Why Your Story SUCKS | Writer's rants & discussions

Why Your Review Shop Sucks

Review/critique shops are a bag more mixed than the stomach of that kid spraying puke all over everyone on the rollercoaster.

I touched briefly on review shops in my "Let authors doubt themselves" rant. But as by the title, this will be fully dedicated to the topic because there's a lot more to be said about review shops and I've wanted to talk about them for a long time. And like I said in that rant, many of you brand yourself as reviewers when you barely grasp what a book is.

I'm sure I'm not the only one around here who's seen someone reviewing books and thought they shouldn't even give their opinion on a 4th graders writing because they'd probably deem it Best Seller quality. Straight from the crayon and ready for bookshelves across the world.

The books I have seen review shops on here rate highly and giving a thumbs up to when they're full of errors is fucking scary.

I'm not a reviewer but I have done enough alpha reading, editing, and mentoring for people since 2018 to have the reviewer experience. That being said and also being someone who sometimes reads through review shops and then goes to look at the books reviewed themselves, there's quite a few different ways people run their shops on here. Some are great, some are good, some are downright mass-braincell-death.

Instead of helping authors, some of you are hurting them by spreading utter ignorance.

How to stop being an unhelpful waste of ignorant opinions? Close your shop and actually go learn about writing and critiquing. Read/watch in depth reviews. Oh and read my bones to pick with shops down below too:

Rubrics - Most review books follow a rubric of what categories they critique books in. Usually its: plot, grammar, writing style, title, cover, characters, blurb and flow. I don't so much have an issue with the typical rubrics as I do how people use them. So many people misuse these categories because they don't know how to actually, properly judge said category. 

I've seen shops think grammar is only spelling mistakes and don't include punctuation, so they okay books with decent grammar but horrible punctuation errors. A reviewer once judged my characters based off of my artwork for them instead of their personalities, roles, dialogue, and overall how they were written.

Chapters reviewed - The amount of chapters a reviewer will look at varies wildly. But I will say, if you're only going to read the first three or ten chapters of a book that's longer, you have zero room to then complain in your review that the plot was too slow or boring. I hate reviewers who barely scrape the surface of a book yet try to critique it on deeper categories and then bitch when something isn't good yet. You're only making yourself look like an idiot.

Helpfulness - I've been told various things about my book from reviewers and critics. Yet only a few of them have actually done what a reviewer giving feedback is supposed to. I've been told my blurb doesn't really tell anything about the story and that some descriptions are confusing, but never a solid example of either, let alone suggestions on how I should go about fixing these said issues. I know I'm not the only one who's gotten criticism so vague there's nothing to do with it.

Don't tell someone how broken their writing is yet have no examples of what exactly you mean and have no suggestions of how to fix it. In what way is telling someone what's wrong helpful if you, the one who's supposed to be knowledgeable, can't even express your knowledge?

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There's probably other things I could add to this, but those are the main issues I have noticed in different shops.

wElL I jUsT wAnT tO hElP AuThoRs tO tHe BeSt Of mY AbIlItY!1! Wanting to help authors by giving them your feedback is nice. But that doesn't mean you should. Going back to my other rant mentioned earlier, and like I said then, just because you watch Grey's Anatomy doesn't mean you're now qualified to be a nurse. Meaning: just because you read and write doesn't mean you're qualified to critique.

In my personal opinion, you do not need to be a reviewer if you've been writing for less than a year or two. Some of you might think that's a gatekeepy opinion. But ultimately more experience produces better results for everyone.

If you can't break down a book's elements and what elements it shouldn't have, or backup your criticisms with examples, give reasons why you think what you think, and suggest potential methods to help fix what you see, you only have reader feedback abilities.

Now no, I'm not saying reader's feedback isn't useful because it is useful to an extent, and I say only to an extent because a lot of Wattpad readers who don't write themselves, are pretty much just yes-men who tolerate anything and everything. But, I'm talking about those who say they have knowledge beyond an average reader and try to give advice on areas of writing they have little to no knowledge on.

(I'm going to clarify because my rants have been misunderstood and taken out of context in the past: yes I just heavily criticized review shops. But if you are one of those people who hates reviewers/thinks criticism is hate and you want to use my rant as another reason why you're right, yeah no you're still a child trying to scream over their mom's orders to pick up your toys. The opinion that critical comments are hate will never be valid.

Review shops, although not all of them are always helpful, are still great resources for gaining different opinions on your work. It's up to writers to have both an open mind, and a sensible understanding of writing to decide what's good criticism and what's not.)

If you still want to review books but don't want to dedicate time to learning actual information on writing, all I can say is either get your head out of your ass and realize you're not actually helping anyone, or rebrand yourself as a reviewer who offers advice from a reader's perspective only.