Last night, I got a negative 2-star review. It was titled Have read cook-books written with more elan and aliveness than this travel report/book … . This reader was unhappy with the book. Have you ever had a bad review? Did you get upset? Did you laugh? Even though I know that a book may not appeal to every reader you can’t please everyone, I still felt the sting of that bad review. I know that authors need to have tough skin, take criticism gracefully, and perhaps even learn from the incident—even if the only lesson is to toughen up.
Everyone gets bad reviews, even well-known authors. For example:
Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy [Paperback] by E. L. James has an overall rating of 3.3 stars on Amazon. This book made the best-seller lists around the world. The series sold over 65 million copies worldwide and set the record as the fastest-selling paperback of all time. From the Amazon customer review chart on the left, it is evident that readers were polarized in their reviews of this book. The following random reviews appeared on Amazon on January 24 (note the number of similar statements):
“Please, don’t waste your time, money and brain reading this book. ”Jo G | 3,041 reviewers made a similar statement
“The books are not well written, incredibly repetitive, there is little character development, and the sex scenes are, well, vanilla. ”sailorgirl27 | 3,438 reviewers made a similar statement
“Every time I read one of these lines, I just wanted to put the book down. ”Camjoe | 1,716 reviewers made a similar statement
What is important to note is that of the 16,765 customer reviews, 47% (7,866) are in the one-to-three-star range. I am willing to bet your bad-to-good review ratio is not this high.
Additionally, having a full range of reviews can positively affect your readers. Those who read customer reviews do not want to see just flowery praise by family and friends; having a gamut of reviews helps them decide if your book is one they should read.
10 ways to deal with a negative book review
- Have a sense of humor.
- Don’t take it personally. The criticism is about your ideas and how you presented them, not about you. Most sophisticated readers can distinguish a rant from a genuine review.
- Find consolation in your good reviews. Keep everything in perspective.
- Focus on the positive. Reviews are just part of your author’s platform.
- Understand that every author gets negative reviews.
- Be happy about the less-than-glowing review. A scathing review can cause a stir; readers who may not have written a review may do so in response to a bad one. A passionate debate from readers can cause others to buy the book to see what all the hullabaloo is about.
- Distinguish between helpful criticism and offensive rants. Ignore the latter.
- See if there is a lesson to be learned. Look to see if there is a pattern in the criticism. Is everyone talking about grammar and spelling errors, for example? As an indie publisher, you can quickly fix the problems and then toot about the revised edition.
- Remember that you did not write the book for its reviews. Looking at reviews, good and bad, may influence how you write in the future. If you don’t want this influence, don’t read reviews.
- Get more reviews. A good review following the bad one will push the negative review down the page so it is not the first seen.
Additional reading
