HUGO AWARD-WINNING SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY MAGAZINE
Editor's Desk:
The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews
I’m often asked why we don’t have a review column in Clarkesworld, particularly one with a focus on short fiction. The answer has always flowed pretty quickly: “There’s no shortage of people writing reviews. I’d rather dedicate our time and effort towards something else.” What I don’t say is that with rare exception, they don’t have much value.
The sad truth about short fiction reviews is that the overwhelming majority of them have little-to-no impact on readership. After monitoring the incoming traffic for the online version of this magazine for nine years, I can say that the typical review has a statistically insignificant impact on the readership of a story or issue. The only notable exception to this has been reviews on high traffic sites, like io9 or Tor.com, that focus specifically on a single story. As the number of stories in a review increases, there’s a dramatic drop-off in story readership.
“Oh, but that’s not the purpose of a review.” Yes, reviews have many purposes and sometimes their impact on readership can be secondary. For example, a good review in Locus may indicate good chances at being on their recommended reading list. That might have an influence on other award nominations as well. If a story happens to make one of those ballots, it definitely has an impact, but that’s a very small percentage of the stories reviewed in a year.
Shouldn’t reviews of good stories have the effect of encouraging people to read the story? At this point, the average variation on “you should read this” with a link on Twitter is significantly more effective than the majority of reviews.
Could it be that most people are looking for “read this,” rather than “here’s a bunch of stories I read?” It’s beginning to feel like that’s the case. Are reviewers trying to cover too much territory in their reviews and thus diluting their influence?
As an aside, there’s one more place reviews have an impact: Amazon. Yes, it’s disconnected from this editorial’s comments on online readership, but it’s pretty clear that Amazon reviews have a significant impact on the sales of print and digital books and magazines. Buying a book after looking at the reviews is not all that unlike following a link to (or Googling) an online story after reading it’s review. It’s timely and influencial.
The last decade has been a time of significant change for publishing and perhaps even moreso for short fiction. There’s no shortage of outlets for short fiction. Very few of us have the time to read all of it, so having help finding the best stories is more important than ever. In some ways the same can be said of reviews. There’s no shortage. Perhaps that’s hurting their influence?
Social media levels the playing field and allows everyone to help fill the gap. The Twitter mentions and Amazon reviews are still largely the domain of the regular reader and even now, we need more people, reviewer and reader alike, adding their valuable perspectives. If we want short fiction reviews to have influence again, we have to work together on it . . . and go where the readers are.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology is Not One of Us, which will be published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.
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Azimuth wrote on September 2nd, 2015 at 10:19 am:
I realize that a single individual's experience is statistically insignificant and therefore useless as a datum for making sound financial decisions, but I have definitely used short fiction review columns/posts to discover stories. There are maybe three mags I read regularly, but outside that limited number, and discounting stuff put out by my favorite authors (whose work I track obsessively), all the online short fiction I read is from those kinds of things. (In fact, recently I was trying to find more short fiction review sources!)
Of course a focused, detailed review about one work in particular is going to garner more attention than a short, blurby review that makes up part of a multi-work roundup. I should think that would apply equally to any kind of fiction, whether novels, comics, TV shows, etc. Considering the volume and exposure of short fiction reviewing out there (i.e., very little compared to novel reviews &c), it seems a bit of a vicious cycle -- the short form is traditionally underhyped, so casual readers are less prone to *get* hyped, so potential reviewers don't see the point of hyping it up...
Kelly wrote on September 2nd, 2015 at 1:42 pm:
Sarah Pinsker has started a #BestSF2015 hashtag on Twitter to gather recommendations and promote work.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/BestSF2015?src=hash
Azimuth wrote on September 2nd, 2015 at 3:02 pm:
See, Twitter is just way too brief and high-volume for me to glean anything much from it, personally...
Neil Clarke wrote on September 2nd, 2015 at 6:21 pm:
The first draft of this editorial had a long section on "but I read them." In the end, I cut it because it was simply repeating what I was saying about the outcome. Basically, it's not that traditional reviews don't have any audience, it's just that there are very few of you.
Twitter, on the other hand, has a huge audience and it can convey "this is a good story" effectively enough to get people to read that story.
Bob Blough wrote on September 2nd, 2015 at 8:36 pm:
Mr. Clarke,
I am sure you are right about writing short fiction reviews. I read Locus and I write for Tangent online and sometimes I fear that I am talking to the wind. But every now and then an author I have reviewed sends a tweet or uses some blogspace to thank me or disagree with me about their story. I love the world of short fiction. It often gives me more reading pleasure than anything else. I love your magazine for that reason and have reviewed several issues. But, what I do is not worthless, what I do can perhaps be brought into this technological age, but before the advent of short fiction magazines on the internet - and the SF magazines were dwindling - short fiction reviewers kept the idea of short stories alive in some measure.
Thank you, again for publishing a great number of my favorite short stories in the past years. That is why I still write reviews for them
Neil Clarke wrote on September 3rd, 2015 at 9:20 am:
Bob: I sort of answered this concern at Black Gate, so I'll just repeat what I said there:
A review that doesn’t send new readers to a story is functionally equivalent to emailing your thoughts to the author. Nothing wrong with that, but there are reviews that send the author a message and readers to the story. I’m saying that the we should all aspire to the former and that most reviewers aren’t. That’s the sad truth I was referring to in the title.
Kind words are nice, but in the end, authors (and editors) want their stories to be read.
Xavier wrote on September 3rd, 2015 at 10:44 am:
My main problem with short fiction reviews is that it's especially hard to say anything meaningful without spoiling a sizeable portion of the story in the process.
I still enjoy the reviews but I read them AFTER reading the story itself. It sometimes makes me see a story from an angle I hadn't thought of myself.
Patrick wrote on September 7th, 2015 at 7:10 pm:
I agree with Xavier. The majority of the time that I read reviews (short fiction or otherwise) it is more to get someone else's take on what I have already read than to discover something new. Arguably this is not the purpose of reviews, but it's hard to find any interesting analysis of fiction, especially short fiction, anywhere else.
Of course, it is certainly worth asking what the aim of a review is and whether reviews are successful at that aim. And if the consensus is that reviews mainly exist to promote work that the reviewer likes then it seems that short fiction reviews are not successful. On the other hand, I hope there will always be some outlet for public discussion and analysis of short fiction, even if short fiction reviews die out.
Bob Blough wrote on September 7th, 2015 at 11:50 pm:
I agree that authors and editors want the stories to be read - so I ask you to help those of us who love short fiction do that. You say use twitter - OK - but if I send out a twitter saying something is good - who will listen? I have read SF for 40+ years but no one would listen to that. My proposal to you is to set up a twitter account using the name of your magazine and allow people to twitter about stories they like. Perhaps you would need to vet these "Twitter-reviews" or at least the reviewers but if you fell reviews are pointless then help make them worth something again.
Justin James wrote on September 8th, 2015 at 1:13 pm:
I can't stand most short story reviews. Far too often they sound like the reviewer tooting their *own* horn. "Look! I can show you how many other stories I read each month! I can tell you about all of the obscure stories/authors/magazines I read!"
I *hate* Twitter. I really do. Only thing I use it for is to talk about a live event that a lot of other people are experiencing (think Super Bowl), and to give quick feedback to authors/bands/etc. Some of my favorite authors are very Twitter-responsive. They already love feedback.
Now... as someone who also writes (hundreds of non-fiction items, a single piece of fiction), I'd much rather get a dozen tweets/emails/comments from actual readers than a single review that will only be read by a small number of people. As Neil says/implies, I don't need my ego stroked by a self-anointed authority/"reviewer", I want to know that my stories are getting *read*. I can easily blow off a bad review ("their tastes just didn't align with my story"), but I can't ignore a lack of feedback - positive or negative - telling me that my piece actually was read.
I will sometimes get an email or a tweet about something I write YEARS ago. Since almost everything I've written was of a technical, "how to do XYZ" nature, getting an email saying "hey, I know this is an old article, but you saved my bacon" means more to me than any review will. It means that I accomplished my mission (helping people).
J.Ja
Eric Mesa wrote on September 18th, 2015 at 7:56 am:
Xavier stated part of what I was going to say - writing a review of a book without giving away spoilers is hard enough. How do you do it for short fiction without sounding pithy?
What I'd actually really appreciate, Neil (if you read the comments), would be short story criticism. Perhaps taking a few stories (maybe as part of the yearly anthology) that revolve around a particular theme and explore how the authors differ in their interpretation of the theme. This could be especially awesome with Clarkesworld as you guys tend to showcase large amounts of Eastern fiction. I've certainly noticed in the podcast that there are lots of commonalities and lots of differences in how Americans and Chinese see the future through the lens of science fiction. Alternatively, exploring themes that authors seem to return to would be pretty awesome as well. Doing so in the world of comics - for example looking at themes that Jonathan Hickman often explores - has given a greater depth to the stories; at least to me.
Neil Clarke wrote on September 18th, 2015 at 8:45 am:
Xavier: It's possible to review short stories without spoiling them. Where I think it becomes more difficult is when it drifts into literary criticism.
Bob: Creating a Twitter account doesn't solve the problem, but it is a first step that needs to be followed by building an audience. It is no different than any other review site. Everyone starts with an audience of 0 and builds from there. These things build over time.
A side-effect of this editorial was the creation of https://twitter.com/sfeditorspicks, which is a group twitter account run by the editors of year's best anthologies, myself included. After a couple of weeks, we're already up to about 2300 followers.
Eric: I like articles that address a variety of themes in the genre and use examples from books, stories, and movies to illustrate the points (unless they become too academic). We've even published a few of them. That said, I don't enjoy writing them, so that makes me the wrong person for the job. If someone out there wants to try, I suggest they pitch the idea to Kate Baker, our non-fiction editor.
Julia wrote on September 21st, 2015 at 3:40 am:
To me, short fiction reviews are basically pointless. I'm not saying, they don't have value - they do, but, as others have said, more as comments on a story I've already read.
I find it hard to find short fiction I might like through reviews. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong, but I see two options: Either I read a lot of (random) reviews and seek out the stories that sound interesting, or I look for reviews of a given story to find out if it's worth reading.
The problem with both approaches is: Is it really worth my time? No story that is purposefully selected by an editor will be really bad. Personal tastes differ, and there will be a lot of stories, that just don't fit my tastes or current mood. No reviewer can tell me that though.
I can determine with relatively good success, wether I will like a certain story by reading the first few lines. That's much faster than looking for a review. As for finding stories that I don't know of, it would be much more helpful to have a (more or less) comprehensive list of short stories published in a certain time frame, that are tagged by (sub-)genre and content, with a short summary, that can be filtered to reflect my preferences. I don't know of any such list though.
For now I've just picked a couple of online magazines that I know frequently publish stories I like. (So please go on doing that
Azimuth wrote on October 2nd, 2015 at 10:56 am:
I mean, it's *short* fiction. When I see a set of short fiction reviews or recommendations from a writer whose taste or insight I respect, I go and read the stories *before* I read the content of the reviews. It's not like a novel where you'd be wasting a whole lot of time if it turned out not to be your thing.
Greg Hullender wrote on October 7th, 2015 at 6:37 pm:
I think there's a difference between offering reviews and offering recommendations.
Most reviews seem to be written for people who already read the story and want to hear what others thought about it. But a lot of readers (especially since the Hugo Awards this year) are looking for recommendations of things to read. Sfeditorpicks does that, but only if you read through the whole twitter feed.
My husband and I are retired Microsoft developers, so on the way back from Sasquan, we decided we'd try to build a recommendation system ourselves. It's up and running, and we'd love feedback.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/10/getting-more-from-short-fiction-reviews.html
It's free and we have no plans to monetize it in any way; the goal is simply to get more people to read (and nominate) short fiction.
Christopher Garcia wrote on October 7th, 2015 at 10:11 pm:
See, I agree and disagree with ya. I totally agree that most traditional short fiction reviews are mostly pointless, but if you have a reviewer who puts themselves into the review, who gives you their experience of the story rather than an analysis or valuation of the story, that's a review that is incredibly likely to drive me to wanting to share that experience and read the piece.
IN other words, I really want reviews that aren't reviews, but do engage with an existing piece of content and chronicle the effect of it on the reviewer as a fellow human.
Chris
Uh-Huh wrote on October 9th, 2015 at 7:05 am:
Not really saying anything.
Twitter reviews is like Tumbler Politics or What your friends daily post of his lunch on facebook.
Doesn't really mean a damn.
But serious reviewers are at least worth a dime as editors tend not to hire Beleibers as critics.
Course everyone is a critic and some get very grand standing about it. But if I know the person takes reviewing seriously and has read more then just Stephen King or Neil Gaiman. Then I tend to value their opinion at least a little more then a layman.
This is something you, me and everyone does.
Natural.
Neil Clarke wrote on October 9th, 2015 at 8:20 am:
Greg: It sounds great in theory, but I'm wondering why you appear to be weighting your own reviews higher than others. (They seem to be the source of the scores used in your monthly breakdowns.) Are the future plans to do more than link to a google search for other reviews?
Chris: Can you name reviewers that do that? Should be easy for me to figure out if people are responding by reading the stories.
Uh-huh: Sure, if you trust the reviewer you'll value their opinion. No one is saying otherwise. So, who do you consider a serious reviewer? The ones I would expect to earn that title had the lowest impacts on readership...
Greg Hullender wrote on October 9th, 2015 at 10:09 am:
Neil: Have a look at the links in bold red. Those are from other reviewers. The Google search is just to catch anything we missed.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/p/2015-year-to-date.html
One problem (from the bar graph) is that, collectively, the other reviewers recommend about 40% of all the stories. That's too many stories. Our own, stricter, review system limits that to about 4%. By showing both, we give people the ability to pick reviewers they like, or even to mix and match.
Since we've only been doing this for about six weeks, we are still experimenting with different ways to organize things. And we keep learning new things too.
Azimuth wrote on October 12th, 2015 at 9:16 am:
Sure there's a difference between reviews and recommendations, but to me, coming from a respected source, they are both incentives to go read the stories if I have not yet done so. Knowing there's a review waiting at the end of it makes me want to put in that twenty or thirty minutes' reading so I can have the fun of comparing notes and seeing what interesting connections the reviewer makes.