Bad Author Behavior

I recently read an article in the Guardian regarding an author (who shall remain nameless) who I believe has exhibited the worst in what I call: Bad Author Behavior. As writers there are only a few cardinal rules that absolutely should never be broken, one of them and perhaps the most important of them, is never ever EVER respond to negative reviews. It’s difficult at times, because you put your heart and soul into something and you want people to like it, but the reality is that, not everyone is going to like it. People don’t owe you anything (as Chuck Wendig noted in his most recent blogpost), nobody has to like your book just because you think they do. But if they write a negative review, it’s probably a very very bad idea to respond to it, multiple times, calling them out on how many ways they are wrong, and demanding they prove their reasoning behind why they felt the way they did, and demanding they prove it with fact.

Here’s a little tidbit of advice from one author to another, reviewers even if apart of major blogs, are not in fact journalists. They have no requirement to show proof of their opinion, it’s a review, and therefore like all art review, one persons opinion on a given story. They don’t have to have a reason for calling your book hackney or childish or boring or whatever other adjectives they may use. No one, I repeat, no one owes you an explanation for why they dislike your book. Sure, if this were a writing critique setting I would say by all means, ask why they felt this way… but a review isn’t an authors group. You’re not there to offer constructive criticism you’re telling how you felt about it, and some people aren’t going to be nice. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also reality. It’s a harsh reality, but being writers we have to understand this early on, because it isn’t going to be pretty and could end up leading to a lot of very bad publicity on our part.

I understand the difficulty of this, but the thing of it is, the original review, was not all that severe, actually as ‘scathing’ reviews go, it was pretty tame, and in spite of the author’s pleas for further explanation I thought the article was well thought out and well stated. But even if the reviewer had simply said: this is garbage, stop writing immediately. They don’t OWE you more than that. It’s a review, it’s a bad one, and it’s mean and nasty but it’s a review and when you put your work out there it’s the risk you run. We all know this, we have to know this, we’re writers. If you expect to make your book publicly available and think you’re going to be the one author in the history of writing to NOT get a single bad review your going to be sorely mistaken.

AN: I’m not mentioning the authors name or book a) because I don’t want to give them more publicity and b) to be honest I don’t want them finding my blog and giving me a ten mile long comment blast as they did with their original reviewer. I suspect if you looked through the Guardian’s Book Section after a page or two you would find it, or even a Google search of author reacts badly to negative review might pop up with the author in question.