Basic ethics of the literary book review

It’s a conundrum. We literary writers frequently publish on small presses, and it can be hard to catch the attention of major review outlets, like Publisher’s Weekly or Kirkus Reviews. 

Poets have it worse than writers of other genres. Kirkus, for instance, doesn’t even review poetry except for pay—currently starting at $425. But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy feat for a prose literary title on a small or university press to get traction.

But aside from the major outlets, it’s hard to find anyone to review our titles, even in more small-press-friendly litmags. Often it seems that the same small-press titles get all of the attention, and I’m not sure that the quality of the writing is the reason. A standout title or a timely theme can be just as big as factors.

Make no mistake: We want reviews because we want readers. Our hard work demands that we find an audience for the books we publish; sometime it seems as though the stories, poems, and essays themselves stand up and demand to be heard.

But our desire to find reviewers can lead us to what the journalist in me regards as missteps—practices I’d caution us away from.

Several of my social media circles are inhabited by authors, and every now and then, someone will chime in with the idea that members trade reviews—a you-do-me-and-I’ll-do-you kind of arrangement.

This is a very efficient plan; two books get reviewed where none before did. I find that it’s not so hard to publish a review. Many magazines that are too low-budget to pay reviewers are hungry for this kind of free content, and as long as their length and style guidelines are followed, they’ll provide a hungry yes to a review submission.

The problem is that a reader trusts a reviewer to be honest and candid about a book’s merits. Even if some journals publish only recommendations instead of reviews, the reader believes that a recommendation is based on literary merit, and not tit for tat.

In my undergraduate journalism education, a course on reviewing was a required part of the curriculum. Mostly we all went to a classroom at night and watched classic movies—All About Eve and Citizen Kane, for instance—and then wrote cheesy reviews of them. (Two thumbs up for Casablanca!) But in between installments from the Golden Age of Hollywood, my classmates and I actually did get a thorough grounding in this sort of criticism. What was drilled into us from start to finish was our ethical responsibility to our readers.

In short, a review is an opinion—ideally a very informed and educated opinion. I have no palate to speak of, so it would be ridiculous for me to write a review of the cuisine in a high-end restaurant. I just like to eat, and a lot of things taste really good to me. I’m simple like that.

A restaurant reviewer should know quite a bit about kitchen chemistry and processes, and about culinary history and trends. A nice meal costs a little more than this consumer can easily afford, so when I do go out, I’d like to know what I’m getting into, and whether Restaurant A is a better choice than Restaurant B. Reviews can make a difference in how I spend my (meager) resources.

Ditto with movie reviews. A reviewer who understands storytelling, cinematography, acting, and culture can help me to make a good choice when I finally pay a babysitter and venture out to one of the two or three non-animated, non-superhero movies I’m likely to see in a given year.

Let’s presume that literary reviewers haven’t already lost their credibility with readers through back-scratch-trading with writers and favor-currying with publishers. Don’t we sort of look to book reviews in the same way? Something like half a million books are published each year in the U.S., and a new release can run in the $20 range. Where do we put our cash? Attention from reviewers can alert us to and pique our interest in new releases, and they can also help us choose from among all of the books vying for our attention. When these writers abuse our trust, there’s a sense that they’re playing fast and loose with our money.

Another ethical concern reviewers must be impartial. Just because a fellow writer is a friend doesn’t mean that the person has written a top-notch memoir. The opposite—the polar opposite—may be true. But we don’t trash our friends—that’s a different sort of baseline ethics, one from universe that is larger than the literary world.

But we shouldn’t review our friends. Even if we have the sort of near-superhuman power to be impartial, we must avoid the appearance of impartiality. Readers trust that we’re not beholden to the people whose work we’re reviewing, whether by money or love or common interest.

Along similar lines, a reviewer is ethically bound to be honest. We shouldn’t downplay flaws in a book, just as we shouldn’t be more effusive in our praise than the work merits. We should aim for accuracy in description and honesty in assessment. 

Additionally, a reviewer should be educated and informed, so that the assessment of the reviewer matters. When an impartial, honest, well-read reviewer offers effusive praise, it means something.

I should mention that some magazines shy away from negative reviews. After all, a book of poetry from a small press is pretty much destined to be ignored by the larger culture; there’s no sense in a journal kicking it when it’s down. I don’t actually object to this practice; why not recommend good books instead of blasting bad ones? The danger is that a reviewer might adapt an assessment to score the publication, rather than choosing to review books that merit a strong review.

As the author of one full-length poetry collection, with another on the way, I can attest that a positive review feels incomparably good. I appreciated the handful of reviews that appeared in literary publications, but I also loved seeing what my friends thought when they posted customer reviews in places like Amazon and Goodreads. 

I wish we had a vibrant reviewing culture—one in which authors don’t have to form secret reviewing circles for their books to get a little attention. Maybe instead of making pledges to one another, we should make a promise to literature that we’ll pay attention and spread the word.

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Getting with the times: On not republishing old work

My perm, 1985

Writers at all levels often ask the same question about their older publications. Why can’t they publish the work again?

It’s a reasonable question, and it’s doubtful that the larger literary world would ever know if work a writer published in a tiny campus publication or on a now-defunct small web journal is republished in another venue—almost certainly a small venue itself.

But published work is published work—and I think it’s much healthier to move on than to try to wrong a second life out of a piece of writing. I’ll explain this momentarily.

It’s the rare journal that publishes reprints, although I’m sure a lot of magazines unwittingly do so when writers take a may-as-well attitude about the matter. It can be extremely difficult to take an honest route toward second publication—unless that is via a method everyone approves of, which is through the publication of a writer’s collected works.

If that hypothetical campus publication I mentioned had a print run of fifty copies, of which thirty were picked up for free from a table in the English Department and twenty are slated to sit on a shelf for a dozen years and then be recycled by an unsentimental assistant professor on a cleaning tear, then surely no harm can be done by sending them to a print journal, right? After all, the typical print journal has a press run of a few hundred, selections of which may be featured on a seldom-visited website. Overlapping audiences could not be less likely.

There is a very common way that published work disappears, too, and becomes, for all effects, unpublished. Sometimes on social media, I see writers complaining that the online journal that accepted their work just disappeared one day. Maybe the editors were dilettantes who only had a year or two of effort and commitment to offer. Maybe someone forgot to pay for web hosting. The writers probably presumed that their work would always be there, and in their disappointment with finding the work has disappeared, their thoughts turn to finding a new home for it.

I understand the disappointment when a good poem, story, or essay doesn’t get maximum reach. Disappearing web publications feel especially sad, since there remains no artifact that the work was ever published at all.

I do hate it when writers lament publishing in small venues, like a local zine or a printed campus litmag. After all, publishing in a venue like that is a nod toward community—a way to participate and bond with other writers who share a ZIP code or an alma mater. I have participated in a lot of local ventures like this, always with my best available work, and I have never regretted “wasting” good work on a  small audience. Instead, I’ve been proud of each publication, and each trip to a mic at a release party. Publishing a poem is nice. Publishing a poem and getting some free cheese and cocktail sausages in the company of like-minded people? That’s even better.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to get a larger audience for a piece of writing, provided a submitter is honest. A cover letter can just admit that the work was in a local zine with a print run of twenty. The average editor won’t bat an eye at considering the work—but as an editor myself, I have to admit: I would.

The joy of publishing writers’ work is in the unveiling of it. As an editor, I have always loved the pure glee of introducing new writers to the world, or of pulling back the curtain on bold new work that no one has ever seen before. This is the big payoff—the reward of being involved in publishing.

I’ll admit up front that I’ve made practically no money in my life from editing literary journals. Oh, occasionally I was able to take home the cheese and sausage from a public event if I perfectly timed the pulling of plasticware from my tote bag in the moments after the crowd left and before the catering staff came to clear the platters. And I love cheese. But as payment goes, that’s not really sufficient for the effort.

What is sufficient is the feeling I get from helping to propel the ship of American letters. And republishing some old poem, essay, or story? Well, that’s a poor propeller—and choosing to reprint work from among a submission pool of hundreds upon hundreds of unpublished pieces is an activity that holds little appeal to me. The unveiling is the thing. The re-unveiling? That’s kind of meh.

I repeat myself a lot in this blog I think, but that’s because I repeat myself frequently in my thinking about what it means to be a writer and publisher. And I know I’ve mentioned this before, and recently—but writers should focus on writing. If I won’t print your essay from when you were a junior in college (and I won’t), I hope that compels you to write something brand new.

An acquaintance of mine is always trotting out the same essay. She is a wonderful writer, and she has sent this short-form essay to dozens of outlets. No one has snatched it up, and so she keeps revising it, and keeps asking people like me to read the latest version and weigh in.

I’m tired of that essay. My friend is too talented to stop at just one, and I feel a little vexed to see it again and again. What’s more, it’s probably over-revised—I believe it’s possible to polish the spark away. I’m hardly the first to note that there is an energy to rawness—like in the beginning of “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd, when it’s possible to hear David Gilmour’s finger rub across the string to produce an involuntary enharmonic tone, and to hear another person, I’m not sure who, cough once in the background. I know it’s possible to attain a cleaner version, but I listen for the rub and the cough. They’re my favorite parts.

Work a piece too hard and we lose the edge. I believe this. But I also believe that if we work a piece too hard and too long, we’re ignoring all of the work that waits to be written. And that’s the real tragedy of doting on our past publications.

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