunities for book publicity or reviewer show-boating. [...] The next generation of readers will continue to absorb and process information through the use of technology, and as long as literary e-conversations reflect our ethnically and aesthetically diverse culture–in ways that book reviewing has not been in the past–we shouldn’t fear that the book review will become obsolete or irrelevant.

And president of the National Book Critics Circl Jane Ciabaratti insists it’s the critic’s job

to offer as fluid a range of cultural references as feels right. (For instance, in the course of a day I’ve been playing Angry Birds on an iPad, listening to Kanye West’s new album, tracking down a 1964 recording of Frank O’Hara reading his “Lana Turner Has Collapsed” poem to post in a comment thread on Facebook. How does that play into my experience of reading Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s engrossing memoir Harlem is Nowhere? All are immersive experiences. Weaving those experiences together in some way might be more interesting than simply sticking to the text of the book.)

Meanwhile, in the New York Times, the editors spoke to six critics about why criticism matters, period. Their responses were eloquent statements about the purpose of literary criticism:

Stephen Burn:

Stepping aside from the culture of opinion, delving deeper into open-minded analysis, critics might fulfill their most important function: locating major works that are not always visible in mainstream networks.

Katie Roiphe:

The secret function of the critic today is to write beautifully, and in so doing protect beautiful writing.

Adam Kirsch:

The critic participates in the world of literature not as a lawgiver or a team captain for this or that school of writing, but as a writer, a colleague of the poet and the novelist. Novelists interpret experience through the medium of plot and character, poets through the medium of rhythm and metaphor, and critics through the medium of other texts.

This is my definition of “serious criticism,” and I think it’s essentially the same today as it was 50 years ago: a serious critic is one who says something true about life and the world.

Image credit: VIDA

Recently, I wrote about literary cameos on The Simpsons. In response, Charlotte wondered, “Are they tweaking on the Franzen gender controversy by only having literary cameos by men?”

This is a timely question. A recent study by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts showing that male writers vastly outnumber female writers at many major literary magazines—as writers, reviewers, and review subjects. The New Republic, startled by this disparity, did some number-crunching and found that publishers also publish fewer books by women than men:

In fact, these numbers we found show that the magazines are reviewing female authors in something close to the proportion of books by women published each year. The question now becomes why more books by women are not getting published.

The VIDA numbers provide a start toward an answer: Of the new writing published in Tin House, Granta,and The Paris Review, around one-third of it was by women. For many fiction writers and poets, publishing in these journals is a first step to getting a book contract. Do women submit work to these magazines at a lower rate than men, or are men’s submissions more likely to get accepted? We can’t be sure. But, as Robin Romm writes in Double X, “The gatekeepers of literary culture—at least at magazines—are still primarily male.” If these gatekeepers are showing a gender bias, there’s not much room to make it up later.

In response to VIDA’s study, Peter Strothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement—which overall published men 2.8 as many times as women—told The Guardian,

I’m not too appalled by our figure, as I’d be very surprised if the authorship of published books was 50/50. [...] The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books. Without making a fetish of having 50/50 contributors, we do have a lot of reviewers of both sexes and from all over the world. You have to keep an eye on it but I suspect we have a better story to tell than others.

Here at Fiction Writers Review, we also don’t “make a fetish” of having an even gender balance in our content. We review books that we feel passionate about, and we choose our subjects for interviews and reviews without regard for gender. But how are we doing overall? I did some counting up, and here is the unscientific gender breakdown for content at Fiction Writers Review:

Contributors overall: 85
36 male (42%)
49 female (58%)

Staff:
5 male (45%)
6 female (55%)

Reviews:
126 published as of count date
43 (34%) by male contributors
80 (63%) by female contributors
Note: Percentages do not add to 100% because several “discussion” reviews with multiple authors were not counted.

71 (56%) were of books by male authors/editors
58 (46%) were of books by female authors/editors
Note: Percentages do not add to 100% because several books had more than one editor.

Essays
57 published as of count date
36 (63%) by male contributors
21 (37%) by female contributors
Note: 6 essays were from the “Novel Dishes” series by Kathryn McGowan; 14 were from the “Quotes & Notes” series by Steven Wingate.

Interviews
52 published as of count date
24 (46%) were by male contributors
30 (58%) were by female contributors Note: Several reviews had 2 female interviewers working jointly.

29 (56%) featured male subjects
23 (44%) featured female subjects

Male interviewing male: 17 (33%)
Male interviewing female: 7 (14%)
Female interviewing female: 16 (31%)
Female interviewing male: 12 (23%)
Note: Percentages do not add to 100% due to rounding.

Based on these data, our numbers at Fiction Writers Review are not exactly 50/50, but they’re a damn sight more equal than any of the journals in the VIDA study! We’re proud that, without placing any emphasis on a contributor’s or subject’s gender, our numbers come out to be fairly equitable.

Which raises an interesting question: if lit journals like the Times Literary Supplement are choosing what they feel is the “best” material out there, and we’re also choosing what we feel is the “best” material out there, why is our perception of “best” closer to 50/50, while theirs is so skewed towards male?

On The Huffington Post, Monica Edinger, a teacher at New York’s prestigious Dalton School, writes about an afterschool book blogging club she and several other instructors founded:

Every week these literary enthusiasts come to my room; sift through my books and advance reader copies; choose to read whatever catches their fancy; and, after reading them, write blog reviews about them.

It’s never too early to encourage reading and reviewing, right?

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports that Penguin is launching Spinebreakers, a social network for teens to talk about books. The Spinebreakers site previously existed as a space for teens to write about books, but over the next six months, the site will be redesigned as “the first social network dedicated to books”. Why? Penguin sees it as an investment in the fiture of publishing:

[Anna Rafferty, managing director of Penguin Digital], said that the site, which attracts 10 to 15,000 unique users each month and is still in beta, was not a commercial venture for Penguin, but was hugely important to the company for “future-proofing the book industry”.

What a great way to think of encouraging young readers, writers, and critics: growing a new generation of book appreciators.

The idea fueling the winsome settings is simple: magic is real. Quentin is a real magician. Instead of relying on rules of magic established in past novels, Grossman deftly structures an internally consistent world with a tangible system of magic. Magic is hard. Casting a spell is not as easy as waving a wand and muttering Latin, but rather a complex series of hand movements and incantations that must be adjusted for circumstances like the time of day or the phases of the moon. The world of the novel operates within strict limitations: the school relies on Victorian-era technology because magic puts electronics on the fritz. The power of a spell is finite, and consequences are absolute: expending magic without control will not only kill a magician but change her into a niffin, “a spirit of raw, uncontrolled

Dungeons and Dragons

magical energy.” The narrator refuses to think of Brakebills and Fillory as anything less than real, and that confidence carries the large, expositional segments throughout the novel. Learning about these worlds is fun, and Grossman playfully pays homage to his forerunners with the inclusion of games like welters, a life-sized elemental chess-like game, and spells based on those found in Dungeons & Dragons.

The characters navigating Grossman’s world are interesting, funny, and heartbreakingly flawed. Magicians are all outsiders, miserable and obsessive, and none more so than Quentin. Entrenched in fantasy stories, Quentin yearns for the Fillory of his childhood where happiness is seemingly achievable. He is a fully realized character who is, most importantly, loved by the narrator. The sarcasm in the narration is always filtered through Quentin, but never aimed at him. At the beginning of the novel, he and his friends walk to a college admissions interview and Quentin hopes for a way out, “If the interviewer actually turned out to be a gatekeeper to the magical land of Fillory, he thought, it was too bad he wasn’t wearing more practical shoes.”

When Quentin and his friends arrive and find the door ajar, Quentin goes in to investigate and finds a liquor cabinet. “It felt like the world was revolving around him, like his whole life had been leading up to this moment… Quentin reached back past the ranks of softly jingling bottles and felt the dry, scratchy plywood at the back just to make sure. Solid. Nothing magical about it.” Instead of mocking or ridiculing in this anticlimactic moment, the narrator sympathizes with the perpetually stuck, disappointed Quentin, who would go so far as to check the back of cupboards in a stranger’s house for clues to an alternate reality. He is someone with holes in his heart, someone who never got over the possibilities of stories. All he wants is an escape, something “that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.”

Quentin does get all that he ever longed for, but that, of course, is where the trouble really begins. Quentin is a perpetual coward. His friends aren’t exactly superheroes, either. Eliot is an alcoholic who has trouble accepting his sexuality. Painfully shy Alice never stands up for herself. Janet overcompensates for her insecurities by boasting, and Josh hides behind comedy. They’re people like us, or people we know. After graduating from Brakebills, Quentin steps back to observe his friends and realizes that “they had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city.” Instead of following the hero’s journey that other familiar fantasy works employ, Grossman leads his unprepared characters through a reluctant and ill-planned adventure to Fillory. The characters enter the imaginary place of childhood stories that turns out to be dangerously real. But even as danger mounts, Quentin never develops into the hero dictated by the genre: Grossman pushes him further.

Quentin is incapable of confronting his problems and can’t act to save others, even when they’re in dire need of help. Though brilliant, he is often unprepared to deal with the hardships of becoming a magician, but it’s through him and his friends that Grossman convinces the reader that if these worlds existed, people like us might enter and survive them. In the final battle between the magicians and the beast, there is a moment where Quentin panics. His breath becomes shallow and he realizes that he isn’t ready for the feat of defeating an evil sorcerer, that the books had it all wrong. In that same moment, the reader panics with him. Grossman chronicles a final battle where the prospect of failure is terrifyingly palpable, both for Quentin and the reader.

Some of the novel’s unanswered questions, such as where Quentin’s true talent lies and where his relationship with his crush Julia is heading, are most likely being kept for Quentin’s return to Fillory in a sequel. However, the heart of this novel is clear: “to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster.” But even as this injunction is uttered, Quentin rejects it. A part of him will always need the story, need escape. Grossman presents not only the realities of fantasy, but also the opportunity for an individual to see himself clearly through it. Quentin and his friends might not be the heroes they’d like to think they are. Grossman doesn’t make his characters stop dreaming, but he does force them to consider their dreams carefully in The Magicians. If magic is real, it’s difficult, but like anything that’s truly worthwhile, it shouldn’t be abandoned. We should recognize it and revel in its power.

Further Reading:

• Visit Lev Grossman’s blog to read his most recent post about his adventures at Comic-Con, in a series of dispatches he wrote for Techland under the banner of “The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con Goes to Comic-Con.” Highlights include: Storm Trooper House Party and Adam Warlock Is Dead. You can also follow Lev Grossman on Twitter.
• In the following video, Grossman discusses the mainstreaming of fantasy, with shout-outs to Tolkien and Susanna Clarke:
• If you like fantasy and genre-defying novels, check out Charlotte Boulay’s review of Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series. Charlotte also discusses the tendency to pigeonhole books into genres – in this case fantasy and YA – and the rewards of exploring other sections of your local bookstore.
• Buy The Magicians at an indie bookstore near you.

This blog is going to be a hodge-podge of book news, recommendations, links, reviewlets, and discussions. I make no promises about being fair, balanced, consistent, or completist, but I hope to keep things interesting. Here’s to the lovely and fearless Marissa, who made this site possible, and to all FWR contributors for suspending their disbelief.