Readers, Reviewers, and The Place Thou Shalt Not Go As An Author

As someone with a book out in less than two months (June 10!) I’m aware that the book is in fact already out there in the world, making the rounds.

Before books officially hit the market on their pub date, Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) circulate among…well, a variety of people. Other authors, reviewers, avid readers, social media influencers get early copies so that awareness of the book can start to build. This is how you get those “I loved this book!” quotes on the backs of books—called blurbs—and how reviews hit before the book publishes.

So even though my book is not officially out in the world yet, it’s out in the world. And this leads me to…The Place Thou Shalt Not Go As An Author. (But you can go if you want and add my book, plus watch for a hard copy giveaway.)

Freckles, the absolute queen of the chicken yard, guarding The Place Thou Shalt Not Go As An Author:

The number one, most repeated, most unambiguous advice every author (debuts and established authors, too) receives is “stay off of Goodreads.” This isn’t because writers shouldn’t learn to take criticism or that they’re thin-skinned, as is sometimes suggested by a small subset of avid readers offended that writers will not read their posts, even when they’ve done the courtesy of tagging the author in on social media. Rest assured, readers—writers develop skin to rival a rhino through rejection, editorial feedback, general reception of their book, and the cruelest, harshest critique dealer of all, the one who lives rent-free inside every writer’s head.

Nope, it’s not on account of our skins or egos that we are well-advised to stay off of Goodreads. Rather, it’s because Goodreads is a place for readers to share their reading experience, not for writers to hang out like awkward chaperones at a prom way cooler than they are.

Frankly, we kill the vibe.

Readers congregate on Goodreads for the same reasons they congregate at book clubs and trade recommendations over coffee when chatting with friends. Reading may be a solitary endeavor, but the conversations reading produces require friends. And so, in addition to real-world connections made over books, readers shelve, browse, like, and add books on Goodreads. They might also write what are labeled on the site as reviews, but please note—most of the reviews on Goodreads (or Amazon or BN.com or anywhere else that passionate readers leave reviews) are not literary reviews in the “lit crit” sense of the term, but rather responses, reactions, personal reflections on the experience of reading. Note that key word—experience.

Reading is, ultimately, an experience. Just like taking in any sort of art, from music to paintings to sculpture to film, we perceive the communicated form the creator’s ideas take, we filter it through our diverse and impressive powers of cognitive, emotional, and relational understanding, and then we are left with a combination of experience and comprehension. We can comprehend, on a good day, the creator’s ideas, but the creator cannot force an experience on us. They can suggest, manipulate, cajole, bias, and otherwise set the stage for the experience, but they can’t make us have one. We create the experience, in fact, ourselves.

Two people can take in the same piece of art and have wildly different experiences. We all know this; think of the last time you raved about a movie only to have a friend dismiss it as “meh.” The last time you read a book someone recommended only to find it bored you to distraction. Frequently our emotional reactions don’t line up with others—whether we felt humor or revulsion, delicious creepiness or unintentional silliness, romantic yearning or eyerolling yawns. Certainly the meaning or purpose of a piece can evade consensus, but the experience even more so.

Experience is guided not only by the intentions and choice of the creators, but by the previous experiences, biases, beliefs, values, preferences, location, sleepiness, digestive function, current allergies, present company, and approximately one zillion other factors of the individual reader (or viewer or listener). Some of these conditions are completely outside the individual’s control (whether they have a headache); some are mostly under their control (whether they chose a form of art they usually like); most are a mix of both (whether someone chooses to challenge their biases or preferences).

All of these conditions combine with the writer’s work to produce the experience of reading, and it’s the experience, as it turns out, that most readers are reacting to and talking about. Browse any set of reviews for examples—the book was exciting (ie, produced feelings of interest and engagement), the end made me cry, the protagonist made me throw the book across the room. I enjoyed, I was frustrated, it made me angry, I FELT. Contrast this with your traditional lit crit style review, which places the emphasis on the perceived intentions of the author and whether those intentions were fulfilled, as well as the work’s place in the larger context of genre, culture, and its predecessors. (For what it’s worth, I am not claiming that lit crit reviews are always objective, fair or unbiased, only that their goals are ostensibly different from the outset—nor am I claiming that those goals are inherently better! It’s just different). It’s far more common on Goodreads (and over coffee with a friend) to talk about how a book made us feel than to speculate on whether the author meant for us to feel that way.

Reading is not input and output. It’s a creative act in which the reader takes the words an author has composed and creates something unique to them. Your Lord of the Rings is not my Lord of the Rings. Your Peter Pan is not my Peter Pan. In fact, my Peter Pan from when I was a kid is not my Peter Pan re-reading as an adult to my own children (how did I not realize how terrifying that book is?!) We all create our own experiences reading, and those experiences are what are most real to us.

And for any book with a large enough readership, the range of experience is overwhelming, from deep engagement and emotional investment to boredom and apathy. The same book can be called both intriguing and dull, romantic and unemotional, charming and clunky, beautifully written and eye-numbingly stupid. It’s fun as readers to talk about experience, and all of the other questions experience leads to. For the most part, all of the readers’ readings are real (barring truly bad-faith readings), and yet the only objective fact is “yep, people sure did read the book, all right.”

Ultimately, all of this is why it’s really best if writers remain fairly disengaged when it comes to Goodreads—and other spaces where readers are exploring their experience with books. Readers deserve a space to digest and share their experiences, without the awkward lurking of authors' obvious presence—and writers deserve to create without the looming specter of trying to please everyone. Not only is the reading experience partly outside the writer’s control anyway, the parts that are within our control are inherently such that we cannot give everyone the experience they want. And that’s ok—for some readers to absolutely love a book, other readers are going to have to hate it. So “bad” reviews? That just means that there are books out there for everyone.

Shameless plug: The Palace of Illusions releases June 10, but you can preorder now!