Yesterday I reviewed the book Never Too Far by Louie Giglio. I always link my book reviews to Amazon in case the reader wants to check the book out for themselves, and I always share by reviews of great books on Amazon to help promote books I enjoy. Well one of the things that shows up on the Amazon page is a chart showing the number of reviews at each star level. To me, the book was easily worthy of five stars, and given the opportunity I would have given it more, but I saw someone gave the book a one star review and I had to see why. I clicked on the review, and this well thought out negative review held all of four words. Those words were “wasn’t what I needed.” Forgive me but “What the heck…” A one star review means your find the book to be utter garbage. A one star review says, “Well that was x amount of hours of my life that I will never get back.” A one star review is pretty much saying, “Whatever you do, don’t buy this.” It is a horrible thing to do to a writer, and something I would reserve for things that are not just badly done, but destructive. To give a one star review because the writer wasn’t able to psychically discern exactly what you needed and write a book just for you is the epitome of narcissism and it’s ridiculous. You know what is worthy of a one star review? This particular reader’s comment. I’m sorry but that is just awful.
I have read many books over the years that were not exactly what I needed, and were I to review them, I might state that it was not what I expected, but I would still try to review the book based on the merits of what the writer had done, because just because the writer didn’t meet my need (something that was never his responsibility) it doesn’t mean that it won’t help someone. “Wasn’t what I needed” is not an acceptable reason for a one star review, as a matter of fact it’s not acceptable for a review period.
AMOKArts 