Negative Reviews
Filed under Advice • 19-05-2010 •
On Dark Fiction Review, Sharon Ring has published an article that asks authors how they handle negative reviews of their work. My own responses are quoted below:
How do you feel about negative reviews of your work?
Negative reviews are always disappointing. Of course they are. If you’ve poured your heart and soul and time into a piece of writing, you want people to connect with it, and if they don’t, you’re bound to feel frustrated. Personally, I tend to mope around the house for a few hours, feeling sorry for myself. But at the end of the day, you have to take it in good humour. It’s all part of the game, and if you can’t take the odd negative review, you shouldn’t be a writer.Are you ever tempted to defend yourself against a particularly negative review?
No, never. If I’ve failed to connect with my audience in some way, then that’s a learning experience for me. It’s my fault. I should have found a better way to communicate my ideas. At the end of the day, a review is a reviewer’s subjective opinion. There’s nothing to be gained by trying to argue against that opinion, especially in public. If they made a factual mistake – like misspelling the title of the work, for instance – then I might drop them a private email, asking them to correct the error. But I would never ask them to change their opinion of it. In fact, I have even personally thanked a couple of reviewers for their negative reviews, because the reviews they wrote were thoughtful and considered, and gave me cause to go back and re-examine the story in question with an eye to improving it.
Read the full article here: darkfictionreview.net
Tags: Dark Fiction Review • Reviews • science fiction
We can’t please everyone. Negative reviews are opportunities – more so than positive reviews – to improve ourselves both in our writing and our ability to ignore that which isn’t beneficial.
Mark, I agree. Negative reviews may be unpleasant for our egos, but they often point the way to improvement.