Celebs Read Mean Tweets (or Authors Write Mean Reviews)
“Robuck has all the syntax of a three-legged cow.” ~Snarky Reader, Online Review Site
Every so often, I pour myself a glass of wine and enact the virtual self-cutting that is reading online reviews of my work. When I self-published my first book in 2009, the negative reader reviews used to wound me. They hurt my feelings. I obsessed over them. Five years later, I am a bit more hardened, but I have to be in a certain light and ironic frame of mind to read them. If I am gloomy, it is not a good idea to patrol the one and two-star reviews.
Last week, however, the above line from a one-star review made me laugh out loud. It was a good and memorable insult. While I do not agree with it, I appreciate the humor and general savagery because I have to confess something: I would rather a nasty one-star review with zingers like this to a recent three-star review that said, “Meh.”
“Meh.”
Years of research, travel, lost sleep, agonizing, imaging, theorizing, writing, rewriting, and rewriting earned me a “meh.”
Please, readers, if the book does not move you to a positive or negative passion of some kind, do not review it.
But back to my snarky friend, I have seen some authors recently reading mean reviews in the style of Jimmy Kimmel’s popular “Celebs Read Mean Tweets” feature, and thought it would be fun to have a laugh over some particularly bad review stories.
So writers, if you are feeling up to it (play “The Eye of the Tiger” if you need to get pumped), please tell me your funny one-star reviews. Even if these criticisms make us giggle, they burrow somewhere in the brain stem to torture us when we sit down to write. Perhaps if we put them on paper, we can release them from our consciousness and have a laugh together.
Cheers!
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Thank you for sharing this, Terin. I think the negative review is often more about the reviewer than the work. Thank you for your post!
Because this one has bothered me for a rather long time.
It wasn't even a review of a book I'd published, but rather, a book that (it seems) is going to be published, which at one time and in one form I'd entered to one of the early Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contests.
If you're unfamiliar with the contest, one early feature of it is that Amazon reviewers...being, in other words, just about anybody who reviews their purchases regularly, for, I guess, a certain amount of cache...get to review excerpts of manuscripts submitted for the first round of the contests, in which something like 2,500 entries are accepted for review.
So. I submitted a mystery. And the criticism was, essentially, "that would/could never really happen."
As you know me, much of my fiction is still based on personal experiences and knowledge of things like homicide investigations etc.
In other words, the reviewer/critic was sure in their knowledge of things I was describing. Except the reviewer was wrong. Because that particular opening scene was derived from direct observation, and participation in investigating, what turned out to be a crime scene...:)
As for the passionate versus dull review, I'm with you there. I actually hope to someday write something that gets banned, just as seemingly harsh criticism seems to often engender sympathy for the writer, or at least curiosity on the part of readers.
Never forget: The Great Gatsby, which has done so well since its author died, was NOT well received when it was first published.
And meanwhile, I'm still pondering (you see how this happens) what syntax a three-legged cow might conceivably have that sounds amusingly harsh if not a horrible distorted mixing of an attempt at metaphor using parts (three legs? syntax?) that don't work together...:)