Holly: Today a little birdie sent us a link to this post, Authors Beware of Unprofessional Reviewers (see the title of my post? Clever, right?), in which Sylvia Massara whines about the bad review she received here on our site. I find this extremely amusing because 1) the author already threw a giant hissy fit about the review and 2) she told us she was going to write a blog post to trash our “little blog”. She really showed us, didn’t she?
Look, I understand when authors get angry over bad reviews in which they’re slammed on a personal level. I really do. A book is not its author. So when I see reviews that say things like “this author is a stupid cow” I fully understand the author being pissed. To my knowledge, we have never written one of those reviews here on this site. When we review a book we try to keep it all about the book, not about the author. Even though the authors sometimes make this really hard.
Sylvia Massara contacted us many months ago asking if we’d like to review her book. It sounded like something Rowena would enjoy, so she accepted. Rowena read the book and didn’t care for it. She said so in her review. She explained, in detail, what didn’t work for her and why she was giving it a bad grade. End of story? Apparently not for Sylvia Massara.
I particularly love where she calls us jealous and says we’ve never written anything but a grocery list. First of all, my grocery lists are amazing and beautiful. Y’all would be jealous if I shared them with you. Second, we have written things besides grocery lists..unprofessional reviews. Duh.
I’m not going to continue to justify the review. I don’t think I need to. It pretty much speaks for itself. Unfortunately for her, so do Sylvia Massara’s actions. She’s just made herself look like a giant ass..again. I think it’s probably time for her to move on. Don’t you?
Casee: I’m rubbing my hands together with glee here. I missed telling Sylvia Massara what an ass she made of herself in the comments of Rowena’s review. I have probably read that review ten times and I still can’t see the how it’s unprofessional. In this new post she actually calls the review trashy. Which made me go read the damn review again (sorry Rowena, but it’s hereby declared the damn review) and did not see any of the things that the author claimed. Rowena was objective. She was not malicious. She stated exactly why she didn’t like the book. Her ire wasn’t directed at the author, but at the character. If anything, I thought the damn review was pretty good. Rowena is nothing if not diplomatic. If anything, Sylvia Massara should consider herself lucky that it wasn’t Holly or I that reviewed the book because our damn review would have been a lot worse.
This part of her post made me smile.
This is why I am warning authors to beware of this kind of reviewer. When you offer your book to be reviewed, first take the time to check out the reviewer. Have a read of some of the reviews they wrote in the past. See if they trashed someone else. Make sure they back up their reviews with facts and objective criticism. I learned my lesson the hard way and didn’t do my research first, as I should have done.
She is warning you (authors) to beware of us. We bad. Make sure you check out this page. Or the “About the Blog” on the sidebar where we let you know that we tell it like it is. You saw that right? Or did you just happen to see a review of a Nalini Singh book that we put of the day you skimmed our blog? One more thing…we don’t have to back up our reviews with shit. All we have to do is tell our readers what we think. If we want, we throw in the why.
Holly ETA: The original post Sylvia Massara put up has been heavily edited and the comments deleted. I thought about re-posting them here so you could all have a go at them if you wanted, but to be honest I’m just too lazy. The lovely ladies over at Book Lovers, Inc are, however, much more industrious. They have posted a copy of Massara’s initial post along with the first 100 comments, including Massara’s now infamous ALL CAPS RANT. Thanks ladies!
by