The reader's right to voice an opinion

[John Dean]

The subject of reviews of books is getting a lot of attention at the moment with the advent of social media and Amazon, where everyone has a voice and everyone can be a critic.

I receive a lot of reviews of my novels and, thankfully, they are overwhelmingly positive but from time to time I do get the odd bad one.

My view on reviews is clear. Good ones are welcome and deeply appreciated but sometimes bad reviews can be useful if the reader makes valid comments. I run a lot of writing courses and workshops and I always tell my students that you can learn a lot from good writing and even more from poor writing. So, if the critic is pointing out something valid, it can be a useful learning exercise for the author.

Where I have a problem is when the reviews are unnecessarily offensive. After all, as one person wrote in an online debate on the subject –‘writers are people, too’.

But first and foremost, readers have every right to review a book they have read (they did, after all, pay for it). It just means that sometimes authors have to have thick skins!