Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Gimme Shelter“ by The Rolling Stones

Many of you have probably read the article I posted earlier on the reviewing system at Amazon.com. In the article I commented that I thought Midwest Review’s policies of awarding 5 star reviews to every author was damaging the review system. A reader who had received a five star review forwarded a link to Jim Cox, managing editor at Midwest Book Review, who then sent an e-mail that tried to explain the reasons for some of his policies.

I had a few questions of my own so I seized the opportunity to interview him.

Here is the interview in its entirely with my comments at the bottom.

Questions:

1. You receive 2000 book/month. Are all the books read? How do your in-house reviewers decide which books get a positive recommendation? How is a book’s intended audience determined?

When books arrive each day, Monday through Saturday, our mailroom guy takes them out of their respective bags, boxes, and packages, puts the accompanying paperwork with them, then stacks them all on my desk. Then I sit down and do a kind of literary triage — meaning that I personally screen them and put them into one of three stacks:

Stack 1: Automatic rejection. This can be for such reasons as they submitted a title that is a galley or uncorrected proof — and we review finished, published copies only. The book features a substandard cover that would make it non-competitive with others of its genre or category as encountered on a bookstore or library shelf. The type is too small for its intended readership. A cursory inspection turns up typos or flagrant errors of grammar. The book arrived without an accompanying cover letter and/or publicity release.

Stack 2: Automatic acceptance. This is usually because I’ve got a reviewer who specializes in the genre or category the book represents. The book is especially unusual, well-made, or otherwise distinctive. The book is in a very popular genre such as a cookbook, an art book, or a significant social issue currently in the news.

Stack 3: Possible acceptance. The book arrives accompanied by the appropriate paperwork, passes muster in its physical appearance, and I’m hopeful that it will be accepted for a review assignment by one of our reviewers sometime in the next 14 to 16 weeks. This is, by far, the largest stack to come out of the daily screening process.

2. What happens if your volunteer disagrees with the in-house reviewer? Is their review discarded?

All reviews by our volunteer and freelance reviewers are run regardless of whether they give a positive or a negative recommendation so long as they coherently explain to the reader the basis for their opinion. Occasionally we will have two or more reviews on the same title. I run them all on the basis that each reviewer brings to their review of that same title differing life experiences, skills, abilities, and perspectives.

3. Midwest Book Review’s Wikipedia article was recently changed from

Your site claims you do not accept compensation for reviews, but because of the above, I would like to ask you straight out. Do you accept any donations or compensation at all from authors or publishers or any other agent at any point in the review process?

We do not permit authors, publishers, or publicists to contribute financially to the Midwest Book Review in order to be able to avoid any conflict of interest issues. We do permit anyone to donate postage stamps to the Midwest Book Review if they want to express their appreciation or simply say ‘thank you’ for what we try to accomplish in behalf of the small press community. Our board of directors determined that postage stamp donations would not constitute an inappropriate means of expressing support for the Midwest Book Review’s three part mission statement to promote literacy, library usage, and small press publishing.

4. Why are so many of your reviews similar to the Editorial Descriptions? Many of Midwest Book Review’s reviews could be written without having read the book. Is there any vetting or oversight of your volunteers?

The reviews turned in by the reviewers range from brief blurbs to multi-page essays. We provide reviewers with a ‘Reviewer’s Guideline’ (you can find it in the ‘Advice for Publisher’ archive that is on the Midwest Book Review website at http://www.midwestbookreview.com). Basically a good review provides an accuratge summary description of the book’s content followed by a coherent recommendation with respect to it’s intended readership. Often that summary description can be drawn from the publicity release in combination with the book’s contents.

5. Please elaborate on why you believe Amazon’s rating system is flawed.

This has long been a pet peeve of mine because it is so arbitrary. One’ person’s 3 is another person’s 4, and a third person’s 2. There are no standard definitions of what these numbers should mean or stand for. I’d like to see them done away with altogether — but Amazon won’t permit the posting of any review unless it is given a number in their 1 through 5 rating system.

So I instructed our webmaster (who does all the posting for reviews generated ‘in-house’ by the Midwest Book Review editorial staff) to use 5 if the book was given a positive recommendation.

The theory is that for a book to make it all the way through the Midwest Book Review process from its initial screening, through it’s being accepted for a review assignment, to the review being completed and published in one or more of our monthly book review publications, it merited the highest recommendation available under the Amazon rating system. Inferior books, flawed books, substandard books are assumed to have been weeded out and never made it to the ‘finish line’ of publication in one of our book review magazines.

This applies only to our ‘in-house’ reviews. The reviews turned in by the freelance reviewers and volunteers are their property. Only they have the right to decide whether or not to post their reviews on Amazon. They (and only they) have the right to decide what rating number to assign to those reviews they decide to post on Amazon.

For example, one of the Midwest Book Review’s most prolific freelance reviewers is Harriet Klausner. She is also one of the most prolific reviewers on Amazon.com — and she does not uniformly ward 5’s to the reviews she writes and posts.

Then consider the phenomena of differing opinions! One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Books I read and disliked as a teenager in high school literature classes became books I appreciated when re-read as an adult some thirty or more years later.

The moral of this story is that while you should make yourself open to the opinions of others, ultimately it’s your own views, opinions, judgements, and values that should determine your choices in books as in life.

6. Why do all of the books you rate merit a 5 star rating? Surely each of the 32,000 books you’ve rated cannot be flawless. Why are there no 4.5 ratings?

See the above response to Question 5.

I sincerely thank you for your time.

It’s my pleasure. I always enjoy discussing what we do here at the Midwest Book Review. In many ways we are so unique as to be something of an anomaly in the publishing industry. We’ve been written up (and uniformly positively) by some 22 ‘how to’ books over the past 30 years. As experienced and organized as we are, there is always something new to be learned, something that we could do better, something previously overlooked and needs to be paid attention to.

Anytime an author, a publisher, or a reviewer deems themselves to be above critique and criticism, that’s when that author, publisher, or reviewer will begin to atrophy and eventually make themselves obsolete among their peers and with the public.

I’m going to include this Q&A response in my monthly column the “Jim Cox Report” which I write for the benefit of the small press community. It is also archived on the Midwest Book Review website

..You have my complete permission to include my comments in your own blog and anywhere else you feel would be appropriate.

First, let me say that Mr. Cox responded to me in one day. The guy is obviously a class act. He also reacted professionally to my question about accepting payments. Since the typical response from scammers is defensive outrage, I’m inclined to believe Mr. Cox despite the Wikipedia article. His goal of bringing attention to self-published and small press books is laudible.

That said, I disagree with some of his policies. If you look closely, you can see that Mr. Cox has instructed his webmaster to award a book 5 stars if it is a “finished, published copy”, if it has a nice cover, the type is large, a “cursory inspection” reveals few typos, and if the submission is accompanied by a cover letter. That’s why all of his reviews get 5 stars. These kinds of review mislead Amazon’s clients since there is no way they can know this in advance. They merely see that Midwest looks professional and has given the book a five star review.

He claims that he does this as a kind of protest against Amazon’s “arbitrary” rating system. “One’ person’s 3 is another person’s 4, and a third person’s 2” he says. I contend that it is a professional reviewer’s job not to tell you if they liked the book, it’s to say if, in their professional opinion, you will like the book. This is why they’re paid the big bucks. You read a review because you trust the reviewer’s opinion. Reviewers don’t have to precisely say what YOU would rate it, they have to say what their overall readership will think of it. Rating every book a 5 out of 5 betrays this principle.

I also believe that it is Mr. Cox’s responsibility to have a member of his staff vet reviews before attaching his name to it. If a reviewer merely rephrases what is contained in the Editorial Description, A) they may not have actually read the book, and B) the reader of the review gains nothing. What we, as readers, want is to be able to form an opinion based on a knowledgable, in-depth review that talks about plot, characterization, theme, and writing style. Rephrasing the book jacket doesn’t help us.

Mr. Cox, please consider adding some oversight to your reviewers. A lot of people depend on your opinions to guide their purchases. Please don’t let them down.

EDIT: Mr. Cox responded in the comments. I have to say, I’m a convert. It’s a pleasure dealing with someone so open and professional.