Hello, friend. I’m Dr. Glanzman, your therapist for the day. I’m here to help you get through the devastating experience of receiving a negative review on your novel. I’m a doctor—you can trust me.
Before we begin, try to do these three things:
- Take a deep breath and pay attention to how you are feeling. Try to name the emotions and pinpoint why you feel them.
- Acknowledge that your emotions are valid. You are allowed to feel angry and hurt after receiving a negative review on your work, which may have taken years of love and dedication to produce.
- Remind yourself that ALL books get negative reviews.
- Participate in self-care or talk to a friend to express your point of view about the negative comment(s).
After you have processed everything, let’s get into some tips on how to move forward after one negative review or a slew of them:
- Firstly, DO NOT RESPOND TO NEGATIVE REVIEWS. EVER. This is the most important thing I can tell you. I know it’s tempting to correct any misconceptions in negative reviews or defend your side, but the reality is that any response is always going to make you look bad. Unless your response would be to genuinely thank the person for helping you understand something that you can apply to your future work, you’re just going to look like a defensive person who cannot take criticism.
- Find out if it is mentally unhealthy for you to read your negative reviews at all. A lot of authors don’t read their one and two-star reviews because they ruminate on them, which affects their work. Know yourself well enough to know how you respond to a large amount of criticism.
- Try to see if there is a common thread between what people are saying in their negative comments. Did you get a handful of comments saying that they didn’t like your main character? Go through them and see if you can pinpoint the reason why. Did a lot of people say that the plot was a mess? Find out if that’s a pattern of yours so that you can pay special attention to it in a future project. Try to understand other peoples’ points of view even if you don’t agree with them.
- Think of your all-time favorite book that you recommend to everybody and would follow to the ends of the Earth if it could walk…and then look at that book’s negative reviews. It may comfort you to know that even your favorite book can garner negative attention and that no book in existence is universally loved.
- Always remind yourself that you are not a bad writer if someone does not like your work. It will only hurt you to attach your identity and self-worth to your art. You are not your book.
You can’t control what people say about your book, but you can control what to do with that information. Writers can choose to apply their criticism to future works, or not. The choice is 100% yours. There could be a lot of useful information in negative reviews, (Particularly if a large number of people say the same thing) but only you have the power to decide whether or not applying it to future works will make them better. The other option is to ignore them entirely, which is just as valid.
The reality is that reviews are not personal attacks. They are simply opinions written by people who consumed your content, and everyone has the right to make them. It’s easy to get defensive when we receive a negative review, particularly if it is a harsh one. It’s understandable to feel that your work—and, in extreme cases, your work ethic—is being challenged. But please remind yourself that negative reviews do not define you or your work, and you are only going to improve from here.
Looks like we’re out of time today, but I’ll see you next week.
As someone who regularly writes book reviews, sometimes I feel extraordinarily compelled to write a bad review. Sometimes I've written a review that should've been an outright bad review, but didn't. But it's also important to realize that everyone has different standards. Sometimes people are going to write a bad review because they simply read something that didn't align with their core interests, and that ends up being as much about them as the book itself. And then sometimes the writing is bad, the plotting is bad, and you really, really want to suggest that the author ought to rethink their life...
ReplyDeleteSeriously, dude, write the bad review if it's your honest opinion. Bad reviews actually help writers improve their work because if the same issues keep being brought up, they'll know what to fix in the future. I think bad reviews are necessary for people to improve because the criticism is unbiased. At the same time, though, I think that people need to be careful about limiting themselves to reading bad reviews if it's going to make them obsessive. Some people get emotional enough that it negatively impacts their writing. The whole debate comes down to self-awareness, doesn't it? Being self-aware enough to know the amount of criticism you can handle and the fact that nobody's self-worth equates to their book.
DeleteGetting a bad review did not stop me from writing, only stopped me from taking bad reviews to heart. As for writing reviews, I choose to write reviews only on books I give 4-5 stars. I don't finish the other books.
ReplyDeletehttp://gail-baugniet.blogspot.com/2019/04/rainy-day-in-ghent.html
Thank you for stopping by love this advice! catching up on all of your letters
ReplyDeleteI heard an author once explain that she would anxiously await the first bad reviews to come in. When a book only has 5-star reviews, she said, it can look artificial to potential readers. Looks like only friends and family ever read the book. So she's happy when some bad reviews come in to balance it out.
ReplyDelete(J Lenni Dorner, if you're here, I used your next prompt in my S post. Thanks!)
The doctor passed me medically sane after my bad reviews. So. this helps with the ongoing recovery. ;-)
ReplyDeleteLOL. Great piece!
ReplyDeleteRonel visiting with the A-Z Challenge music and writing: Music Rush