On Reviews
Crossposted from Deadline Dames, where there are contests and loads of other advice. Go check it out!
The Internet is a marvelous place, full of ponies and rainbows and unicorns. It has also been revolutionary for consumers and readers sharing information. There are a million review sites and ways for readers to rank and talk about and pick apart a book. This is a good thing, despite the echo-chamber factor, but it underlines one thing I wish I could tell newly-published writers.
Do not respond to reviews, positive or negative. On that path lies danger.
Reviews are meant for readers. I use them myself in my capacity as a reader, just like anyone else. But there is something I have to consider when I review a book–professional standing. As a professional, I tend not to review something unless I have something positive to say about it. That’s one constraint on my speech on the Internet, and a self-chosen one. I don’t have time for a flame war, and when I say something nasty, it reflects badly on me. (Publishing is an incestuous little business, too. What one says WILL get around.) Sometimes I choose to say something controversial, like when I’m talking about my politics, my religion, or a Mel Gibson snuff film. I make no bones about having opinions, I’m human. I think long and hard before posting my opinions, but the idea of disagreement doesn’t stop me.
Still, when it comes to reviews of my work, I just shut up. Period. I used to say “thanks” and link to positive reviews, a while ago. Then I really thought about it, and decided to cut that out.
The trouble with responding to any reviews, even just the positive ones, is that it makes it much more likely you will respond to a negative or critical review. And when you’re talking about something as personal as your writing, that “response” can quickly turn into a sucking hole of Internet fail that makes you look like a crazy person. (Remember Anne Rice’s Amazon meltdown?) The chances of getting into a flamewar or touching off an Internet sh!tstorm go up exponentially the moment one starts responding AT ALL to reviews, positive or negative. There is no shortage of Internet sh!tstorm-age. We don’t really need more.
You’ll notice, please, that I don’t say I don’t read reviews, both positive and negative. I do. I read Amazon reviews (sometimes, when I’m fairly sure I’m calm and balanced) and I keep a watch on my Google mentions just like anyone else. If more than three or four reviewers say the same thing about a craft aspect of a book, I’m likely to do some hard thinking and take it under advisement. I’m not stupid, and I listen to my readers.
But responding is a different slice of cake entirely. Even a “thank you” to the positive reviews tempts me to answer the negative reviews. That is a temptation I do not need. Some healthy, balanced, sane and sober people can say “thank you” to even a negative screed and move on. I doubt I am one of those blessed few, so I avoid the temptation and am happier all around.
Sometimes, when a lot of readers note something, I will quietly address it. But I will not talk about reviews online[1]. I’d rather concentrate on writing.
Here is an example. (Yes, I am about to break this rule, sort of, in the interests of education.) Sometimes, some reviewers take issue with my characters making certain choices in stressful situations. “I would NEVER do that, therefore X shouldn’t and Saintcrow is a horrible writer for making him/her!” I often would like to point out that I’ve made intensive study of psychological deconstruction under stress (mostly to understand some of my own lingering trauma, but also because the process fascinates me) and sometimes my characters’ reactions are that: deconstruction under stress in a particular way. Breaking a character along a fault line they’ve had all along is part of what jazzes me about being a writer.
Now, noting this in the interests of education is one thing. But to link to particular reviews and take it point by point? Danger, Will Robinson! This is treading close to the line of “taking it personally”–that magical event horizon where measured, reasoned response can degenerate into attack, flamewar, and complete and utter epic fail.
Do I have time for that? No. So I accept it as one of those things, where I as an author have not reached a particular reader. There’s nine billion people in the world. I am not going to please every single one of them, and due to the vagaries and the imperfect nature of communication, I am not ever even going to reach a significant percentage of them without some distortion and message-loss.
Nothing’s perfect.
There are authors who manage to respond gracefully to all kinds of reviews, and they have my undying admiration. I am not one of them. I listen, certainly, but I know myself. The risk of getting into an insult-slinging match is just too high, and part of being an adult is learning to shut your yap rather than make things worse. I’m not perfect at that, either, but having a rule about never responding in public to reviews at least ensures I don’t shoot myself in the foot. (Much. Over reviews, at least. I still manage to damage myself in other ways. I’m cool like that.)
I see some writers getting into flamewars and taking reviews utterly personally. Sometimes I just want to grab them and sit them down and make them tea and say, “Honey, just cut it out. Focus on the writing and back away from the forums and chatrooms. Yes, the Internet is a great tool for helping your readers feel a connection with you. But don’t let it get personal, because the Internet never forgets and rarely forgives. Just chill, drink some tea, knit a few rows, or go shopping. Do something else and don’t respond to this stuff. Life is too short, it will make you too tired, and you should really be spending this time writing, anyway.”
But who would listen to that?
[1] Now, sometimes I’ll moan about reviews over drinks with the Selkie. But that’s different, honest. If you can’t bitch with your beta, who can you bitch with?
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May 8th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Oh, Lili,
I could not agree with you more here.
Responding to ANY reviews is a bad, bad idea.
I’ve broken this rule once or twice by thanking someone (who I do know personally) who has given a Noble Dead book a nice, detailed review . . . but you are soooooo right that responding to positive reviews could lead to responding to negative ones.
I think Anne Rice lashed out at some negative reviews once and her reaction ended up all over the Internet. Yikes.
May 8th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I’ve only gotten one author reply to a review, and that was when I reviewed something out of the clear blue — and knowing the author isn’t that well-known, and the review was complimentary, I figured I should let him know. I emailed with the link, and a day later got back a very short (like four words) reply that still made it clear the author was beside himself. I saw no reason to reply; we’d said what we needed to — but it was the best compromise between a public statement and private gratitude. That, I think is fine.
Had the author responded publicly to my post, however, I think (even with the gratitude) it still would’ve been a little uneasy-making. Not for me, since in this case I was complimentary, but for anyone who disagreed. Author presence can have chilling effect!
But all the same, it’s still really nice to get a private thank-you from an author when they’re appreciative, so long as the conversation ends there (and isn’t used as starting point, as though the good review were a bribe for attention by reader). Or maybe that’s just the Southerner in me doing the talking right now…
May 8th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
I wish more authors felt the way you do. Mostly.
Years ago, before I understood what the internet was really capable of, I liked to comment on my LJ about books I’d read. I didn’t think of these as “reviews.” Most of them were less than a paragraph long! My commentary was for my friends, who, at the time, were the only people on my LJ friends list, go figure. But I still had a statistics-tracking do-hickey in my mood icons, and I also recorded IP addresses of commenters, because I had once suffered a stalker, and once was more than enough for me, thank you very much.
So then one day some anonymous commenter made some very hurtful remarks to me regarding my book comments, and suggested that, because I was an aspiring author (obvious from my LJ profile) and hadn’t yet landed an agent or editor (wasn’t submitting my stuff at that time, thanks again!), my opinions were somehow invalid or worse. Opinions like, “I didn’t like this one as much as her last book.” And then she went on to lecture me about how I shouldn’t post my real name on my LJ, because publishing is incestuous, blah blah blah, and now I was surely never going to get published because I had taken “pot shots” at authors. Pot shots like “I love [author]‘s writing, mostly, but I wish I would have loved this book more than I did.”
So, I looked up the commenter’s IP address on my statistics-tracking do-hickey (I don’t use it anymore, I just disabled anonymous commenting, but I think it was called LJ-toy?) and low and behold, it appears to have belonged to an author whose book I had read and made a luke-warm (tiny one paragraph long) comment about. It wasn’t even a negative review, just… meh.
Well, now I tell everyone I know not to buy her books. I would have kept buying her books even after a meh experience. Not every book is a perfect fit for me. But not hers. Not after that.
But then again, I did write a full quasi-negative review once of a book by Michelle Sagara, and she contacted me privately to thank me for it! And we ended up exchanging several long emails about what it was in the book that didn’t quite work for me, and how much I loved her other (Michelle West) books, and where I would never have bought another book in that particular series before, because I didn’t like it, now I buy them just as a show of support, because I still love her Michelle West books, and she was so kind in her emails I was willing to give her Michelle Sagara books a second chance. And I’m really glad I did.
I guess the moral of the story is: If you ARE going to respond to a negative review, just remember that you might be turning a mediocre reading experience with ONE book into a BAD experience with an entire author. So don’t be an asshat.
Or, y’know, do like you say to do, and don’t respond to reviews at all. *grin*
May 8th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
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Or would that be tweeters.
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May 8th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
fixing html mess up
Or would that be mash up. Thank you mashable.
May 8th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
thanks, i needed that
May 10th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
This post reminds me of John Scalzi’s comments on crazy screechy monkeys, the handling thereof, and why poking them is a Bad Idea.
I think that the pseudo-intimacy created by online interactions can be a bad thing for the author/reader connection in several different ways. Not just in terms of foot-in-mouth-syndrome to the oh-god-someone-take-the-modem-away-before-they-alienate-their-fanbase incidents, but also in terms of reader expectations putting pressure on the author (ala GGRM) and also the increased opportunities for crazy-stalker-type shananigans (ala M.L).
It’s why I’m damn careful about reading author blogs these days. I don’t know if it’s a failing in me, but I’ve gone off a few people, to the point where I stopped enjoying their books. Not to do with personal politics, but to do with behaviours exhibited. Either my newly negative opinion has crept over into my reading of their writing, or the experience has pushed me into reading between the lines of their writing in a way I hadn’t the perspective to do before.
It’s not a new phenomenon mind; I suspect that if Louisa May Alcott were writing today and had a blog I might be a tad irritated with her given her notorious flounce regarding fannish expectations of the day!
May 10th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
I normally don’t do reviews, but recently I did post my thoughts on a book at the Barnes & Noble website. It was pretty negative and I am now feeling badly about it. I was disappointed in the book and allowed myself to vent in a public place. I don’t know how constructive that is and I regret doing it. While I have a right to my opinions, I’m thinking that its best to keep the really negative ones more private in the future.