Join The Coffee Pot Book Club on #WriterWednesday as award-winning author Juliane Weber talks about negative Reviews #HistoricalFiction #WritingTips #WritersLife

 

Dealing with Bad Reviews

by Juliane Weber

As any author will tell you, writing a book is a labour of love. It takes hours, months and even years of hard work and dedication to construct a novel, not to mention the enormous amount of research required for something like a historical fiction book. And then there’s the emotional toll of getting into the characters’ heads as they experience adversities and heartache, a very personal and sometimes challenging journey that allows the characters to come alive on the page. It’s no wonder then that most authors are filled with a strange combination of elation and terror when their “book babies” go out into the world. While we want our masterpieces to be read there’s always the fear in the back of our minds that our readers might not like what we’ve written.  

Especially as a new author this idea can be daunting and, indeed, getting that first one-star rating can be terribly upsetting (I know it was for me!). But, if you are fortunate enough to get your book into readers’ hands, bad ratings and reviews are inevitable—there is not a single book that is loved by everybody who reads it. This realisation is the first step in dealing with negative feedback. In fact, to perk yourself up if you’ve gotten a bad rating or a bad review I recommend checking out the Amazon pages of a few successful books. You will find that all of them have multiple one-star ratings (sometimes even thousands). Further, if you look at the reviews attached to those poor ratings, you will see that readers who didn’t like a particular book bemoan the plot, the characters, the writing style and any number of other things, which will usually be the exact same features that fans of the book say they love.  

Clearly, it’s all a matter of opinion. Assuming you’ve done your utmost to eliminate errors from your manuscript before it’s published, just about everything about your book is subjective—some readers will love it and some will, unfortunately, hate it. It simply comes with the territory.

But knowing this and being able to deal with bad ratings are two different things. Even with the best of intentions we can find ourselves becoming dispirited when a reader posts a scathing review. I myself have had moments when I’ve wondered why I bother writing at all and was seriously tempted to unpublish my books and pretend I’d never written any. To prevent myself from doing any such thing I decided on a very simple tactic: I no longer read bad reviews. While some authors might consider all forms of feedback constructive I find this not to be the case. After all, what is constructive about a reader telling you you’ve written a terrible book? I couldn’t write a different book if I tried, as I can only write the story that comes into my head. I therefore choose to read only reviews from readers who actually enjoy what I write—to motivate myself to continue doing so.

Now, if you find that you’re getting a disproportionately high number of three-star ratings and below, it might be a good idea to have a look at those reviews after all, to see if there’s an issue with your book that needs to be fixed. Perhaps professional proofreading and editing are required to polish the manuscript and increase readers’ enjoyment of your story? But if you’re getting a mix of the good and the bad, with a decent flow of glowing reviews in between you can rest assured it all comes down to reader preference. And if you still find it difficult seeing your overall rating take the occasional nosedive, consider simply stepping away from everything to do with ratings and reviews for a time, since there’s nothing you can do about them in any case. Not looking at your Amazon or Goodreads pages for a few weeks or months might help you remember why you started writing in the first place, and get back to working on your next book.   

Thank you for your insightful article, Juliane. Great advice to follow. We cannot please everyone, but gaining a loyal following of readers who enjoy our novels makes it all worthwhile.

Juliane Weber

Juliane is a scientist turned novelist. She holds degrees in physiology and zoology, including a PhD in physiology.

During her studies she realised her passion lay not in conducting scientific research herself, but in writing about it. Thus began her career as a medical writer, where she took on all manner of writing and editing tasks, in the process honing her writing skills, until she finally plucked up the courage to write her first historical novel, Under the Emerald Sky. The book is the first in the Irish Fortune Series, which takes readers on action-packed romantic adventures amid the captivating scenery and folklore of 19th century Ireland around the time of the Great Famine.

Juliane was born in Germany, but spent most of her life in South Africa. She now lives with her husband and two sons in Hamelin, Germany, the town made famous by the story of the Pied Piper.

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