Author Anxiety: on personal attacks, industry ire and people talking behind your back

One of the first things you’ll usually hear before you start a career in the arts is that you have to develop a thick skin. And while a big part of that advice refers to developing a high tolerance for critique and rejection, there’s another element we don’t talk about:

People don’t only talk about your work. They talk about YOU as a human in ways that can be upsetting or downright damaging to both your writing career and your general mental health.

In Author Anxiety: On dealing with bad reviews, we talked about reacting to negative reviews of your work. This post will deal with a similar but also distinct issue of being an author: personal attacks or what happens when you suddenly find yourself one of the main characters in the industry drama of the day.

Readers sometimes have trouble distinguishing between an author and their work. They’ll claim you, the author, surely condone everything your supervillain believes or only included that dark element in your book not because you wanted to deconstruct the issue, but because you’re secretly evil.

Don’t you know that authors truly believe every word out of their characters mouths? 🙄

Or, worse yet, they use your writing to attack your personal life, forcing queer or neurodivergent authors to out themselves or reveal their medical history as their only defense. We’ve seen this play out dozens of times, most famously to Love, Simon author Becky Albertalli.

Readers have opinions on the stories they read and the people who write them. A hundred years ago, an author could remain blissfully unaware of what people were saying about them and their work unless they ran into them in person. But in the social media era, it’s near impossible to have any kind of presence online without encountering negative comments, even if you’re not looking for them. Half the time, readers even take the time to tag you directly to make sure you don’t miss them chewing you out or ripping your book apart.

There’s a lot we could say about how we got to this place as a society where it comes to the intersection between parasocial internet relationships, algorithms that favor outrage engagement, media literacy or, really, literacy in general, but most of that isn’t within our control as authors.

There is only one part of this we can control and that’s how we react to the things people say.

Story Time!