Excerpted from the Amazon customer reviews of a bestselling erotic romance:

"5 stars--Finely crafted, well rounded characters, exciting battle scenes, erotic love scenes, and a plot that keeps you wanting more."
"1 star--This book was basically sex scenes with a very loose storyline linking the sexual encounters together. The characters were poorly developed and not particularly likeable."

Okay, we all know literary criticism is NOT an objective sport. Each of us has read at least one book and recommended it to someone else who ended up hating it. And we've certainly each been surprised from time to time that a particular book got an award, or another book was overlooked.

But there's nothing quite so confusing as reading the customer reviews of erotic romances.

I thought I'd entertain myself by playing this quirky little game. I went to Amazon and did a search on "erotic romance" and sorted by "bestselling." Then I looked over the reviews of the top ten books. Now granted, I know the reading experience is largely one of taste, but I didn't expect to find such dramatic swings in commentary, particularly for well-respected authors. Here's another example from two reviews for the same title:

"5 stars: I consumed this book like a five-star dinner. All I can say is 'wow.'"
"1 star: It gets to the point I'm rolling my eyes every other page by the end I had started to skim just to finish the damn thing cause I so hated it."

These books were all big name bestsellers, from major publishers, with overall good ratings. And yet nearly all of them had a few absolutely scathingly negative reviews. Not just the sort of reviews in which a person says the book was not their thing, oh no--reviews that claimed the writing was truly bad. I would read one commentary that made me wonder how this book found a publisher at all, much less became a top ten seller, only to discover the next reader adored it. Sort of like these excerpts of reviews for another title:

"5 stars--I want to keep re-reading the book until the pages fall out."
"1 star--It felt like being catapulted into a bad parody of an x-rated movie."

Fascinating. Well, so far I have avoided getting a reviewer's rating of less than 3 stars, and that now strikes me as incredible luck that is surely about to run out. Nevertheless, I have my own example of this contradictory opinion problem: I have always been perplexed when I look at my book Soulful Sex on Fictionwise. Right next to the red letters that note it was an Eppie Award Finalist, are the reader ratings of 2 Good, 3 Okay, and 1 Poor. However, in view of what I found on Amazon this lack of consensus seems unremarkable and I feel lucky. I mean, those top selling Amazon books are the work of authors who track their popularity on the New York Times Bestseller List. And their authors are looking at stuff like this:

"5 stars--Sexy, sneaky, witty and just plain funny. It's a book worth finding."
right next to
"1 star--so contrived I could not even stand to continue."

So why should a new author like me expect any less contradictory treatment for her books? I guess no erotica author can, not even the very best of them...get this: Apparently the book Romantic Times BOOKclub chose as Best Erotic Romance of 2005 has Amazon reader reviews so varied that 40% of them are at least partly negative. Among the adjectives used for this prizewinning bestseller were "awful," "uninteresting," "disappointing," "offputting," "not erotic," "offensive," "tasteless" and "crude." Please understand I'm not commenting on this book in any way myself--I haven't read it. And I realize the book to which RT gave this honor to is not going to be every reader's favorite any more than "Brokeback Mountain" is going to be everyone's favorite movie of the year. But still...how weird, hey?

So, just as I was about to conclude that there must be something about this genre that inspires mass confusion (something my readers know I've considered before, LOL), I decided to check one more thing.

I looked up the reader reviews for Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I found among the comments:

"A plotless, boring, meandering, pretentious book"
"Shame on Pulitzer! A mediocre short story at best."
"There's no story and it just goes on…"
"Thoroughly tedious and highly over-rated"
"Slow, fairly plot-less and uninspiring"

A third of the reviews were at least in part negative! There were nine 1 star ratings! Well. I guess that just goes to show you, variety is the spice of life, it takes all kinds to make a world, etc., etc.

In the end, regardless of the genre in which you write, perhaps all an author can do is apply herself diligently to doing the best quality work she can. And let the chips--er--stars fall where they may.

Diana Laurence is the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies published by Living Beyond Reality Press (www.livingbeyondreality.com). Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com, and read her blog at www.eroticawithsoul.blogspot.com. Download her free fiction from the LBR Press READ FREE Project at www.livingbeyondreality.com/readfree.html.