We in the blogging community often work quite a bit more closely with authors than, say, a reviewer for a national newspaper or bigger book reviewing website.  One of the consequences of that is we develop pretty good working relationships with authors and sometimes those develop into friendships (insomuch as one can be friends with someone purely online).  But that also brings up a big ethical question: How do these relationships affect our reviews?  Should book reviewers befriend authors and review their books?

No review is completely objective, obviously.  Your own experiences and likes and dislikes go into your perception of a book and the writing of the review.  But being friends with an author can make writing a review a little harder so should bloggers either a) not befriend authors at all or b) not review books by their friends.

Personally I consider myself friends with some of the authors I’ve reviewed here on my blog and I still reviewed their books anyway.  (This is a limited number because while I’m friends with about 5 authors most of my relationships with authors would be considered ‘professionally friendly’.)  But when I write a review I totally block out any perceptions of the author as best I can.  If my friend writes crappy dialogue, I’m going to tell her in the review.  If the characters seem one dimensional and have very few realistic motivations then I’m going to call him out on it.  Sometimes it’s hard; I’m certainly not going to claim that it’s not.  However, I feel that I am generally objective enough not to let my friendships as they stand interfere in my criticism.  If at some point in the future I did feel like I couldn’t objectively review a book by a friend, then I simply would not review the book.

What I want to know now is this: As a blogger do you feel it’s right to make friends with authors at all?  If you are friends with an author, do you feel it affects your ability to give them an objective review?  How do you balance your friendships with your reviewing principles of honesty and openness?