Quick Review Honesty Note
I’ve said I’m going to review every new book I get on Amazon. Just as a point of fact, I’ve got two books on the Kinks today, actually from Amazon, but I won’t be reviewing them – they both would be in competition with the book I’m doing, and so I can’t give a fair, unbiased review.
I respect your decision and disagree with it, but only because I think ‘fair and unbiased’ is a wild goose – or a more fitting metaphor I can’t recall right now. I think you are perfectly capable of being honest and frank with your opinions and assessing the books on their worth.
In fact, as someone who will have a Kinks book in his bibliography, your review has weight. Not to mention that a good review from you might lead to people finding you from the book’s page. Single subject books aren’t in competition with each other any more than fiction books in the same genre: they supplement each other, and someone who likes reading books about the Kinks will almost certainly read more than one. All non-fiction books worth reading have recommendations for other books on the same subject.
If you would be writing a poor review, and therefore don’t think you can write a review that will be *taken* as fair and unbiased, that’s a different matter.
I actually agree about the reality here, but the perception would be (and I’ve seen a *lot* of people say this about writers who’ve left reviews of other books) that I was either trying to use those two books as promotion for my own, or conversely that I was trying to sabotage their sales to bump mine up. No matter what reviews I give, it *will* reflect badly on me, sadly.