That One Time I Responded to a Negative Review

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. As authors from various genres run around making asses of themselves, as the publisher run mailing lists I'm obligated to be on fill up with complaints about the frustrations of promoting things on communities I love ... social media is changing the relationship between content creators and content consumers, but we are still holding to the same sort of social patterns.

Ages ago, back when I was working through the first draft of Split Self as a web serial I responded to a negative review, but not because it was negative. And every time there's a shit storm about authors throwing temper tantrums over reviews, I can't help but think back to that. So as there have been a lot of twits who call themselves authors acting up ... it's been on my mind a lot.

Webfiction is an extremely small community. Most people who want to write want the status of a writer to go along with it. The world of webfiction, where you're just posting your stories for free with very little impressive street cred, isn't really appealing. No money, no fame, scared off publishers ... the webfiction community tends to attract pure storytellers, not aspiring authors.

At the time the community was all a buzz about this new website that was reviewing webfiction. We'd had review sites before, but more was always appreciated and this one had a team of reviewers that posted long, in-depth, thoughtful, pull-no-punches reviews. Naturally, everyone lined up.

When they got to Split Self the reviewer completely ripped it apart (and rightly so, I hadn't quite developed a sense for pacing or the difference between interesting-to-me vs interesting-to-anyone-else) which didn't bother me.

What did bother me were a number of statements made in the review about the plot and characters that were completely and totally wrong. I'm not talking about spelling names wrong, or mixing up eye colors ... I'm talking about describing elements of the story that simply did not exist. For example, the review summarized Split Self as a story "about four New York girls meeting in cafes and talking about sex" ... Split Self is in fact a story about a girl entering a polyamorous relationship with two men. The first chapter (at the time, this was later cut altogether for exactly the reason the reviewer bashed it) opened with the MC meeting two of her girlfriends for brunch, but these other characters never reappear nor does the situation ever repeat itself. The MC spends more time at the snarky gossip blog she works for than she ever does with any friends, male or female.

There were lots of errors of this nature. The review painted a picture of a book that was virtually unrecognizable. Split Self had a lot of problems, thinking back on the state of that first draft I often wonder how anyone found it readable at all, but even though it took me a while to get to the point it was hard to imagine how anyone could overstate so many minor elements and leave the actual plot of M/F/M (or M/M/F depending on your point of view) completely unaddressed.

I was a little suspicious and fortunately I was running Split Self on my own server. So I pulled the logs for the week the reviewers were supposed to be reading.

Most of my traffic at the time was from the US, and the reviewer in question lived overseas in an English speaking country that I did not get many visitors from. Actually, I think she was my FIRST vistor from her region which made it ridiculously easy to identify her in the logs and look over her activity on my site.

What I found was horrifyingly simple: she hadn't read it.

Actually she'd read the first chapter and seemed to skim the second chapter. After that she disappeared, never showed up any further than that.

I was outraged ... but not really sure what to do because writers are not supposed to respond to reviewers. I emailed a webfiction friend for advice. Replying directly to the review was obviously a bad idea, but maybe I could email the reviewer privately? Just ask her to disclose that this review was a DNF? (Unlike some writers I think DNFs are completely valid reviews and in some sense even more valuable to readers. If a book is so horrible you couldn't bring yourself to finish it that's something I want to know as a reader) That seemed like it might be okay, I drafted up a quick email (being careful not to accuse her of anything) just asking her to update the review with a note clarifying how much she had actually read. I ran this draft by a couple of people to spot check the tone, then I sent it.

This is where things start to get interesting. I waited about a week, nothing happened. But I kept my eye on the logs and noticed my friend from overseas mysteriously reappear, skim chapter three and disappear again. I may have sent a follow up email after a couple of days, I can't remember to be honest, but in any case by the time the end of the week came I was pissed. I was really really pissed. It looked an awful lot like this reviewer had read my email and decided to ignore me after it seemed unlikely she would be caught.

So I did what writers are never supposed to do, I left a comment on the review basically saying 'I tried to handle this privately but since you're going to ignore me I've got no choice. You didn't actually read this book, please update your review to make that clear.'

Oh boy did the shit hit the fan ... but not entirely in the way you'd expect. Yeah, there was the high and mighty 'the reviewer is absolute HOW DARE YOU' stuff, the eye-rolling 'typical author' sneers, the people vowing to never read my stuff (that they had never read in the first place and were never going to read anyway) ... but then other writers started coming forward too and it turned out that this wasn't the first time this reviewer had skimmed two or three chapters and then posted a review that implied she'd read the whole thing.

What I didn't know until much later is that this reviewer was also an aspiring ~*~professional~*~ writer and (it seemed) had come into the webfiction community in order to build a following for her writing blog. But still the whole thing got wildly out of control for such a tiny community and within a few weeks the review site was shut down.

I was not happy about that. I felt vindicated that people had come forward both publicly and privately to confirm that, yes, this had happened to them too and they were too afraid to speak out. I was happy that many in the community agreed that writing reviews for stuff you haven't read was unethical, but I was not happy about the outcome.

To begin with a valuable resource for a community I cared about had gone down in flames. That wasn't good. Also, to be honest, even though the review was full of inaccuracies it did help me turn a critical eye to my own work. Why did this person find my writing so boring and so tedious that she was even TEMPTED to do something like this? A lot of her critiques, ironically, became very useful in the major revision that preceded Split Self's formal publication. I cut most of the random stuff that she had falsely assumed *was* the story, restructured the plot so that it moved faster and rewrote over a third of it completely. If someone was going to make up a review based on the first ten pages, I wanted to make sure they at least made up something close to what I'd actually written.

In retrospect I regret my actions, not because the reviewer didn't deserved to be called out for her unethical behavior and not because all the reviewer's friends took meaningless vows to never read my stuff, but because I caused everyone a great deal of aggravation over basically a nonissue. PEOPLE ARE SMART. We writers look at bad reviewers and think that potential readers will accept them immediately, without question. But that's not true. People don't see one bad review and think "oh that's it, nevermind." They skim a number of reviews before making a decision. If they see one that is particularly snarky, mean-spirited or nasty ... there's not a person in the world who doesn't consider the possibility that the reviewer is a bitter failed writer, has a personal grudge or just has no taste.

I've noticed this with my own book buying habits, after reading a few positive reviews from my GRs friends I will try to seek out a negative one. I want to know what's the worst thing someone can say about this book. If that criticism seems unfair, ridiculous or petty it makes me want to buy the book MORE, not less.

So I regret my actions because I was giving my audience too little credit. Anyone who looked at the two or three other reviews of Split Self at the time would see the disconnect. It would have been obvious to everyone. I didn't actually have to say anything about it.

Moral of the story: Readers are smart people, save yourself some angst and give them more credit.