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August 16, 2020 - Madi Sinha vs Booktuber

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Community issues: A reviewer (Booktuber) asked to interview an author and review her book, but when the book turned out not so good, the reviewer posted her "negstive" review on Amazon and cancelled the interview. The author got upset and subtweeted about it in a way that made it sound like the reviewer was 1) bigoted against authors of color, 2) scammed her for a free book, 3) was out of line for posting a negative review.

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[My apologies of the Frankenstein patchwork of screenshots below, WP only allows for 20 images per chapter. They are arranged in the order they were found.]

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Dear authors,

Sending out ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies/ Advanced REVIEW Copies) is for HONEST reviews. Their reviews, whether positive or negative, are meant to boost your book's visibility and hype it up. ARCs should be sent to reviewers who have followings and not just friends/fam to pad your reviews.

Most reviewers, bloggers, vloggers don't get paid or paid enough, and a "negative" review can actually be a positive for someone else. Example: "This book had too many cuss words and sex"..... some people LOVE books with adult language and content. Example: "This book was too plot heavy".... some people like plot over character studies.

🤷🏻‍♀️ Them the breaks. The reality is that consumers prefer books with ANY review over a book with NO reviews, statistically. ARCs are an expense, use them to their fullest capacity.

Working with reviewers is a symbiotic relationship, and we must all try to get along and behave professionally. There are legit critisms to be said about specific reviewers or review groups, and the process of who gets ARCs, but pissing off a large segment of the review community is not gonna help anyone, especially not the author at the center of the situation.

Reviews are for READERS, if you can't handle bad reviews, please do not go look at them. No one owes you a positive review, and honestly, what is a fake positive review worth? Nothing. Inevitably someone else is gonna read the book and feel let down or lied to.

Reviewers depend on their reputation. (There's a discussion to be had about reviewers who misuse their platform, but that's not this discussion.) There are reviewers of all types, with differing opinions and audiences. They have an agreement with their audience to speak THEIR truth. Whether it's to say, "Hey, I got paid to show you these books," or "Hey, I found this book in a yard sale and this is my 3 part essay on post colonialism," etc. If audiences cannot trust their reviewer, the review means nothing.

Let me repeated that again, REVIEWS HAVE TO BE HONEST TO HAVE VALUE.

Lying or neglecting to include other opinions takes away confidence in the system.

[We must add, AOC (Authors of Color) legit have had many issues with (knowingly/unknowingly) biased reviewers, but this seems not to have been one of those situations. A common situation AOC have is that their POC characters are seen as "unrelatable" whereas purple vampires from Mars are not... 😑 It is extremely disappointing this author claimed a racial bias when there was not. She should have taken the review in stride, most people wouldn't even have noticed, but now her reputation is tarnished. It wouldn't be surprising if her publisher or agent didn't pick up her next book.]

We hope this all made sense. There are so many things to be said about this industry/community and it's hard not to run off on different tangents. Watt Wolves Community will strive to cover the different elements come here in this book, if they haven't already.

- WWC

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