My Best Bad Review

When you put your book into the world, there's always going to be some fear of a bad review. 

This is your baby! You've worked for at least months, probably years, to put this project into the world. If you're a responsible author, you do fastidious edits and revisions before presenting your work to the public, which adds even more time. Then you spend time with your cover, formatting, advertising... you get it. It's a lot of work!

So when someone writes a critical review or, God forbid, a negative review, we feel attacked. All the work that we put in feels not only unappreciated, but utterly pointless. In my opinion, this is the reason that, regardless of how we authors steel our wool or emotionally detach ourselves from out book, critical reviews still hurt. So when I saw this...

“Serializing a work of fiction can be executed effectively, but, in this instance, it was not. … The journey could have relieved my feeling of plot-drought, but it did not come off as onerous in a physical sense or in regard to the relationships between the characters. Worst of all, Stemler builds suspense throughout the novel for the Soldier Son fight, but it doesn't pay off.”

 

OYE!

My heart!

My soul!

My lungs!

My liver!

No, not really. Though that was probably my initial reaction. Maybe that initial gut-wrenching feeling never goes away. But then I took a breath, shrugged, realized that everyone has books they like and don't like, and my book isn't perfect. (I've been at this for 5 years now. I know the drill)

Critical reviews are not our enemies as authors. Critical reviews are not enemies to anyone, actually. The reviews that really annoy me (and many like me, from my conversations with other authors) are the ones that say “I didn't like it” and then don't say why. Those I call “bad” reviews, for more reasons than one. Critical reviews give us something valuable; an opportunity to improve. Critical reviews are not easy to hear—it's not easy to hear what you're not good at—but they are one of the ways we get better, and no one ever said getting better was supposed to be easy. On that note, no one ever said your work would be appreciated, either, or should be. Once I thought about it, I realized that asking someone to appreciate my work would be like asking someone to appreciate me living. No one can appreciate your life but you!

This particular review got more more interesting. I got an email message from the reviewer over twitter asking about the book. Fascinating! He had a lot of great questions about the Soldier Sons, about Zensor, about the book's conflict. I was so glad to see he was interested. However, I did think it was a little strange he knew so much about the book and was interested enough to track me down, yet didn't like it. 

Zensor is displeased by all this fuckery.

 In any case, it was the best bad review I ever had. I love answering questions about my works. In fact, it gave me an idea for a mock interview (which I hope to have more space for next time). After I answered his questions, I noticed he did change his review from one star to three stars, which made me very happy. Three stars is also what I also give books that, though they didn't have any major flaws, weren't my cup of tea.

Long story short, critical reviews aren't necessarily bad reviews and good listening is always a good policy.