In the case of BUST, we haven’t gotten a single negative review yet (not even yours: you wrote “Crosses and double-crosses, miscalculations and blunders, and plenty of dead bodies…For those who like the bungling-criminal genre, this is good fun”; that may not be a rave, but it’s hardly what I’d call a negative review). But we’ve had other books – even ones that have been nominated for or won major awards – that have gotten a dozen extremely positive reviews and one viciously negative one. Obviously those books weren’t bad books in an absolute sense, they just pushed some individual reviewers’ buttons in the wrong way, producing these idiosyncratic “outlier” reviews.

But are the outlier reviews “wrong”? Not if they accurately reflect those readers’ feelings about the book. If a reviewer consistently expresses opinions with which readers disagree, those readers are free to stop reading the reviewer (or at least to disregard his recommendations); but that doesn’t mean the opinions are wrong or shouldn’t be expressed.

As a publisher, would I rather not have those negative reviews? No. I want to see the full range of opinions on everything we do, honestly and persuasively presented. That’s a reviewer’s job.

That said, when we are fortunate enough to receive almost unanimous raves for a book we publish, it’s our job as a publisher to let readers know about it – specifically, to let readers know that a fairly diverse set of critics (who, given the realities of lead time, may themselves not have been influenced by reading each other’s reviews any more than you were) all enjoyed a new book of ours quite a lot, and that therefore it’s at least statistically likely that readers will enjoy it as well. (When even your most negative review calls your book “good fun,” you’re probably doing something right.)

-Charles

You raise a good point about readers’ relationships with reviewers: I think we all have reviewers whom we like or trust more than others, and their honesty and consistency make it easier for us to choose them.

Most of my reviews of Hard Case Crime books have been extremely positive, so I do think you’re doing a lot right – though I’ll always reserve the right to offer a different opinion!