By Melissa Sileo
You can’t win them all. It’s as true in book publicity as it is in any other part of life. So when you open up that newspaper or log on to that blog only to find your book torn to pieces by a rabid reviewer, how do you possibly walk away with some positive thoughts?
The first thing to keep in mind that while many reviewers will give their honest opinion, some aim to dish out a terrible review for the sake of entertainment purposes to build up their own notoriety (enter the old phrase “sticks and stones…” here). For the bad reviews that may hold some merit, instead of envisioning running them over with your car, you, as an author, need to take it as constructive criticism.
If the editing job of the book is under attack, take a look at your book and see if you perhaps missed some grammatical or punctuation errors. Having these bloopers pointed out in a public forum is a tough pill to swallow, but unless you want to continue to make the same mistakes, you need to take a lesson from it and move on. Is the editing of your book stellar but the format or design of the book under fire? Is the reviewer critiquing your character development? As hard as it may be, take these observations and lay them against your book – it’ll hurt, but it’s important to know what areas you need to strengthen before moving on to the next project.
Bottom line: if your dream is not only to be a published author, but the best writer you can be, you need to take the good reviews with the bad, and use it all to your advantage.
It's a fine line between "no publicity is bad publicity" vs. maintaining a positive image. It is a little scary that any random person can also leave their own book review --- let's hope that any kind of ensuing discussions lead to more comments, more feedback, and eventually more sales.
ReplyDeleteMonica, that is a great point. With bloggers, reviewers and readers able to post commentary at will, even best-selling authors are at risk of a bad review.
ReplyDeleteWe would love to hear from authors whose book received a negative review. How did you handle it? Were you able to turn it around and use it to your advantage?