The Web has greatly increased the number of book reviewers available these days, both for ebooks and print books. And that’s all to the good. Given the number of books being published, it’s always helpful to have lots of people posting their own reactions to the latest books available, particularly if those books may appeal to a specialized audience who might not hear about them otherwise.

Some of these review sites present straightforward reviews, the kind of thing you’d find in Entertainment Weekly or Time or The New Yorker, assuming those magazines actually deigned to review romances. But there are also some sites that are largely the creatures of the Web, the ones I think of as snark sites. The reviewers on these sites do like some books, but it’s not the positive reviews that their readers look for. Instead, it’s the negative reviews, the books that the reviewers hate, that get the most hits. There’s something about seeing somebody eviscerated in a few well-phrased paragraphs that really appeals to a lot of readers.

Predictably, most authors hate these sites. At RomCon last summer, some authors argued that reviewers owed authors at least some respect for the fact that they’d actually finished a book and gotten it published, which is, granted, more than a lot of the reviewers have done. While I can sympathize with this point of view, I don’t necessarily share it. Reviewers don’t really owe us anything. Much as the snarky reviews hurt (and having been on the receiving end of a couple, I can testify that they do, in fact, hurt a lot), reviewers have an absolute right to say whatever they want.

Above and beyond this right, however, I actually do understand some of the impulse behind snarky reviews because I’ve felt something similar. As I’ve said before, I once was on the faculty of Enormous State University in South Texas. I started teaching in the English department, and then moved into Communication. In this capacity, I read more papers than I want to remember—thousands, possibly tens of thousands. Early in my career I took workshops about writing comments on student papers, and I did my best to follow them. Start with something supportive. Concentrate on one or two problems the student can work with rather than trying to list everything on particularly hapless papers. Try to couch suggestions in positive language.

As I say, I did this for many years. And with many of the hapless papers, I could offer something helpful because I could see that they students were trying, albeit not getting very far. But the longer I taught, the more I lost patience with some of the papers. Some students clearly hadn’t spent any time on their writing, and the results were sloppy and often well-nigh unreadable. Sometimes students went on making the same mistakes over and over, not because they couldn’t recognize them but because they couldn’t be bothered to do anything about them. Some students simply plagiarized something from the Web. These students pissed me off, and I found it increasingly difficult to write helpful, supportive comments on their papers. I longed, in fact, to tell them precisely what I thought—that they were wasting my time and their money in blowing off assignments. That other people wanted their seats in the class and that they might profit by seeing what awaited them in the “real world” if they continued to screw up. I wanted to write comments on their papers that were decidedly snarky.

Although some snarky reviews may be written just because the reviewer knows snark is popular, some may come from a similar impulse. The reviewer was hoping for something good and instead got something that didn’t meet her expectations. The author has wasted the reviewer’s time and the reviewer is, consequently, pissed.

Now the author may legitimately reply that she did the best she could, and that she (and her editor) believed the book was actually pretty good by the time it was published. But the reviewer may well be operating from the same set of feelings I had on reading the third plagiarized paper in a row. Maybe she’s spouting off because she expected, and wanted, a lot more.

In romance terms, you can think of her as a disappointed suitor. And as romance writers, we all know what that leads to!