Author or Book Reviewer: Pick a Side

Hey friends! Welcome back to the Loose Leaf List. This month, I was hard at work on revisions for my fantasy novel, and I finally have a draft that somewhat resembles a book! Woohoo!

I don’t know whether this book will ever get published — I really hope it will, but it’s too early to say. That said, given that my goal is to be published, I’m already conducting myself online with that in mind, most notably in the realm of book reviewing.

I started my bookstagram in 2019. Back then, I reviewed books all the time, and I wasn’t afraid to say when I didn’t like something. Nowadays, I exclusively post about books that I would recommend — and here’s why.

Author and Reviewer Etiquette

Throughout my years as a book reviewer, I got the sense of a few general principles authors and reviewers are expected to follow:

• Reviewers shouldn’t tag authors in negative reviews.

• Authors shouldn’t interact with posts about their work unless it’s a positive review and they’re tagged.

• Authors shouldn’t publicly complain about negative reviews (though if an author is drawing attention to nasty reviewers writing bigoted things about their book, that generally gets a pass).

These guidelines have a common thread: it’s important to keep reviewer and author spaces separate. That way, reviewers can be honest without worrying about backlash from the author, and authors aren’t slapped in the face with negative comments about their work when they aren’t in a good headspace for hearing it.

The trouble is, book reviewers who become authors after establishing their platform are necessarily in both spaces. As someone who wants to become one of those authors, I realized I needed to tread carefully.

How I’m Navigating the Treacherous Seas of the Multifaceted Bookish Internet

Picture the scene: You’re at a convention or a book signing or something, and you come across an author whose book you’ve previously trashed in an online review. How do you interact with them?

Personally, I’d rather not be in that situation. Authors are each other’s colleagues. Why make things more awkward with a colleague?

My policy now is that, unless it’s an author who I’d never want to be considered colleagues with anyway (because they suck as a person, for example), I don’t do negative reviews anymore. Even middling reviews. Anything I wouldn’t say to the author’s face, I’m keeping to myself.

I haven’t even really done star ratings for a while. On platforms like Amazon that require a star rating, I pretty much just give five stars to every book that I enjoy.

I’m actually in a better spot than some bookish content creators who want to pivot to being an author. While I do still post reviews, my most popular content isn’t directly about giving my thoughts on books — it’s Doctor Who video essays and random word facts and space geekery. There’s no author to offend with these kinds of videos.

(Well, except the Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies, but he’s a screenwriter and also extremely mega famous. I don’t think he would care that I recently complained about how episode 1 of the latest Doctor Who season was goofy and not always in a good way.)

But for the reviews I do write, I’m at peace with the limits I have to set. Rant reviews are fun to write (and I still have fun reading other people’s), but I would find it almost impossible to give up raving about the books I love.

What are your thoughts on the author/reviewer divide? Do you ever write book reviews? Do you have any favorite book reviewers? Share in the comments!

Review Corner

For the reasons outlined above, you’ll never catch me posting a rant review about a book I hated these days. But you WILL catch me gushing about books I loved! Here are two that I very much enjoyed recently.

The Shadow Sister by Lily Meade

In this speculative YA thriller, teenager Casey knows that her sister Sutton is a horrible person — but when Sutton goes missing, everyone is determined to paint her as an angel. And then, Sutton comes back, but she’s strangely different. As Casey unravels the truth of what happened to her sister, she realizes that Sutton isn’t the only girl who’s gone missing.

This is a super compelling read that I basically blew through in a single weekend! The unreliable narrators, unexpected ending, and sister relationship made this a great time.

For more thoughts, see my full review of The Shadow Sister here!

A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert

I’m always on the lookout for reads similar to my favorite book ever, This Is How You Lose the Time war. When I came across A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert, I instantly got Time War vibes — it’s a science fantasy novella about lovers on opposite sides of a war, after all. But A Necessary Chaos puts a different spin on the concept, with a really cool magic system that had me riveted.

For more thoughts, see my full review of A Necessary Chaos here!

In Case You Missed It …

In which I round up my favorite fun posts that I made this past month! Unless noted otherwise, these were all posted on both my Instagram and my TikTok.

Early in the month of May, I talked about the history of a couple of delightful speech occurrences. The first is the Spoonerism, which is perhaps the only time in history when a guy failed at public speaking so badly that he ended up with a verbal slip-up named after him:

I also covered the history of the Malapropism, which is named after a literary character. This is when you axiomatically — I mean, accidentally — replace the word you meant to say with another, similar-sounding word:

Next up, I talked about four words that most people don’t realize are acronyms — and in a twist of irony, I didn’t realize that I had a whole TARDIS in the background while I was talking (that’s Time And Relative Dimension In Space, BTW):

The fun world of acronyms got me thinking about portmanteaus — also known as blended words, because they’re formed from two other words smashed together. So here are four words most people don’t realize are portmaneaus (featuring one classic author in particular who takes the crown as King of the Portmanteaus):

For the Whovians over on TikTok, I’ve been reviewing every episode of the new season of Doctor Who both spoiler-free and spoilery. I’m quite enjoying the season so far (though not without my criticisms). All five review videos I’ve made at the time of sending this newsletter can be found on my TikTok page, but here is my review of the first episode, Space Babies:

@looseleafellie

I wasn’t expecting my review of Space Babies to end up being so long, but I guess I just had a lot of thoughts! One thing’s for sure, thou... See more

And finally, in perhaps one of my most history-nerd videos to date, I dove into the weird and wonderful history of the ampersand:

Thank you so much for reading! Until next time, bookish friends.

Love,

Ellie