SiteRotten reviewers (and the rotten authors who review them)
Thanks to a post in today’s GalleyGat, I spent the last hour reading the details of an angry romance author’s vendetta against the writer of a (gasp!) 3-star amazon.com review. I read the review — since taken down by amazon.com presumably at the angry author’s request — and it’s fairly pleasant, nothing that would get my frilly pantaloons in a bunch were I the author. Holy Schmoley, though. Hiring a PI? Sending e-mails to people, asking them to “vote down this bitch please”? Getting amazon.com to remove negative reviews? Does this author have a life?
While the Renegade Writer and the Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock have received mostly 5- and 4-star reviews on amazon.com, we’ve gotten a few 1- and 2-star zingers. (I know — can you believe that? What the HECK?!) I can see some people not liking our books because they’re perky or chatty; were we pedantic and dour, we’d get 1- and 2-stars for being that … you can’t please all the people all the time. And I admit some of the low reviews leave me scratching my head, like the reader who wrote that our query book was “too general — not enough specific information on ‘how to write a query.’ ” (Note to Linda: let’s scrap the editors’/writers’ comments on each query for the next edition and include a section on where fingers should be placed on the keyboard.) I’m being snarky, but you know what? Bad reviews happen when you’re an author. Readers are entitled to their opinions. Speaking for Linda, I know we’re both grateful for all the wonderful reviews we’ve gotten, along with the hundreds of e-mails from satisfied readers that have appeared in our mailboxes over the years, so spending a lot of time obsessing about the cruddy reviews we get now and then seems, I don’t know, ungrateful? Pointless? A colossal waste of time?
I remember very clearly a conversation I had with Linda when we’d finished the first RW book and we were wondering what readers would think of it. I recall predicting, “I think people are going to either love it or hate it.” As luck would have it, love was on our side. I also remember saying I didn’t really care because I loved our book. We’d worked hard on it, I was proud of how it turned out, and I stood by what I’d written. Rotten reviews would not be able to take that away from me.
It might be a good attitude for this spurned romance author to adopt. [db]
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cal
Said this on April 17th, 2008 at 7:23am:The amazon comments have been so padded for such a long time that now hardly anything surfaces that isn’t nice — or if it does have some criticism, it is much further down&a lot harder to find. It’s a shame because, as you say, a negative review is par for the course. One of the services provided online that’s impossible to get in person are the quantity of different sorts of reviews. I’ve sometimes bought things *because* of the negative review — if someone says something like: couldn’t follow it, far to academic, I know I’ll probably like it. And where “perky” could be a negative, because I know a little about freelancing, I might pick up your book just for a much-needed dose of optimism. Likewise, when I read glowing but nearly illiterate reviews, I back off. Most of the up-front ones for Eat Pray Love made me cringe and when a friend loaned me the book, I was glad I hadn’t bought it.