Author Anxiety: On dealing with bad reviews

When you’ve poured your heart and soul into a writing project over months to years, it hurts to hear someone speak negatively about it. That’s just human nature.

You can’t please everyone. In fact, the surest way to fail at any kind of creative work is to try. Even your favorite book has its haters.

But publishing is also a business. Your book may be your baby but the minute you put it out there for sale, it becomes a product where your readers are your consumers. Customers have a right to express an opinion on the products they purchase and many don’t realize the distinction between “big box chain store that makes millions of dollars a second so one scathing review means nothing to them” and “struggling indie author whose book lives and dies by every review.” This can be especially frustrating when you haven’t gotten many reviews and the one bad one drags your whole star rating down or limits your exposure in the algorithm. Readers don’t realize their one bad review could be the thing limiting your shop visibility or preventing you from participating in bundles or group promos and they aren’t responsible for the retail hellscape that is our present moment.

And as much as it would be great if we could simply not look at reviews and concentrate on the work, sometimes that’s not realistic or possible. Especially when you’re an indie author or proactive about marketing your book, simply visiting your book page or interacting with your readership means glimpsing your reviews whether you like it or not.

Heck, sometimes readers even have a point and if you’re doing something that’s unwittingly causing harm or could be making your books better, that IS something you’d want to know. Negative reviews can sting but sometimes there’s a grain of truth in even our harshest critiques.

I struggle with this too. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of a bad review that ruins my whole day. Other times there’s a review dragging down my whole star rating that isn’t even for my book, it’s for a another work with a similar title or a different product entirely and there’s not a dang thing I can do about that.

This is why I always emphasize during my Marketing class is that the very best thing you can do to market your books is make sure you’ve written the best damn book you possibly can before you do anything else. A good book will generate more good reviews and word of mouth. The more people talking about your work overall, the more the positive comments will drown out the negative.

I can’t tell what to do to never see a single bad review nor how to control your reaction to them. But I can tell you what NOT to do…