BradfordFerguson said:
REVIEWING OVER-RATED
1) Even if you get a hardcopy of the product, if you count all the time you spend reading the product and writing the review, it doesn't even pay for itself equal to minimum wage.
Ya, that's why I ask for voulenteers. People shouldn't expect it to pay for iteslef. Its giving back to the community and having fun writing reviews.
2) If you get on a publisher's list and half the books they send you are mediocre, it's not worth it. Who wants to write a 1000-1500 word review about something they thought was "just OK"?
This doesn't bother me. You get the good and the bad, as a reviewer you should realize this going into it. So, sure I love it when I get things that I love but I know that to balance that out I have to get things I'm not going to want to write about.
3) Some publishers are so enwrapt with their product that they freak out when you write a mediocre review, or give them four stars instead of five stars. So you, the reviewer, spent all this time reading the book, carefully writing a review, then the publisher sends you an e-mail complaining about the review.
I've never had this happen to me personally. Obvious, its happened to others but I guess I have lucked out. Actually, I hear very little from publishers. I get the occasionally thank you but for the most part it seems they just don't respond to reviews.
4) Some publishers who make mediocre stuff (there are companies that set the d20 on fire, and there are those that don't) will accuse you of being biased against their product if you routinely don't give them the highest score.
Again, never seen this happen with my reviews.
5) Even established reviewers (and Joe has admitted to this) can get over their heads and over-commit to doing reviews. I've done this in the past where I over-commit when life is very boring and then when things pick up, I gotta break some commitments. It can also be over-whelming after a gaming convention: you get home, you're tired, you're bummed the convention is over, you gotta catch up with real life, and you got a half-dozen things to review.
Ya, this happens to me. I try to be honest about it and tell the publishers that I'm not going to be writing reviews on everything I get. I try to review a product from each publisher I get, just not review everything a single publisher sends me. Its one of the reasons I started this PDF Review project.
6) Like Berandor said, buying instead of receiving review copies is preferable. You are buying product you are definitely interested in and you don't have to do through mental hoops of "If I was into underwater adventures, would this be a good product?" As a reviewer, if you are reviewing something that isn't in your preferred genre, it can be a tough task.
Agreed, one of the reasons I ask people what is there perfered genre so I can hopefully get them something they are a bit more interested in. The buying and reviewing works well for the print side, but for PDFs few people buy and review them it seems.
PDF REVIEWS
1) I think onsite reviews may be the most effective. If you think about it, someone is either going to buy one product in specific (or a line after it's been more fleshed out) or they are going to browse. PDF products are cheap (unless you are buying from some companies on DriveThruRPG), and your time is worth money, so people aren't going to spend much time investigating the PDF they are gonna buy unless it costs $10 or more. So, if I'm at RPGNow.com, I can check out the comments of others who bought the product.
The comment section there is nice, but you have to buy to comment. But the comments for the most part are never reviews and frankly, few are informative. I like the publishers that link to reviews, but I don't know how helpful that really is.
2) It's harder to get people to do PDF reviews because they aren't actually receiving the product. They gotta either pay to print it, or they gotta strain their eyes as they read it from a computer monitor.
Very true, excepot the strain eyes thing. I have terrible vision, but PDFs allow me to increase the font size so I can easily read it all. I like PDFs becasue of that.
THAT ALL SAID
1) Kudos to Crothian and other PDF reviewers. They deserve accolades for their service of informing the RPG community. Doing reviews is a pretty thankless job, but it's satisfying as a reviewer to know that people read the reviews and then use them to help make buying decisions for their games.
Thanks, I do what I can and I constantly try to think of ways to get reviews going. I like reviews, I think other people do too. Its just hard to find people to do them at times, so I felt I needed to give everyone a lpush.
2) Super-long reviews suck. When I was at Silven Crossroads and later producing D20 Filtered, I did my best to keep reviews to around 10 words per page count, so if the product was 256 pages, then the review would be under 2560 words. At Silven, I had a pretty big blowup with a reviewer who insisted on writing a 7000-word review of Unearthed Arcana, and the person above me overruled me.
Some people like long reviews, and I think people should write as long as they feel the review needs to be. We aren't a newspaper or magazine that only has so much column space.
, I have found I don't have the time I would like. In the future, my plan is to review one thing a week. That will give me plenty of time to create a quality review, which is what every item deserves.
