I think encouraging ordinary readers to review, as much as possible, is a good step all of us can take as writers. There may be few people in the fandom truly qualified to do the kinds of full-on in-depth book reviews I know we’d all love to see, but anybody can post a review to Amazon, FurPlanet, Bad Dog, and Rabbit Valley – places that are also right at the point of sale and can potentially have a good amount of influence on what goes into someone’s cart. It doesn’t have to be a small essay. It can be, like, three sentences, as long as it’s ideally just a bit more than “it was a great book, I liked it.”
That said, we do get into that problem where the writers are also the main readers, and I can understand why some furry writers just don’t want to get into the minefield of reviewing stuff and having to worry about how the author/editor/publisher will take it.
Yeah, that definitely does suck. Like I said, I’ve been there. :-[ But it’s part of the job. You deal with it privately, in whatever way works for you, and you move on.
To quote Super Chicken, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.[sup]*[/sup] ;D
[sup]*[/sup]rather obscure cartoon reference that few people will probably get
As a reader, I prefer reviews that offer some specifics; I don’t want a simple rating. If the fact that you didn’t like the story because it just featured rabbits and no other animals, then I think that is relevant to say, because I might not have issue with that.
In addition, I think one can usually find something positive to say about a story. Being particularly nasty does not make one a better critic. Now I am not suggesting that one should not point out the negative nor that one should not emphasize it if the story as a whole seems lacking, but it is helpful to both reader and author to see both the strengths and weaknesses.
In terms of style, I think it is generally better to say “this story did not appeal to me” (or similar statement) than “this story is bad” (or other similar statements. Yes, it may seem a minor thing, even a bit silly distinction, but it can make a negative statement less painful to an author and it is just as accurate if not more so. As an example, I really did not like Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow–but there were plenty of people who did.
With regard to anthologies, I actually do not think it is necessary to review every story, but rather I think the point of an anthology review can often be “is the anthology as a whole worth buying?” With this in mind, I think it is perfectly acceptable to say things such as “I found this anthology to be a mixed bag,” or “with a few exceptions the stories in this anthology were a delight to read” or “this anthology did not appeal to me at all; none of the stories made me want to stay up late and read them.” I still do like to see some detail, but the overall picture is fine as a starting point. In terms of providing examples and detail in anthology, I actually prefer the examples to not specify the story or author. By not mentioning these details, the focus remains on the anthology as opposed to the individual story, and yet one can still provide enough detail to help readers decide whether or not they would like the anthology.
If one is going to name individual stories within the anthology, then I would normally prefer that the reviewer select not just a few, but rather give well-thought out reviews for all of them.
I’d like to be a Furry Reviewer because I read pretty much everything (from novels to the labels of the stuff I use to clean my bathroom with) and I would like to offer honest reviews of the stuff that I’ve read from time to time.
That being said, I’m straddling the fence here. On one hand, I’m a little irked by Fred’s review of Trick or Treat, Red Lantern, and even a few of Rukis’ books because I see a bit of a bias there against erotica and then Furry in general. I’m not sure if he has a relatively high standard when it comes to furry literature or he has an axe to grind, but the dislike was very palpable. After reading the reviews on those books, I do not think he likes erotica or Furry at all, which makes me question why he would review them at all? This may be above my skill set, but when I’m asked to review or even Beta read a book, I prefer that the book is something that I’m interested in or else I know that I’m not going to be able to give it an honest review. I strongly disagree with Fred’s stories that he featured, but on different fronts (I’ll get back into this later). With Furry writing, we do need some decent reviewers to constructively help the writers grow. Personally, I give my finished works to several people to glance over and get their opinions, and I get an average feel of what they think and use that to gauge the level of the story; however, when it comes to published authors in my genres, I hold their criticisms in high regard because they’re published and I’m not lol. But it’s all still an opinion.
As for Fred’s reviews and the stories he chose to reviews, I’m going to be completely honest and say that some stories he featured as his “likes” were around my “meh” level.
Some of the stories left me wanting, but not in a good way. I felt as if they had been heavily edited to remove the “meat” of the story. However, I don’t think Fred’s reviews were on target and without bias. If I were a fan of Fred’s, I wouldn’t have read the book; but, I’m not and I never just take a person’s word as gospel when it comes to literature. I read and discern for myself, as everyone should. Criticism should be taken with a grain of salt and and a pound of patience.
The only thing I can really say is that Fred’s “review” of Bonds of Silver, Bonds of Gold boiled down to “Wow, there’s a lot of disturbing sex in this book; the main character develops Stockholm Syndrome. Did I mention sex?”
I wholeheartedly agree that we need people who will read and review material. However, we need even more for those reviewers to be credible. We need people who can convincingly and reasonably argue that this book is well-written and that book needs work and this is why it’s good and this is why that’s not so good and ultimately why the things that are worth reading are worth reading, so we as a community can really develop. My whole drive to bake a rating system into the Coyotls was explicitly to try to convey some sense that we actually had reasons for saying what we did and not just “this is the only name on the list I recognize so I’m going to vote for it.” Whether or not it worked… is open to debate. At least I tried.
I’m angry with the situation with Fred because it feels like our most prolific reviewer is letting his biases show in a way that isn’t healthy for the community as a whole, and that we’d be better off if he could simply recognize when something was outside his comfort zone and say as much.
I would agree that if a story is in a genre that you don’t like (such as erotica) then it does not seem appropriate to review it since your comments may really relate to the genre as a whole rather than to the specific story. Ideally the reviewer should enjoy the genre they are reviewing and their comments then reflect their thoughts on the story itself relative to other stories of that type as well as overall quality of writing.
Guys, just to put on the moderator hat for a second, do bear in mind that Fred is registered on these forums, and even if he weren’t, I don’t want this thread turning into something potentially personal against one individual. I don’t think we’re headed down that road yet, so this is just a general friendly preemptive reminder to please keep opinions and disagreements respectful.
Reviews have a potential of leading readers to cool things that they might have otherwise missed. This is the reason movie reviews so often review strange independent movies that you’ve never heard of – the fact that you haven’t heard of them is largely the point. You probably knew whether you were going to see Guardians of the Galaxy before you read a single review, but when a reviewer enthuses rhapsodically over The Burials of Melquiades Estrada, that might be the first time you’ve ever heard of it.
Poetigress mentioned the notion of a group review blog; that was something I wanted to do with Claw & Quill, but as usual with me I let my ambition run rather ahead of my time. C&Q has about 90% of an absolutely terrific content management system on its back end, but in retrospect the choice to go with an issue format – which is what the system is explicitly built for – wasn’t a good idea, and while it has the foundation to have multiple editors that was the 10% of the back end that wasn’t finished.
I’m in the process of poking at a WordPress-based replacement which I imagine I can make look close to the original C&Q – or at least make it look like something I don’t mind putting on the Internet – and I think making it a group review blog would be a good thing, for multiple reasons. All the ones mentioned here, and because it would be awesome if for once I implemented a system that didn’t make me a single point of failure.
(And if you’re one of the folks who submitted something to C&Q that hasn’t been published – not that there’s many of you – I still have your stuff!)
I think the conversation here has been lively and informative, and all the low-handing fruit of good comments and responses plucked, so I’d just like to comment on this:
and arguably it’s contradictory to the spirit of our by-furry, for-furry community.
clears throat apologeticallyFUCK EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS.
Being by a genre, for-a-genre, is fine. But if you’re going to pander to a genre, make sure you know what you’re doing in your pandering.
By that I mean, for one, that there is nothing noble about wallowing in a genre ghetto, nor in trying to excuse the faults in your work by hiding behind a genre label.
I believe a writer should not not just endure, but appreciate negative reviews. Agree or disagree with their opinion, they too, like editors and beta readers before them, offering up their opinions on how to make a story better, and that is always worth its weight in gold.
Yes, that also means occasionally someone isn’t going to love your baby. Move on. Write a better story. Write a story so good that reviewer and those who follow after won’t have the teeth strong enough to best it.
Take no shelter in the ghetto of the genre, for it is there your stories will wallow, weak and worthless. Bust out of the ghetto, and then let that story break back in on it’s own terms. Make every story a revolution in genre. Love your genres, but challenge them.
Writing genre fiction like furry shouldn’t protect your work from criticism, it should subject it to higher standards. It’s supposed to be specialized.
Anyway. That’s my two cents. Thank you to Poettigress and Voice and so many others here who’ve beat me to so many rebuttals I was going to make.
All, this is a terrific discussion and a real treat to read through this morning. Thanks especially to Poetigress for answering my question so honestly and directly, sharing that story about negative criticism.
I want to add a couple of things. Firstly, I’d like to spread a bit of love for Fred Patten. He cops a lot as a reviewer, and criticism of his criticism is fair. I suppose it’s inevitable, given that he’s brave enough to share his thoughts on other people’s art in Flayrah. But he provides an invaluable service to furry, in time and in intelligence, as a reviewer that people can trust.
In that review, Fred gives a long and neutral introduction to the plot, and includes several quotes directly from the book. Any reader of his review would get a good idea of the book’s themes and style. The bulk of his criticism is a single, short paragraph:
There is a good dramatic plot here, but it is buried under the constant nonstop graphic sex, the beatings, and the humiliation. The beatings and the humiliation are Stannis’ alone; everybody participates in the sex. Buy according to your taste for this sort of thing.
That’s it. It’s a positive piece of criticism - “good dramatic plot” - and points out that there is an awful lot of sex. That, to me, is good criticism: the reader knows what to expect and can make their own decisions.
Anyway, I’d agree that there is a lot of value in reviews, and that furry would be well served by having more regular reviewers. I’m not sure that a new venture is required given that there are already a few good venues that have a regular audience. Flayrah is an obvious place to share opinions, and I’d suggest that Claw & Quill is a good alternative.
And, of course, anyone wishing to go deep into a book (or several books): [adjective][species] would love to publish your thoughts. We have a strong, loyal, intelligent audience that would love an intelligent perspective on some furry writing. (As a guide, we aim for 1000-2000 words per article, although that’s not set in stone.)
On that note…
Phil - yes! Absolutely. (I’ll email you.) That goes for anyone else here who might be interested in writing an article on or around the topic of criticism: it would be nifty to publish a short series of articles from different voices and points of view. Anyone interested?
Obviously I agree with the sentiments of your post :), I just wanted to touch on this element again… To me, when I’ve published something, it’s finished. It’s done. Opinions on how to make a particular story better aren’t at all useful to me once we’re past the point of publication – that’s what you look to editors and critters and beta readers for, pre-publication. (Although you can pick up on patterns if reviewers keep identifying certain elements of your writing in general as strengths or weaknesses, so if that’s what you’re referring to, I would agree with that.)
So that’s kind of my caveat to reviewers who say “reviews help the author get better” – with some reviews and authors, yes, that might be the case, but again, I’d caution reviewers to write their reviews with potential readers in mind, and not so much with the idea that you’re giving the author a critique.
Besides, there are plenty of authors who follow the advice of not reading reviews of their work at all, positive or negative, which is probably the wisest path for writers who really get emotionally and creatively derailed by negative criticism (I mean, more than just a day or two) – or for ones who get so many reviews they don’t have the time or energy to waste wading through other people’s opinions anyway.
Yeah, no. >_< And in following links on that post, also found this. It’s geared more toward the Amazon-type customer reviews, but still has good advice from an author’s perspective:
Do you ever post book reviews to places like Amazon or FurPlanet? All that requires is having an account (well, I think at one point Amazon required that you had to have made a purchase from them within the previous couple years – anything, including free ebooks – but I don’t know if that’s still a requirement).
This is what I refer to as taking ownership of your tastes and preferences, and in my opinion it is something any responsible reviewer should do. In other words, if the work in question is a genre or has certain characteristics that are not to the reviewer’s taste but are to other potential readers, the reviewer should do his best to factor out his own tastes and preferences, and represent the work to the best of his ability to others whose tastes are likely to be more aligned with the work in question.
In my opinion, Fred has done a good job of taking ownership of his opinions and not letting them color his reviews of works. For example, he doesn’t seem to think much of the swashbuckling antics prevalent in some of Alflor Aalto’s recent works, but concedes that readers who enjoy that sort of thing would enjoy those works; Hollywood puts out stuff like that all the time and people pay to go see it.
That’s a legitimate reminder, and thank you. That said, I think it’s important that the feedback loop be closed. If he wants to be a reviewer, he is open to his review style being critiqued in turn. It’s important to keep it respectful, certainly, but nobody is wholly beyond reproach.
Agreed on both counts, as long as the critique is kept to the reviews themselves. As I said, there wasn’t a problem yet with what had been said; I just saw the potential for problems to develop and wanted to head them off before anything got started.
I think the point here isn’t so much that reviews help this work get better. This work is done. I’m not going to go back and edit it now that it’s out the door. (I might, in one rare case where the amount of feedback I’ve gotten on one specific segment is so intense and so constant that making the edits might be worth it.) However, in seeing what a reviewer liked or disliked about what I wrote, I gain insight into what at least one reader was willing to publicly identify in my work as strengths and weaknesses. That kind of fine-toothed analysis is invaluable, and I’m always happy when I get it, even when I’m not happy with what it means about my writing.
This is why I found Fred’s review of Bonds so frustrating. It felt ultimately like he didn’t like it for reasons that had nothing to do with whether the book was good and everything to do with it falling so far out of his comfort zone that he didn’t know what to do with it. However, instead of just saying that, it felt like he tried to treat the things he didn’t understand as problems. Likewise, it feels like he simply dismissed the stories in Trick or Treat 1 that had sex in them as being not worth reviewing. It appears to me that, as a reviewer, Fred simply doesn’t like erotica, and when he runs into it, rather than acknowledge it’s not his cuppa or try to review the style independent of the subject matter, he simply dismisses the work. As such, he’s not really helping. Perhaps he thinks he’s breeding a better fandom by saying “this has sex in it; you can skip it,” but if so, he’s not making my fandom better. Critique is, at least in part, the ability to separate “this is badly written” from “this is well-written for some other audience,” and that’s an area where I feel we as a fandom don’t do very well.
And Fred, if you’re reading this, I would love to have this conversation directly with you instead of through third parties.
Wow! Be away from things for just a couple of days (I just had two teeth extracted – not fun!), and see what you’ve missed.
Seriously, I agree with all of the comments about the need for more reviewers in furry fandom. I feel embarrassed when people imply that if a furry book has been reviewed by Fred, it doesn’t need any other reviews. Books always need reviews by more than one person, to provide a variety of opinions.
A notoriously famous example is the often-cited example that “Watership Down” by Richard Adams was rejected by almost every publisher in Britain, over a dozen, before a tiny publisher, Rex Collings, decided to take a chance with it. Those weren’t published reviews, but clearly those dozen+ publishers either didn’t like the book, or felt that it was so “different” as not to be commercial. Look at the success that “Watership Down” has had since it was published. A book or manuscript needs more than one editor’s, or one reviewer’s opinion.
If I may plug a current example here, Roz Gibson currently has a Kickstarter campaign to raise $6,000 to get her furry s-f novel “Griffin Ranger” published. I read her manuscript a couple of years ago, and I think that it is brilliant, as a mainstream s-f novel as well as a furry novel. So why has no mainstream or s-f specialty publisher, much less no furry publisher, snapped it up? I surely hope that Roz gets her $6,000 (her Kickstarter campaign has until early September), if only so that “Griffin Ranger” can be published as a form of “I told you so”. I expect it to win awards.
I agree with most of the comments here, including those that say that I don’t like blatant eroticism much. I have tried to make it clear in my reviews that just because I don’t doesn’t mean that those who do may not like the stories. It’s been pointed out to me that saying that a blatantly sexual furry story will have a hard time selling to a more widespread readership is just not pertinent when a book is not expected to appeal outside of an erotic furry readership. Since then, my reviews have veered more to the “if you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this.” Kyell Gold’s books are easy to review; they have so much in them besides the eroticism.
And I’ll repeat what others have said; it’s hard to review every story in short-story anthologies. So many of them are well-written, but don’t offer much more than a superficial variation on a standard theme. In fact, let me take this opportunity to semi-apologize for my comments about Voice’s “That Red Panda Girl” in an upcoming review of the anthology “Taboo” on Flayrah. My review makes it sound like it is pretty ho-hum. I couldn’t figure out a way to say that it has a very good surprise ending without giving away that there is a surprise ending. I do say in my overall summary of the anthology that there are some surprise endings here.
