I spend far too much time hanging out in the KDP forum, so see many discussions about different things.
A regular topic is reviews. An author posts that they just got a negative one, others respond in various ways, depending on their particular stance on negative reviews. Some will hurry to ‘defend’ their fellow author, down voting the negative review and/or leaving a comment on the review, whether the review had valid criticisms or not.
The topic came up again today, and I jumped into the discussion. After learning a bit more, I posted the following (edited a bit to make more sense in a blog post).
Reviews aren’t for authors. They’re for readers.
However, they can be useful to authors because a fresh pair of eyes and perspective can pinpoint mistakes that weren’t caught during writing, revisions, and editing.
Don’t take reviews personally.
I know that sounds dumb, because it’s your book that you’ve sweated and slaved over. Our books are our babies, and a negative review is like some stranger walking up and telling us our newborn ‘sure is ugly’.
It’s hard, and requires a lot of practice, because it always hurts when someone says something negative to someone else, I don’t care who you are.
But we’re authors.
We’re putting our stories out there specifically to let strangers read them. None of us are perfect, getting everything so right that every person who reads our stories is going to rave how wonderful they are.
That’s impossible. There’s the whole subjective thing.
When you get a negative review, go to your friends to vent privately. Doing so publicly usually only results in a lot of people thinking you’re a baby who can’t take criticism.
Of course, that opinion isn’t fair if you have a valid complaint. Say someone has made it their mission in life to give all your books a 1 star rating and push the message that you sacrifice puppies or something.
But even that kind of thing is better handled out of the public view. Work behind the scenes to get that person’s reviews removed. All you’re doing when you say anything publicly is adding fuel to the fire.
Other reviewers see someone’s review getting down voted, or comments left by other authors attacking that reviewer (and any disagreeing comment by an author is attacking a reader), they jump in. A pitched battle between authors and reviewers begins. Those NEVER end well for the authors.
Authors just lose potential sales.
A bad review isn’t the end of the world, and won’t necessarily kill your book’s chances of being purchased. Acting like an ass – and it doesn’t matter how hard you try to not come across like one, there will be people who feel you are – will do far more harm to your book’s potential.
You cannot tell readers how to feel about your books.
In short form:
- Behave like a professional (actually, better than some of the ‘professionals’).
- Don’t react emotionally. If it’s an obviously personal attack (‘this author sucks so bad and I wish she would die in a fire’), deal with it behind the scenes.
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