The Danger of Responding to Reviews
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
Last week I read a Washington Post article about doctors who were angered by bad Yelp reviews from patients. They fired back at these patients, revealing confidential information in the process. (“Doctors Fire Back at Bad Yelp Reviews–and Reveal Patients’ Information Online” by Charles Ornstein.)
The crux of this particular piece was that doctors who responded angrily to the patients were violating patient privacy. But to me, it was just another reminder of the inherent danger of responding to reviews. Any reviews.
It’s very difficult for me to imagine a time where an author comes out looking good after responding to reviews.
This doesn’t mean that I’m not itching to respond to some of my reviews. I’ve received plenty of reviews that were downright irritating. My most-reviewed book, Dyeing Shame, has 684 reviews. 684 mixed reviews.
Many times I wished I could argue in my own defense. For example, I’d love to explain that Amazon’s shipping issues don’t actually reflect on my book’s content or quality.
But there wasn’t a single instance in which I felt my response wouldn’t sound argumentative, thin-skinned, condescending, or downright priggish. Or even arrogant, like some of the defensive doctors in the Washington Post story.
Commenting on good reviews? For me, that’s also a bad idea, although I didn’t think so when I was first published. Now I consider it author intrusion of a different sort. Most reviews are intended by readers for readers. They’re hardly ever directed at me.
The one time in my memory that I’ve responded to comments was very recent. It was for my trad-published book, Pretty is as Pretty Dies. The publisher suddenly updated the digital file and, in the process, omitted chapter seventeen and included two chapter sixteens. As you can imagine, readers were dinging me over this. I was baffled because this book has been live since 2010. I immediately contacted the publisher to correct it. Then I set to apologizing to the readers who complained…offering to email them the missing chapter immediately from my own draft from over six years ago. This is the only time I felt it was appropriate for me to respond…not to defend myself, but to apologize and offer a fix.
Reviews do have their place. Glowing reader reviews can be an important part of our editorial review section on our book’s page on Amazon and other retailers. We can tally our best reviews to make marketing statements: “100+ 5-star reviews!” We can learn from our bad reviews, if they have something valuable to impart to us.
And, for me anyway, practice the challenging art of patience while remaining silent.
Have you had any reviews you’ve been itching to respond to? Do you read your reviews at all? Have there been times in which you did respond to reviews or felt you needed to? How did that go? What’s your own policy on responding to reviews?
The danger of responding to reviews:
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