It’s Not Personal. It’s Just Teh Interwebs.
Morning, everyone. I’m sipping at some coffee and making various morning faces–not because of the coffee, just because it’s morning. The weather report says it will be drier today than yesterday, thank God.
Get ready for me to get heavy, baby.
Over at Smart Bitches there’s a discussion about how, if one doesn’t like a particular book or author’s style, one is perfectly entitled to say so, and that it doesn’t mean you hate the fans or the author personally. It means you didn’t like the book.
There are a lot of issues wrapped up in this. First I’ll take it from an author’s point of view, because that’s where I spend most of my time. Being a writer is tough, and so is being an author. You labor over a book, sometimes for months, sometimes for a year or more, go through the masochism of submitting it around, it finally gets taken, and then there’s revisions. If you’re not a quivering wreck by the end of the process, you haven’t been paying attention. Then someone pans your book, gives it a bad review on Amazon, or slaps the cover up on a website and OMG snarks it! AFTER YOU DID ALL THAT OMG WORK! JESUS!
Chill out. You are not going to write a book that pleases everybody. It’s just not possible. Snark, bad reviews, and pans do have a valuable purpose in the ecosystem of the Interwebs. View them as free advertising or as rain (as in, can’t change the weather) and LET IT GO. Queenly disdain and silence is the road to take when it comes to bad Internet or Amazon reviews. Don’t believe me? Two words: Anne Rice. I love Ms. Rice’s early work, but her famous imbroglio of a response to some Amazon reviewers has ensured I probably won’t ever buy a book of hers again unless I can find it used in trade paper. Contrast that with Nora Roberts, who isn’t normally my cuppa tea to read, but who is so classy, especially in Internet brouhahas, that I can see paying full price for her books, no problem. And I have, with the Three Sisters Island trilogy.
We’ve moved from being an author to being a consumer here. As an avid consumer of the printed word, I read reviews and snark to amuse myself. I’m very rarely guided by Internet reviews unless the site I’m reading has evolved a good track record with me. Example: I read Smart Bitches pretty religiously, as you can probably tell, but Candy and Sarah’s tastes when it comes to reading are very different than mine, and I rarely pick up any book either of them recommends unless it sounds like, from the plot synopsis, I would enjoy it. (Case in point was Anne Stuart’s Black Ice, which I read as a direct result of a Smart Bitches review, and enjoyed even though it isn’t my usual fare.) The negativity or positivity of the review, funny as it may be and as much as I may enjoy it, doesn’t really enter into it. (I’m more likely to pick up a book I see reviewed in The Economist, because I’m a boring little geekhead.) I’m more likely to stop reading a particular author if s/he responds with reckless idiocy to negative reviews, no matter how much I love that particular author’s books.
But I never, ever, make the mistake of thinking that negative reviews of books I love are directed personally at me, the consumer. You cannot take everything (or even most things, or in reality ANYTHING) on the Internet personally. An author can’t take bad reviews or cover snark personally, a consumer can’t take in-jokes on a particular site about an author some people can’t stand personally, and publishers, if they know what’s good for them, should confine themselves to being friggin’ thankful their product is getting free advertising, positive OR negative.
Too many people take the Internet too personally. It’s like high school, an artificial terrarium where the heat and moisture are kept on high and things are forced to a boil by hormones, daily contact, and sheer human f!ckw!ttery (always in abundance.) The Internet, as much as we love it (and as much as, I admit, it is my lifeline to a lot of my friends in different parts of the world) IS NOT REAL LIFE.
This is not to say that Internet stalking/bad stuff doesn’t go on. It does. I’ve been stalked, I’ve had my inbox filled with hate mail, and I’ve had people try to personally insult/attack me to draw me out. Sometimes it’s hard to take my own damn advice and ignore or take the high road. That’s a whole different issue, and one I’m NOT addressing here.
The other side of this polyhedron issue is the bookstore worker. I’ve spent a lot of my working life in bookstores, one way or another. (Can’t seem to get away from the damn places.) I’ll ask indie bookstore employees what they thought of a particular book, or I’ll look at “recommend tags” on the shelf, especially at Powell’s. I don’t do that so much at chain stores, because chain bookstore employees seem too harried much of the time. You’re always overworked and underpaid in a bookstore gig, but corporate chain stores don’t give their employees much time or room to do what sells a book best–talking to customers about it. A bookstore employee shrugging and saying, “I thought that was too wordy, but you might want to give it a go if you like _____” carries more weight with me than an Internet review ever will.
Part of being a bookstore employee is being asked for recommendations, and it’s usually a game of Twenty Questions. We take our bookses seriously, so we assume you do, and we want to know what you like before we start recommending. I’ll seriously ask someone at least ten questions about the books they like and why they like them before I’ll venture a recommend, and by and large customers seem overjoyed with the personal attention.
When I review a book here, on my weblog, I’m stating my opinion, on the technical aspects of the work, on the artistic value I feel the work has, the emotional effect it had on me, what I liked and didn’t like. Now, I have to be careful because I’m in publishing. If I didn’t like a book, or couldn’t finish reading it, I’ll very rarely say so here because this blog, as personal as it is, is also a public face. (I think a lot of authors forget that.) And one does not lightly foul one’s coworkers’ nest in an industry as closed and incestuous as publishing. I’m much more likely just to keep my trap shut and just review the books I loved, or that surprised me, or that really moved me.
A site meant only for review, like, say, Smart Bitches, can say why they didn’t like a book with abandon, because they are consumers and giving a consumers’ POV. Which is just as necessary a part of the internet ecosystem as the squeeing fansites. One should not confuse the two. And let’s face it, not everyone is going to enjoy the Smart Bitches brand of humor, or even the profanity. I happen to enjoy both in the context of the site, because to me it’s very well done.
But if you don’t? Close your damn browser. Don’t go back, and most especially don’t go there and yell in the comments “OMG U R MEAN GIRLZ U INSULTD MY AUTHORZ AND I HATE U!” It just makes you look bad. Just like going on an author’s website/fan forum and hurling personal attacks at the author or his/her books. It’s inappropriate in the venue and idiotic to boot. If you feel compelled to vent your spleen and talk about how you hate Smart Bitches reviews/a certain author’s books, get your own damn blog and publish your feelings there. If you do it with snark, pizzaz, proper grammar, and a healthy dose of proportion, you might get a following comparable to the Smart Bitches.
If you’re still stuck in high school and just want to vent your spleen, you’re only going to get trolls and other oddfellows stuck in high school. That’s just the way it works.
Far and away the best thing to do if you don’t like what you’re reading on the Internet, if it’s making you angry, if you just want to reach through the screen and throttle the person who wrote what you don’t agree with…
…is to shut your damn browser and go do something else. All sorts of Internet kerfuffle could be avoided by just that simple step. Just don’t take the Internet personally. It’s a vast bubbling sea of opinion, with occasional rocks of brilliance and actual content that your browser may beach on and bookmark, that you may return to after surfing waves of dreck. Getting upset at the dreck for being dreck, or mistaking the sea of faceless dreck as something directed at YOU PERSONALLY, is a fool’s game. Even those rocks of brilliance and content may not agree with your personal hobbyhorses, opinions, and tastes. That’s life.
Get used to it.
Over and out.
