A friend rang me this morning to ask why I’d drawn attention to a bad review in yesterday’s blog. “Aren’t you worried,” she asked, “it will turn people off the book?”

“I don’t care,” I told her with a shrug, which is absolutely true, because I really don’t think it matters. Take Wolverine and Star Trek, for example. Critics panned Wolverine and raved about Star Trek and yet Wolverine took a couple of million more at the box office. So much for the critics.

Besides, if bad reviews were going to make or break a book, Dan Brown would be pumping gas.

But the other reason I post bad reviews as well as the good is because I often talk to unpublished writers who are nervous about having their work critiqued. They worry people won’t like their work (and perhaps, by extension, them). I think it’s good to remind writers still struggling for recognition that writers will always be judged and if you don’t like it, you need to stop trying to get published until you can deal with it.

Note: I did not say you have to stop writing. Just stop asking for opinions (or collecting rejection slips) until you’re confident enough in your own skin to handle the bad along with the good.

In publishing, I promise you, no matter how well (or badly) you write, someone out there is going to love you and someone else is going to hate you.

Would-be writers who suffer this apprehension need to accept that and get over the idea that once they are published the bad things will vanish because people will only say nice things about their work. After all, it was good enough to get published, wasn’t it?

Trouble is, the criticism doesn’t stop. It gets worse because now it’s not just friends and family (who care about your feelings) offering their ten cents worth. Now there are whole bunches of people with access to the internet who don’t give a rat’s arse about your tender ego. They just want to be entertained. Good on you if you can do it. Look out if you haven’t managed to.

How you deal with either end of the hate-adoration scale, will have much to do with how much of your sanity you retain.

Artists of any ilk (writers, actors, painters...etc) can’t afford to get wounded over a bad review. Doing so is only slightly less dangerous than believing everything they say in the good ones. (Or what your publicist puts out in press releases... hehehe)

It is lovely and gratifying to get positive feedback like reviews and fanmail. It is annoying and sometimes hurtful to get negative mail and reviews.

The problem is, every writer will eventually get bad and good reviews, and you need to take both with an equal grain of salt. Or better yet, think of all the authors who can’t even get their work reviewed and be grateful someone deigned to notice your work long enough to say it sucks:). The important thing for me about the Publishers Weekly review for me was not that it was good or bad... it was that Publishers Weekly reviewed it at all!

I am fairly confident I am not the greatest writer that ever lived but I’m also pretty sure I’m not the worst, either. It’s nice to have people remind me of that, but I don’t need to be told it every day to keep writing. I believe in myself and apparently enough other people out there believe in me, too – at least enough of them to keep a roof over my head.

One cannot live their life according to what other people might think. You cannot write and remain true to yourself if you try. You can take into consideration what fans might like to see in a series, but you can’t give them what they want unless it’s also what you want and it works within the context of your story and your characters.

I cannot write a book that I hope will please the reviewers. It is not possible to know what even those closest to you think. When all is said an done, I can’t write a book I hope will please the readers, either, because short of polling every literate person on the planet via survey on the off-chance they might one day pick up something I’ve written, how could I even know what they like?

My first published  work was the one I set out to write to please myself, not all the well-meaning people I had (up to that point) been trying to please.

So, ten years on, I wrote a book a reviewer hated. It was also nominated for an award. They kinda balance each other out, I think.

Either way, I get a laugh and a blog entry out of it:)

And that's a very grown up response!

From the reviewers POV of bad comments: I only just recently had my first (editor, actually, not author) bad comment on a review one of my staff wrote. It just makes them sound like a total sulk.

You weren't sulking, you were having fun :)

And that is one of the best essays I've seen on the matter. So absolutely true.

well said.

This is excellent advice. (((hugs)))

This is hilarious. Whoever reviewed it might not have been a fantasy fan. Tis what I don't like about reading reviews by so-called 'experts'. It gets really uppity and it probably does not reflect the opinion of the gazillions of us commoners who have enjoyed the book. Still, to each his own opinion I suppose... I wonder though how you can 'slog' through The Gods of Amyrantha. That takes some serious skill.

Thanks for sharing.

By the way, I love the layout of your website :)