Reviews, ego and the impact on writing
What About Him was released on 28 November. I was really looking forward to it because I'd had a lot of fun writing it and viewed it as a fun, light-hearted read: nothing heavy or deep-and-meaningful, just fun.
It seems to have been selling better than previous titles but the reviews haven't been as good. It seems readers either love it, or they hate it. Ratings have been good or bad, nothing in between. I find it confusing that so many of the reviews are critical (and some of them personal) when the rankings on Amazon indicate it's been selling quite well. I haven't responded to any of the negative reviews. I have no intention of trying to explain what I intended with the book. It wouldn't make a difference. Those readers obviously didn't get it. That means, as a writer, I need to look closely at any future work and make sure I don't make the same mistakes again.
The reviews that were personal? I'll ignore them, along with the one that reviewed the book without even reading it. And the one that said they live in the country and never have snakes: I live in the city and I have a friend who lives near a bushland corridor who has snakes all the time. I guess there's nowhere else for them to go in the city.
That doesn't mean my ego hasn't taken a beating. Like most writers I want readers to like what I do. I write to entertain, and if my stories aren't doing that, I'm not achieving my goal. I've gone through a stage where I've wondered if I'm writing the wrong thing: the wrong genre, the wrong story, the wrong characters. Perhaps I'm not putting in enough detail, although whenever I do and read through it, I delete anything I start to skim over. I figure if I don't have the patience to read all the description, it doesn't need to be there. Perhaps I'm wrong with that.
My happy endings aren't usually the declarations of eternal devotion I see in some other stories. I have a lot of trouble, personally, accepting that a couple who've only been together a few weeks have reached a stage where they can make those types of declarations to each other. After a few weeks, they're usually at the stage where they've decided they don't want anyone else and want to see where this thing goes for them. That's happy, isn't it?
Can you see the kinds of questions and doubts I live with and become exacerbated by negative reviews? I really need to deal with it better.
The good news is, I decided a couple of days ago to simply stop checking the reviews and Amazon rankings. Today, for the first time since What About Him was released, I opened my current WIP for final edits before submitting. The Courage to Love (the current WIP) has been effectively finished for a while but I've left it sit because it didn't FEEL finished and I couldn't work out why not. I now have floating in my head some still-pretty-nebulous ideas on what is missing in the storyline and how I can change it to make the story stronger.
The ironic thing is that I don't think I would have realised that without the negative reviews of What About Him. I am thankful to those reviewers who took the time to write thoughtful and constructive criticism of the story. Those reviews are going to make me a better writer.
The others, the nasty ones, can go suck eggs.
It seems to have been selling better than previous titles but the reviews haven't been as good. It seems readers either love it, or they hate it. Ratings have been good or bad, nothing in between. I find it confusing that so many of the reviews are critical (and some of them personal) when the rankings on Amazon indicate it's been selling quite well. I haven't responded to any of the negative reviews. I have no intention of trying to explain what I intended with the book. It wouldn't make a difference. Those readers obviously didn't get it. That means, as a writer, I need to look closely at any future work and make sure I don't make the same mistakes again.
The reviews that were personal? I'll ignore them, along with the one that reviewed the book without even reading it. And the one that said they live in the country and never have snakes: I live in the city and I have a friend who lives near a bushland corridor who has snakes all the time. I guess there's nowhere else for them to go in the city.
That doesn't mean my ego hasn't taken a beating. Like most writers I want readers to like what I do. I write to entertain, and if my stories aren't doing that, I'm not achieving my goal. I've gone through a stage where I've wondered if I'm writing the wrong thing: the wrong genre, the wrong story, the wrong characters. Perhaps I'm not putting in enough detail, although whenever I do and read through it, I delete anything I start to skim over. I figure if I don't have the patience to read all the description, it doesn't need to be there. Perhaps I'm wrong with that.
My happy endings aren't usually the declarations of eternal devotion I see in some other stories. I have a lot of trouble, personally, accepting that a couple who've only been together a few weeks have reached a stage where they can make those types of declarations to each other. After a few weeks, they're usually at the stage where they've decided they don't want anyone else and want to see where this thing goes for them. That's happy, isn't it?
Can you see the kinds of questions and doubts I live with and become exacerbated by negative reviews? I really need to deal with it better.
The good news is, I decided a couple of days ago to simply stop checking the reviews and Amazon rankings. Today, for the first time since What About Him was released, I opened my current WIP for final edits before submitting. The Courage to Love (the current WIP) has been effectively finished for a while but I've left it sit because it didn't FEEL finished and I couldn't work out why not. I now have floating in my head some still-pretty-nebulous ideas on what is missing in the storyline and how I can change it to make the story stronger.
The ironic thing is that I don't think I would have realised that without the negative reviews of What About Him. I am thankful to those reviewers who took the time to write thoughtful and constructive criticism of the story. Those reviews are going to make me a better writer.
The others, the nasty ones, can go suck eggs.
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