Bruce Beckham's Blog - Posts Tagged "jimi-hendrix"

The Reviewer is Always Right

In Dale Carnegie’s famous treatise, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ all you really need to know is contained in the title. Working in advertising, I soon learned that not a great deal of profit is made out of telling folk they’re wrong. It’s a maxim that applies in most walks of life, especially if you’re the seller.

Apart from at a domestic level, the main complaints I have to put up with – small by comparison – concern reviews of Inspector Skelgill. Acquaintances quite often ask if I get bad reviews – and I laugh and say, ‘Yes!’ – and then they ask am I upset and I repeat my answer. But there is a caveat – I probably couldn’t do without them.

Don’t get me wrong, good reviews are absolutely uplifting – a few generous words from a complete stranger make you feel like Winnie the Pooh with a full jar of honey stuck on your head. Good reviews provide the essential motivation to keep writing. But bad reviews provide the essential motivation to keep improving.

There is a long-running debate on the Goodreads author forum about whether authors should respond to reviewers. The accepted protocol is no – reviews are there for potential readers, not to start an argument with a belligerent author. I agree!

But readers are allowed to argue among themselves. Indeed today I noticed that a recent 1-star review has attracted a string of comments. The negative reviewer was berated for not buying or reading the book, but instead judging it by the ‘Look Inside’ function on Amazon. (As far as I could tell, none of the people who jumped to my defence were on my payroll.)

Actually the original criticism was that the book is written in the present tense. It is. So the reviewer was right. So too was the person who said, ‘How can you review a book without reading it?’ And the person that remarked, ‘I don’t like the present tense – thanks.’ (It goes on, dilly-ding, dilly-dong.)

The moral of the story?

Frustratingly, to paraphrase a popular misquote, ‘You can’t please all of the people all of the time’ – particularly when the complaint is something that you ‘just do’. I’m sure there were times when Jimi Hendrix was asked to play more slowly, or Joan Rivers not to swear, or John Updike to stop using metaphors. Even Rabbit, Run has 8% 1-star reviews.
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