I admit it. I was the kid in class that reminded teacher
that he or she had forgotten we were supposed to have a quiz that day. This
made me wildly unpopular. It was just part of who I was/am.
Besides, my main motivation was to get those wonderful little
“A”s sketched across the top of my page of loose leaf. If I were to look at
them now, I’d recognize them as the scrawl of an exhausted teacher and
ultimately useless. But at the time, those precious “A”s looked like tiny Rembrandts,
my personal masterpiece and evidence that someone approved of something I had
done.
So I find myself reminded of those times when it comes to
the reviews of my book on Amazon. There are even stars, just like 4th
grade. A means of arbitrary categorization. It’s very cool to get 5 stars, mind
you. It means someone had a great time reading your story. A very flattering
experience. For a while, I was getting a mess of those.
Then it happened, as it was bound to, a two star rating with
a review that was a little on the vicious side. Contextually, I saw this two
star review just as I was still internally snoopy-dancing about the fact that
Allies and Enemies: Fallen had received the top 50 for military scifi onAmazon. (Totally cool seeing my book cover on the same screen as some of the “rock
gods” of the same genre.) So, to see this was a bit of a let down.
But it begs the question: Do I address it? Ignore it? How do
other authors deal with negative reviews? I’ve become a big fan of Lindsay
Buroker, having encountered her steampunk books. She’s got some nice advice
about dealing with this:
Ultimately, I choose to have faith in the readers out there
browsing for a new adventure. They’re intelligent folks that can make their own
decisions, weighing the good against the bad. I accept the fact I can’t change
everyone’s mind and it reminds me that with each word or agonized-over passage
I grow as a writer.
