Integrity is so important. It is the value of emphasis that the master teacher is reinforcing with my kids in tae kwon do. Truthfulness, along with kindness, are the things that we want them to know we value. And it’s also something we work hard to model, both in our lives and in the kinds of reviews we write and publish.

There are a lot of review sites that will only publish positive reviews. If the reviewer doesn’t like the book he doesn’t write the review. That’s okay, everyone has a different philosophy, but here we think that to serve you the best you ought to know what isn’t worth your time or money as well as what is so astonishing that it’s worth it to pay the extra money. We try to be professional and tell you what we think, but without being nasty. There are librarians who write reviews for us, and people who truly love the genre, and we support them in their views. It’s hard to give out a negative review, especially a respectful one, and I so respect those of our reviewers who are honest when it comes to writing a difficult review (sometimes those reviews pay off in unexpected ways– like a writer revising his book, or a reader who really appreciated the review).

I know there are a lot of fake reviews out there– reviews that rave about how great a book is, or are really negative about one, that are with cynical intent, or even to drive (or decrease) sales. It saddens me that there are so many, because the way most books end up in someone’s hands is when someone they trust recommends the book to them. But with so many fake reviews, who can you trust? If I only bought the books the book critic at the Wall Street Journal recommended I’d end up frustrated because her tastes are different from mine… but at least I can trust her to give her honest opinion. I’d like to be able to trust that the opinions I see in reviews are genuine, too, since they’re more likely to live on the same planet with me.

But even if a review isn’t written with integrity, and the number of these that aren’t is expected to increase, Digital Book World reports that reviewers who are compensated for writing positive (or negative) reviews may be committing a crime. Incentives to write positive paid reviews are expected to increase as companies attempt to increase their market share, but every time someone writes a paid review he or she deprives the rest of us from making an informed choice.

We don’t take compensation here. Although we are sent review copies, anyone who contacts us ought to know that sending us a book doesn’t guarantee them a positive review. But we write honest reviews. You can count on that.