How we have steadily devalued the book review
As an offer it sounded almost too good to be true.
Last month I got a message that said the upcoming issue of De Mode magazine wanted to feature my book in The 10 Best Books of the Year 2025: April Edition.
I had never heard of De Mode. Its Instagram page suggested a glossy fashion magazine. Whether that page was the real De Mode magazine or an impostor was unclear to me. One should not look a gift horse in the mouth, but it turned out it wasn't exactly a gift horse. My promised A4-size two full-page coverage featuring an exclusive interview and posts on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn would cost ₹5,900 (including GST). For less than ₹6,000, I could proclaim myself one of the 10 best books of the year.
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There was one other small problem. They didn't seem to know or care that I didn't actually have a book out in 2025. The world of book promotions clearly believes in magical realism.
This month I got another offer, this time for NY Weekly Magazine. A PR agency contacted me to ask if I would like to be featured in NY Weekly Magazine on the list of 'Top 20 Female Leaders to Look Out For In 2025". At the end of that tempting offer it added a postscript—*Charges Applicable.
It made me sad. If I was a woman leader who had a book out I could have been on both lists for a modest sum.
I do have a book to my name. But it's a decade old. Yet every week or so someone still offers to review the book. One offer even came from a page with 1 million followers.
Another book reviewer messaged me to say, 'I write and also review books to promote authors and bring them new readers." She sent me a menu card of promotion options: ₹700 for Instagram, ₹300 for Amazon and Goodreads, ₹500 for LinkedIn (30,000+ connections), ₹400 for Facebook (60,000 likes) and ₹200 for X (11,000+ followers). It all sounded very professional but I asked my would-be reviewer whether she knew what book I had written.
Whichever one you would want to promote, she replied.
Did you look up my book? I asked. She said, 'It's called Don't Let Him Know. It's in your (Instagram) bio." That was a duh moment for me. 1 point to book reviewer, 0 points to me.
Then she added generously, 'I read the blurb and I'll read the book if you want me to review it." When I said it was rather old, she just sent me a heart emoji. It made me feel less crushed. It was as if in the world of social media reviewers, a book never ceases to be relevant.
Unlike me, my friend Himanjali Sankar does have a new book out. The Burning hit the stands this year. If I get a trickle of offers, she gets a barrage of offers for book reviews as well feature opportunities in important-sounding publications. For a mere ₹299 she can get a bumper deal, which includes an unboxing video, Amazon and Goodreads reviews, Instagram stories with reading updates alongside an actual review on Instagram. That sounds like a much better bargain than what I've been getting. Another bookstagrammer promises 'authentic book reviews and feedback." 'Use of the word authentic is a good touch," Sankar admits though she still chose not to avail of the kind offer.
At first I didn't know what to be more aghast about—this explosion of paid 'authentic" reviews or those who paid for them. To be honest, I feel a little sorry for these reviewers. One of them had two books to her credit. Self-published or not, that was double my literary output. It made me sad that someone who wanted to be a writer was willing to write little paid Goodreads reviews for strangers she found on the internet. Every reviewer should be paid for their work but by an outlet that publishes it, not by the author. And I wonder what self-worth an author feels when they tell the world they are one of the 25 best books of the year, knowing full well the price tag for that honour.
The truth is we have steadily devalued the book review. Sometimes with good reason. The world of Indian literary reviews can be incestuous and complicated, writers reviewing each other, or worse wannabe writers reviewing writers they hope will one day blurb them. A good review is suspected of being writers scratching each other's backs. A bad review feels like vendetta to avenge some old feud.
As writer and critic Nilanjana Roy wryly observes in a 2010 blogpost, 'It turns into a kind of Indian joint family system after a while, where everybody knows why Cousin x has a blood feud on with Maasi y." Newspapers and magazines have ever-shrinking space for book reviews and India does not have magazines with the authority of The Paris Review or NYRB devoted to literary criticism. But she adds there are still good reviewers in India, names five and then sheepishly admits 'all of them are friends". In her defence, she writes, they became friends through their work—'the bylines came before the coffees and the lunches." But now many reviewers want to come to literary festivals to be friends with the very writers they are reviewing, drink coffee with them and have lunch. Sometimes they excitedly share screenshots of the author they reviewed sharing their review.
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All of that has led to us putting greater stock in the authentic user review whether it's for a book, a restaurant or a plumber. That is supposed to be the unvarnished reviewer, the one who can truly speak her mind. Except as my Instagram requests show, authenticity is even easier (and cheaper) to fake. When Hillary Clinton's campaign memoir came out, there were so many one-star reviews, Amazon got suspicious and deleted hundreds of them. I am constantly getting WhatsApp calls promising me ₹200 every time I review some YouTube video.
But I was wrong to think this was a problem of our social media-driven world. According to The New Yorker, Walt Whitman's first book of poetry, Leaves of Grass (1855), got panned in initial reviews as 'tedious" and 'intensely vulgar, nay, absolutely beastly". One reviewer refused to tell readers where they could buy it. An incensed Whitman apparently started writing anonymous rave reviews of his own work, opening one with the full-throated 'An American bard at last!"
Now thanks to the online world, this has assumed industrial scale. In 2012, crime writer R. J. Ellory was accused of not just gushing over his own work under a pseudonym but posting negative reviews of others' work. He called it a 'lapse of judgement." Best-selling author Johann Hari in 2011 admitted to maliciously amending the Wikipedia pages for journalists he disliked while lavishing praise on his own page. There are even terms for these practices now—sock puppeting and review brushing.
But people are not fools. They can usually smell a rat. Especially if I suddenly showed up on the list of top 20 female leaders to look out for in 2025. Although the world seems to run on sycophancy and yes-men, some of us still appreciate true honesty. Years ago I walked into a lit fest with a reviewer friend. We noticed one of the other authors, and my friend said with some alarm that he had given X's book a rather harsh review. I hope X does not remember, he said. If X did, X didn't let on. But I am sure X did. Writers often forget good reviews, but we remember every word of a vicious one. However, we all got along splendidly. Months later, I discovered X and the reviewer had become a couple.
Sometimes honest reviews, it seems, can lead to happy endings.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.
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