There’s this idea that I’ve been running across a lot lately… A sort of antithesis of the ”Appeal to Authority” logical fallacy, wherein a person’s criticism of a book is discounted because they’ve “never been published,” and are therefore not qualified to judge the work of someone who has.

I’m running into it a lot in the wake of Robert Jordan’s passing, and it’s ridiculous. Certainly, there are people who are not qualified to level criticism at a book or its author(s)… You see them on Amazon all the time, complaining that a book is something it quite simply isn’t, or that the book sucks because the author wasn’t solicitous enough in some online encounter. I’ve even seen people over there complaining about a scene that just doesn’t exist in the book they’re reviewing (in at least one case, a scene that existed not only in another book, but in another book by a completely different author.) But to assume that someone isn’t qualified to hold an opinion or act as critic based on the fact that they aren’t published (or, if they are, that they aren’t as successful as the author in question) is a straw man. As for the David Argument of “4 million Chinese people can’t be wrong,” well… yeah, they can. As much as I argue that some things are actually successful because they are good, it’s never a sure bet that something is good simply because it’s successful.

I just don’t buy that you have to be a writer (or a particularly successful writer) to recognize when something just doesn’t work. At some point, even a writer has to become a reader.