Soon after I began writing reviews and publishing them on my blog, I asked another author if he would review my book of short stories and post it on his blog. He said that he didn’t write reviews because he didn’t want to be a target for disgruntled authors who might not like what he said about their work. I took his point and decided that if I couldn’t say something good about a book, I would say nothing about it in public. I also want to support good authors, not talk about books that aren’t so good. Who wants to hear about them anyway? So my policy for reviewing is that I will only publish reviews for books that I can give 3 or more stars for. That doesn’t mean that I give 3-5 stars for everything I read; it means that I don’t publish my 1 & 2 star  reviews. If the author had requested a review from me, then I send them a few private notes. However, in the same way that fake 5 star reviews have consequences for the whole rating system, so does this policy. Many reviewers, … [Read more...]