Yes, back in 2003. One of our reviewers followed my guidelines and said what she liked about a certain book and what she did not like about it. In her opinion the author had done a “writerly trick” at the end of the book and just ruined it for her. Up to that point, she enjoyed it quite a bit, but she could not recommend the book because of this flaw. The book was published by a small independent and they needed our review to generate some publicity. Naturally, they were appalled when they saw what was posted. I had not read the book myself and felt bit helpless as I considered what to do — stick up for my reviewer or persuade her to soften her review. When I looked around at other reviews, we seemed to be the only site to pick up on this flaw. But then, there were only a few reviews and those sites were smaller than ours with more fluffy reviews. I had more discussion with the reviewer to just to make sure she wasn’t being a sloppy reader. Despite thinking she was probably right in her assessment, I still decided to pull the review and post just the excerpt instead. Without reading the book myself, I didn’t think I should keep the review posted. And since the book didn’t interest me enough to read it, I figured taking the review down was the moral answer to the dilemma.

Since the reviewer involved in this incident has just published her first book, I’m tempted to revisit this issue with her and see what she now thinks about how I handled this situation.

That incident helped me solidify my rules for bad reviews. And I haven’t had anything as strong or nasty as that incident since.

Though I did have one author who decided her self-published book was terrible and asked me to remove any mention of the book because she didn’t want to be associated with it. It was too bad because the book wasn’t all that bad.

I also had one author ask me to cut words out of a review that I had written because he felt that I had given away too much of the story. I did change it but I don’t think I made the right decision because I do not think that I gave away too much. But I was “young” then. Now I would simply tell him that no one remembers the review itself – only whether or not the book sounded interesting enough to read the book and I would have left my review alone.

Kooky reader comments is another thing …. Lots of these over the years usually threatening to boycott the site for one reason or the other.