If the shoe fits ...
Writing is certainly not for the faint of heart or the weak of spirit. You don't believe me? Just click through to Amazon and read some of the customer reviews posted against your favourite books and writers, including yours truly. It can make for some pretty brutal reading.
Never believe a writer who tells you they don't read reviews. It's a lie. They all do, me included. After all, it would be incredibly arrogant not to care what your readership had to say. If you're prepared to take their money, you should certainly be prepared to listen to what they like and don't like about your work.
And much as you'd like to, you can't just dismiss bad reviews because you don't like them. Not unless you're willing to dismiss the good ones too, which most writers aren't - I post mine up on my website! The problem is how random these more negative reviews can be, with one person criticising the very thing that someone else has identified as your greatest strength. The answer, according to my agent J-Lo, is to "date" reviews, not marry them. In other words, you don't have to take everything to heart. Personally I look for two things before I start listening - either patterns, where the same point is raised by lots of different people again and again, or resonance, where a point chimes with something you instinctively feel is right.
It's certainly much easier to dismiss a review if it is plain wrong or obviously vindictive. For example, the one word review that one Amazon reader left for me ("Dire") was so bad it was funny. The reviews that really annoy me are the ones where people seem to be judging my books against literary or other inappropriate criteria, rather than against other thrillers and the basic features and conventions of that genre. It's a bit like going to a Linkin Park concert and complaining that it's too loud, or moaning that a Ferrari doesn't have enough luggage space. That's the whole point! That's part of what makes it what it is.
I have to say that our good friends the Americans are the hardest to please. Everyone says the US is a tough market, but I didn't know how tough until the first few customer reviews began to be posted on Amazon.com. Not only are they much more vocal in voicing their opinions, but they never seem to occupy the middle ground. They either love it or hate it. The only problem is that they email me when they love it, and post it on the internet when they hate it for the whole world to see!
Perhaps it is an unfortunate by-product of today's Big Brother / Pop Idol world that people seem so ready to criticise, often quite vindictively and at great length, as if trying to out-Cowell Simon Cowell. Praise is certainly the much scarcer commodity. If you click through on the names of some of these e-critics, you can see who else has felt the sharp lash of their keyboard - often they have come off no better. Is there a small army of bitter readers out there - failed writers perhaps - who spend their time knifing unsuspecting authors from a distance, safely concealed behind their anonymous usernames?
With my first book especially, I used to take any feedback very personally. At one stage I was logging in on an almost daily basis to see what comments had been posted, with a good one seeing me in high spirits and a bad one confining me to a black mood for the rest of the day. I used to coral friends and families to post favourable reviews to repair the irreparable damage that I assumed was being done to my career and reputation by these swivel-chair critics. I even at one stage formed a variety of Amazon identities to post up some of the positive messages that had been emailed to me to try and tip the odds in my favour.
It’s a losing battle. And, I came to realise, a pointless one. You can’t (nor should you seek to) control the Internet and the power of free speech it confers onto all users. More to the point, perhaps, people don’t make purchase decisions on the back of Amazon reviews but on word of mouth and newspaper reviews and price promotions and in-store positioning. Good sales are often a far better guide to reader satisfaction than a self-selecting group of Amazon reviewers. In fact I sometimes wonder if there’s a direct correlation between high sales and negative feedback – it’s much more satisfying to bash a successful book!
As Oscar Wilde once said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about at all!
Never believe a writer who tells you they don't read reviews. It's a lie. They all do, me included. After all, it would be incredibly arrogant not to care what your readership had to say. If you're prepared to take their money, you should certainly be prepared to listen to what they like and don't like about your work.
And much as you'd like to, you can't just dismiss bad reviews because you don't like them. Not unless you're willing to dismiss the good ones too, which most writers aren't - I post mine up on my website! The problem is how random these more negative reviews can be, with one person criticising the very thing that someone else has identified as your greatest strength. The answer, according to my agent J-Lo, is to "date" reviews, not marry them. In other words, you don't have to take everything to heart. Personally I look for two things before I start listening - either patterns, where the same point is raised by lots of different people again and again, or resonance, where a point chimes with something you instinctively feel is right.
It's certainly much easier to dismiss a review if it is plain wrong or obviously vindictive. For example, the one word review that one Amazon reader left for me ("Dire") was so bad it was funny. The reviews that really annoy me are the ones where people seem to be judging my books against literary or other inappropriate criteria, rather than against other thrillers and the basic features and conventions of that genre. It's a bit like going to a Linkin Park concert and complaining that it's too loud, or moaning that a Ferrari doesn't have enough luggage space. That's the whole point! That's part of what makes it what it is.
I have to say that our good friends the Americans are the hardest to please. Everyone says the US is a tough market, but I didn't know how tough until the first few customer reviews began to be posted on Amazon.com. Not only are they much more vocal in voicing their opinions, but they never seem to occupy the middle ground. They either love it or hate it. The only problem is that they email me when they love it, and post it on the internet when they hate it for the whole world to see!
Perhaps it is an unfortunate by-product of today's Big Brother / Pop Idol world that people seem so ready to criticise, often quite vindictively and at great length, as if trying to out-Cowell Simon Cowell. Praise is certainly the much scarcer commodity. If you click through on the names of some of these e-critics, you can see who else has felt the sharp lash of their keyboard - often they have come off no better. Is there a small army of bitter readers out there - failed writers perhaps - who spend their time knifing unsuspecting authors from a distance, safely concealed behind their anonymous usernames?
With my first book especially, I used to take any feedback very personally. At one stage I was logging in on an almost daily basis to see what comments had been posted, with a good one seeing me in high spirits and a bad one confining me to a black mood for the rest of the day. I used to coral friends and families to post favourable reviews to repair the irreparable damage that I assumed was being done to my career and reputation by these swivel-chair critics. I even at one stage formed a variety of Amazon identities to post up some of the positive messages that had been emailed to me to try and tip the odds in my favour.
It’s a losing battle. And, I came to realise, a pointless one. You can’t (nor should you seek to) control the Internet and the power of free speech it confers onto all users. More to the point, perhaps, people don’t make purchase decisions on the back of Amazon reviews but on word of mouth and newspaper reviews and price promotions and in-store positioning. Good sales are often a far better guide to reader satisfaction than a self-selecting group of Amazon reviewers. In fact I sometimes wonder if there’s a direct correlation between high sales and negative feedback – it’s much more satisfying to bash a successful book!
As Oscar Wilde once said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about at all!
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