The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Nasty

Authors are told never to respond to bad reviews. Have you ever been tempted? How do you deal with negative comments? Pick a few irksome ones (anonymous of course) and let us know how you really feel … no judgment.

Brenda Chapman here.

I've come to be in a zen place with negative/nasty/dismissive/ reviews. I'm not sure who said it, but the best advice I ever heard when faced with a bad review is: "This person is not your reader". Yeah, they really aren't and that's okay. I'm not a fan of everything I read either, even some books that are on the best-seller lists. And that's okay too.

I have to admit though, there have been times I've had to pull myself away from the keyboard because I soooo wanted to respond to somebody's comments, but then I sunk into my mantra ... "Just not my reader."

So a few anonymous examples.

A recent Goodreads reviewer took the time to read all seven of my Stonechild and Rouleau books before giving the entire series one star. My question to them would be, "Why did you keep reading if you didn't like the first book? Who reads seven books if they aren't enjoying the storyline or characters?" Hmmm.

Someone else wrote recently about the last book in the series, "The author dialled this one in." I want to respond that I spent a year writing and editing that book, and took great pains to make it an original story with a complex plot. My editor and publishing team also spent a great deal of time working on it. Readers have almost to a person lauded the book and lamented that it's the last one in the series. Dismissing my work with one flip line sounds like a dialled-in response to me :-) 

One final irksome example of a review that bothered me (just ask my husband how much) happened a few months back. My latest book Blind Date had just been released and started a new series. I nervously awaited feedback from readers to see how it would be received. A day or two after the book was up on Amazon, a reader rushed to put up a two-star, critical review that stubbornly stays first on the list of reviews, the rest of which are all positive. This first review was demoralizing, but I'm happy to say that it's been the only negative one to date.

Recently, I watched some well-known American authors in a webinar and they spoke about the reviews on Goodreads. One of the authors said after her first book came out, she opened up her phone to read the reviews while in her car in the grocery store parking lot. She said they were so bad that she burst into tears. Another author on the panel said that she's learned never to read reviews on this site because they can be so brutal. 

While I respect the right of every reader to their opinion and recognize that tastes can vary widely, I'd like to gently suggest that reviewers remember a very real person has written the book and invested a lot of time, sweat and effort. Constructive criticism doesn't have to be so cutting that the author is devastated, maybe even enough to contemplate stepping away from the business. 

On the other side of the coin, any reader who is moved enough, either positively or negatively, by a book that they rate or review it, is a marvellous thing. However, I'd argue that every author deserves respect even if a reader doesn't care for their writing or book. It's fair to criticize, and writers appreciate constructive feedback, but I'm not a fan of taking kindness out of the equation.

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