There's a conversation going around on Threads again about whether authors should publicly review books once they join the industry. The conventional wisdom seems to be no. Once you are an author, other authors are your colleagues. Critiquing their work, especially negatively, is seen as a threat to your relationships, your opportunities, and even your career.

I have been thinking about this a lot, and I don't just mean over the fourteen years I have spent writing online. Recently. When I launched Mareas and officially became a publisher, these questions about honesty, responsibility to my audience, and capturing my authentic voice came into even sharper focus. My position in the industry has changed, yes, and somehow, I have to reconcile that with the fact that my instincts about what it means to engage with books have not.

And here's where I land: I think it's dangerous when we treat a critique of a work as a personal attack on the author. It shrinks what reviews are supposed to be. Reviews are part of a broader conversation with readers and with culture itself, not personal feuds between writers and readers. Treating author reviews as a black mark against them frames reviews as inherently combative rather than critical or curious.

Criticism, after all, has always been part of the craft. For me, reviewing has been essential to how I got here. It sharpened my editorial eye and made me a more careful reader. It helped me develop the ability to articulate why something worked or didn't. Thinking out loud about structure, voice, pacing, and representation, and learning how to translate my experience into a review, made me a better reader, a better writer, and ultimately gave me the confidence to know I could do this work.

Generations of writers—from Pauline Kael, to Paul Schrader, to Zadie Smith—treated criticism as a serious artistic practice, one that fed their own creative work. Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and James Baldwin all openly critiqued their peers. Now, I know we cannot all be Zadie Smith or James Baldwin, but my point is that the idea that authors should never publicly review other authors is relatively new and, I'd argue, mostly Anglo-American. It feels reflective of social-political realms that are pushing toxic positivity, decreased media literacy, and a devaluing of expertise. Who better to critique art than those involved in making it?

When we decide that the safest move is to stay silent, the priority is not community; it is industry. We are protecting power. We are protecting the comfort of those who already have access, and we are asking those who want access to prove that they will never make anyone uncomfortable. And, as always, the burden of that falls unevenly. Writers of color, disabled writers, queer writers—anyone already perceived as "too aggressive" or "too opinionated"—are the ones who pay the highest price.

When honesty itself becomes a liability, we lose something vital. We lose the opportunity for genuine dialogue about what our culture produces, what it celebrates, and what it overlooks. We lose the chance to sharpen our understanding of craft, of story, and of each other.

And it is not a coincidence whose voices get stripped away first under these expectations of "professionalism." Marginalized reviewers are often the ones identifying harm and naming problems in the work that others would rather ignore. I cannot count the number of times someone has asked me, "Did you know this book had issues with racism?" and I am left thinking, I did know. I said so. I said so early and publicly when it still felt risky to do it.

Professionalism, as it is often used, is a tool to silence, not to uplift. It costs us the kind of necessary, uncomfortable conversations that actually move literature forward.

At the same time, I think it matters how we review. Transparency matters. If you are reviewing a book by someone you know, someone you have a professional connection to, you can say that. The problem is not criticism itself; it is the erasure of context. Transparency strengthens reviews. It builds trust with readers, and it models good practice for others coming up behind you.

(Perhaps this is something else we are losing in increasingly fascist environments: the expectation that disclosure and honesty are not just niceties, but essential parts of public trust. We could once, with more confidence, look to journalism as a model for how to disclose conflicts of interest, how to make our relationships visible without erasing our ability to speak.)

It also matters to focus on the work, not the person. Talk about what is on the page: the choices the text makes, the patterns it repeats, the assumptions it holds. Avoid speculating about the author's intentions or character. Don't tag authors in negative reviews. That boundary protects both the reviewer and the author. It keeps the conversation rooted in the work, where it belongs.

I built my audience by being honest. People found me, trusted me, and continue to support me because I have always said what I actually think about the books I read. Stopping now, simply because my role has shifted, would feel like betraying the very foundation of what brought me here in the first place.

Of course, it is awkward sometimes. I have stood in rooms with authors whose books I gave one-star. And that has likely already cost me certain opportunities. But if a door closes because I approached books with honesty and respect, then it probably was not a door that would have sustained me or my work in the long run.

I am not naive. It is easier to say all of this when you feel secure. It is harder when you have, say, been unemployed for eight months, and every potential opportunity feels heavy with stakes, just like the idea of every imagined lost opportunity feels like a tightening noose. (🙋🏽‍♀️) I am aware of the privilege it takes to make decisions based on principle rather than necessity. Not everyone gets to do that all the time. I might not always get to do that either.

To that end, the answer to whether you "should" publicly review books depends a lot on the kind of question you are actually asking. If you are asking how to maximize your opportunities, minimize awkwardness, and stay in good standing, the safest advice will always be to keep silent. But if you are asking about your own boundaries, your relationship to your voice, and the kind of career you want to build long-term, the answer might look very different. And there's no real shame in admitting either thing. We all curate our online personas because of ideas of professionalism in this industry or others. 

At least, that is where I am falling, even in the face of people who have already criticized Bindery for placing influencers inside the industry by design. And I cannot emphasize this enough, this particular criticism is almost always directed most loudly at the imprints run by people of color.

It is also worth saying that there is reputational risk in being honest, but there is reputational upside, too. Authenticity builds trust, and that trust cannot be manufactured later. If someone demands uncritical positivity as a condition for working with you, that relationship was probably brittle to begin with.

Perhaps the point is that all of our relationships to traditional publishing are brittle indeed.

And not for nothing, but when reviews go wrong, it is usually because of bad-faith behavior, not because of the critique itself. Look at Cait Corrain's fake one-star spree, which cost her a book contract. Or when Molly X. Chang conflated one-star reviews with "review-bombing" of her work. Look at Goodreads review-bombing campaigns that now get flagged for manipulation. The issue is dishonesty, not disagreement.

I want to believe there is space in publishing for people who engage critically and passionately with books, even from within the industry. Some say you cannot do both. Maybe they are right. But for now, I am going to keep trying.

Thank you for being here to support that effort.

♥️

Marines

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