{"id":1912,"date":"2023-06-01T12:26:53","date_gmt":"2023-06-01T16:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1912"},"modified":"2023-12-13T09:46:18","modified_gmt":"2023-12-13T14:46:18","slug":"bad-book-reviews-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/bad-book-reviews-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Book Reviews, Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Image by Luisella Planeta LOVE PEACE \ud83d\udc9b\ud83d\udc99 from Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Good grief, people. I keep telling y\u2019all not to respond to bad book reviews, but you keep doing it anyway. And then you\u2019re surprised when you end up being Writing Twitter\u2019s main character of\u00a0the day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And get this: the incident that set off the most recent Author Behaving Badly fracas\u00a0was over a very favorable four-star<\/b> Goodreads review. The author in question was indignant that her book\u2019s perfect 5.0 score was ruined. She went to TikTok to trash\u00a0the Goodreads reviewer, calling her a bitch. That\u2026backfired. A lot. Her book’s rating was at 1.0 last I checked. And it\u2019s not even being released until September.<\/p>\n

For the record, I don\u2019t love revenge-bombing a book\u2019s reviews. The poor book didn\u2019t do anything; it just wants to be read. But what this author did was catastrophically\u00a0stupid.<\/p>\n

OK, Nicole, why does any of this matter so much to you that you’ve devoted three blog entries to it?\u00a0 <\/span>Why won\u2019t you shut up about it? We’re bored over here.<\/i><\/p>\n

Thin-skinned authors who do this are hurting all of us\u2014especially those of us with small publishers or who self-publish. How?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Because the smaller book review sites are understandably fed up with\u00a0this behavior.<\/b> They give honest reviews of the books they receive, and for their trouble they\u2019re mocked, insulted, and cursed out. More and more of them are saying \u201cScrew this\u201d and shutting down their sites. That means fewer sites where someone might discover my book. Or yours. And when you\u2019re not with a big publishing house and its access to major book reviewers, and you depend on smaller sites to get the word out, that matters. You know what will really hurt a book\u2019s chances of success? Nobody talking about it.\u00a0People can’t buy a book if they don’t know it exists.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Nicole, this person wrote a super mean review of my book. Shouldn\u2019t I explain how they got everything so wrong and are incredibly stupid and probably just jealous of my blazing talent?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Hell no. Listen up: Some bad reviews here and there will not hurt your book.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What?!?<\/i><\/p>\n

I promise. Pinky swear. A few months before Tidepool\u2019s<\/i> release, it got a lukewarm review in a major trade publication. Even though the review could have been way worse, I felt like I\u2019d been kicked in the stomach. Here was one of the biggest trade reviewers basically saying Eh, it was OK, I guess<\/i>\u00a0about my debut.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After Tidepool\u2019s<\/i> release, it was reviewed by a well-known genre review site. And that reviewer hated<\/b> it. I tried to stop myself from reading their review, but I couldn\u2019t tear myself away. I was devastated. I\u2019ve gotten a lot better about avoiding bad reviews since that one.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As you probably know if you\u2019ve heard me drone on about it, Tidepool<\/i> sold very well, was a finalist for both the Stoker and the Ladies of Horror Fiction awards, and got a very nice mention from Ellen Datlow in her The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 14 <\/i>anthology last year. It was picked up for a Spanish translation, netted enough royalties to allow me to bump my HWA status up to Active Pro Writer, and overall vastly exceeded the modest hopes I had for it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not bringing that\u00a0up to be all \u201cNeener neener!\u201d to the reviewers I mentioned. I\u2019m truly grateful they took the time to read my book and write about it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m just saying that the occasional negative review\u00a0won\u2019t destroy your book\u2019s chances of success. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is no novel that is universally popular, and many readers suspect author and\/or publisher fuckery when we come across a novel that has nothing but<\/i>\u00a0five-star reviews. That\u2019s right: Bad reviews actually give your good reviews more credibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wanna know what will<\/i> hurt your book? Attacking reviewers. If you send them insulting emails or call them out on social media, you\u2019re liable to find yourself becoming Twitter\u2019s main character of the day. You never, ever want to be Twitter\u2019s main character. I bet that author I talked about at the beginning of this rant wishes to hell she\u2019d left that 4.0 review alone.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(She has since claimed that the video was a joke because she\u2019s a comedian and geez, you dummies, how could you people who never heard of her until yesterday\u00a0morning not know that? Are there any sociological studies out there on why people these days will\u00a0never, ever just say \u201cI\u2019m sorry?\u201d)<\/p>\n

So for the last time (until this happens again): Leave your reviews alone. If you’re especially shaken by\u00a0a bad review, go look up your absolute favorite book ever on Goodreads and check out how\u00a0many negative, scathing reviews it got. See? You’re just like your favorite author! Cry, eat all the chocolate, slam the cabinet doors while muttering darkly, and do whatever else you need to do to cope\u2014offline<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, The Shadow Dancers of Brixton Hill<\/i> comes out in less than two weeks and ARCs are winging their way to reviewers as I write this. So I\u2019m going to be taking a crash course in Practicing What You Preach 101 over the next several weeks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Until next time…<\/p>\n

(Postscript, June 1: The angry author’s book has been canceled by the publisher. Ouch. Like I said: Attacking reviewers will hurt your book’s chances way more than an\u00a0occasional bad review will.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Good grief, people. I keep telling y\u2019all not to respond to bad book reviews, but you keep doing it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,65,113,4],"tags":[131,137,103,10,17],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1912"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1912"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1921,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1912\/revisions\/1921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}