Fear of bad feedback is a common reason fear of writers. Even within our circle at World Tree Publishing, there is always a period of nail-biting and agonizing pain from the depths of your heart after an editor tells you, “Okay, I’m done, I’m emailing you my comments now…”
But the scathing opinion of strangers, though? Ah, that’s even worse, I think. It’s unsolicited, after all, and made by someone who probably bought your book, or at least took the trouble to get one for free, so you can’t help but feel that at least some of the negative comment is warranted. Hell, I’m anticipating some right now after doing a free promo on Jaeth’s Eye on Amazon.
I’m not really sure how I would react to them. A lot of one-star or two-star reviews on Amazon for books that are otherwise great seem horribly unfair. Most seem to revolve around the personal tastes of the reviewer, and not the actual quality of the work themselves. Or they have a definition of “quality” that seems impossible to meet, usually involving something that the writer cannot in good faith agree with but that which the reader insists is how “things should be”.
I’ve done my fair share of reviews in the past. Although I like to think that I’ve tried to be fair, I think that I never really understood how much my personal tastes could colour my opinion of “quality”. Fast forward to a few years ago, where I started to give certain popular books a “chance” even when they weren’t quite up to my taste. I didn’t approach reading these books with a mindset of “I hate it already”–I just wanted them to entertain me. I wanted to see what people liked about them.
The experience was enlightening. I found out that I could enjoy books even if they weren’t written “to my preference”. Even for the ones I didn’t enjoy, I could still grudgingly see why people would like them, which is why I bought my cousin a box set of Fifty Shades of Grey for her birthday a couple of years ago even though it is not the sort of book I would be caught dead reading.
At the other end of the spectrum, I found myself reading bad reviews of book I liked and realizing that I still agreed with some of the points they made. I might not have approached them with the same vitriol, but certain facts could still be true without the opinion of bad or good attached to them.
Heck, there are books of writers that I worship that I still can’t finish.
I think my point is that whether someone liked something or not is not a good enough basis for somebody else’s opinion. This is why I always approach reviews with a grain of salt: I look at the content to see if this is the sort of book I would like (e.g. if somebody gave a book a 1-star review saying “Oh my God, all they did was talk about their personal problems instead of building the setting…”, I would probably take a look at it), and then go from there.
Get a copy of The Agartes Epilogues and then just go, GO, and leave me be…
