I thought it best to put together a few notes about how I go about making my short fiction and book recommendations, especially as I will treat them a little different on social media. Read on for what we’ll call my current policies on how I go about making recommendations.

First, though I may have used different language in posts made some years ago, I call what I do making recommendations, not reviews. You can call it whatever you want, but I wanted to be clear that I’m only interested in writing about stories I enjoyed and why I enjoyed them. Yes, I do read things I end up not liking, sometimes quite strongly, but I have no interest in spending my time publicly cutting down an author’s work. I want to share what I love.

Second, when I make short fiction recommendations I will usually tag the authors and publishers of those pieces on Twitter. I won’t do that with book recommendations. Why? Well, many authors of books don’t want to see any reviews of their work. Whereas, in my experience, many short fiction authors don’t mind at all. Part of that might be because short fiction gets so much less attention, part of it might be because writing a book is a sometimes grueling process that can take years, and that is rarely true for short stories. There is a lot more of oneself wrapped up in a novel and it can be far, far more important to one’s career than any single story. The emotions around it are quite likely to be far more intense.

That said: if there are short fiction authors I have tagged in the past or tag in the future who would rather I never do that again when posting short fiction recommendations I will make sure to respect that.

Conversely, despite the fact that I choose not to tag an author on social media with a book recommendation (and would prefer that third parties don’t either for the reasons stated above) I have no problem at all with authors who find my recommendations of their books and want to share them or talk about them or comment on them or correct them. Many people say authors should never engage with reviewers. Reviews are for readers they say. I am explicitly waving that convention for any recommendations I make. I understand why the convention exists but there are several ways in which I don’t agree with it. SO: authors, you are welcome to talk or about my recommendations to me or anyone else, publicly, or not, to your hearts’ desire. As stated above I only plan on writing about works I enjoy and think people should pick up and read themselves, so I suspect most of the landmines that comes with negative reviews won’t exist here anyway.

Finally, I tend to try and stay away from spoilers and try to highlight when I’m going to cross into particularly heavy spoilers in talking about a recommendation, but the safest bet is to always assume there may be spoilers in any recommendation.