One Star, Shining in the Darkness, by Catriona

What advice do you have for new authors on reviews? Do you read reviews? What is the best ever review you’ve received? What’s the worst and most hilarious? Share it with us!

I read trade reviews when I'm lucky enough to get them - the Wall Street Journal said "Hitchcock-like suspense" about The Dead Room and all of a sudden I know what my first tattoo would be. 

And I read Amazon reader reviews too - but with one proviso: I read them about books I'm maybe going to buy and read. That's what they're for. I don't read Amazon reviews of my books; they're not for me. 

So my advice to new authors would be - don't read your Amazon reviews. Don't read the five-star ones and don't read the one-star ones. They're not for you! It's impossible not to see how many reviews you've got and what the overall star-rating is but you don't need to click through.

I'm a hard-core non-clicker - I don't click on anything online that I didn't specifically search for - so it's easy. Hang on, sometimes I click on things that friends send me. At the moment that's mostly videos of very refreshed Scots being jolly in Boston.  

My favourite review was probably the first one I ever got. Stuart Kelly writing in the Scotsman called me "an exemplary crime-writer". You could have fanned me flat with an eyelash. And I was already so cool and professional that I immediately wrote to him to say thank you. Shudder. He was kind enough not to say anythimg about that when I met him at a festival soon after. 

My funniest review was from another UK newspaper - I genuinely can't remember which one - that accused me of not writing tartan noir. Um, guilty as charged, m'lud. It's not actually obligatory to write disaffected cops in seedy settings because you're a Celt. Right? It was such a bizarre complaint. 

I do love a good stupid review, mind you - almost as much as I love a good non-apology - and the one-star reader reviews of inarguably five-star books are a rich seam. I'll never forget the review of Pride and Prejudice that called it "an older and more boring Bridget Jones". Oh burn. Or the review of Catch-22 that said "It's like Mark Twain's Huck Finn, just an endless barrage of needless prose, instead of focusing on plot and character development by showing not telling". Oy-oy, I thought, someone's taken a class and reckons Twain and Heller would have got a lot out of it too. Brilliant.

Cx