The OF Blog: An interesting comment on review purposes

Friday, February 15, 2008

An interesting comment on review purposes

I was reading a link from one of the links I posted earlier today when I stumbled across this comment from a reviewer in regards to another making a comment about the reviewer's complaint about an author's word choice:

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but if you were, look, this journal isn't trying to influence anyone to read a book. This is more of a personal take on books I've read, and how I feel about it, rather than me critiquing it for others.
So strange to see someone so naive about the nature of online reviewing. Over the past year or so, ever since I started posting the majority of my online reviews here, I've learned via that handy little Sitemeter widget that quite a few people do Google searches, Blogger searches, etc. On a few occasions, I've even had authors respond here, so it's just strange to think that one would make a "public" post and not expect one's own words to spark a reaction, especially when hundreds or thousands of visitors visit blogs such as this one each and every day, in hopes of learning more about a particular author and/or book. And while I try to be as fair and as analytical as possible, I do write much of the time in hopes that someone would consider trying a particular book (not-so-subliminal message here: Read more Borges, Cortázar, Eggers, Eco, and Calvino) or at least giving an author a first or second shot. After all, if writing is one form of communication, writing/blogging about an author's writing is part of that shared conversation, no?

3 comments:

Tia Nevitt said...

I was about that naive when I started Fantasy Debut. I had started other blogs that had not garnered any interest whatsoever, so when I started FD, I expected my blog to turn up so low in the Google rankings that no one would ever see it.

Boy, was I wrong. Book title searches hit my Google Analytics all the time. Along with other searches that are so odd that I wonder how they possibly led to my blog.

Larry Nolen said...

I've had weird hits as well. The sickest was "uncle/niece fantasies"? WTF?

As for the books, I've found that for a good number of the ones I review, mine appears on the first page and usually in the top 3 of the Google hits. Then again, I'm not the umpteenth reviewer of the latest epic fantasy installment, so that might explain it... :P

Anonymous said...

That's the thing you do have to bear in mind that google is going to find you and that you don't really know who is going to stumble across your humble little blog. I get hits for lots of books that I reviewed last year all the time especially when they hit paperback, I wonder if my review stand the test of time?

 
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