Negative Feedback: What To Do
It’s a challenge for anyone, but particularly I think for writers: how to glean something useful from negative feedback. Sure, negative feedback sucks for everyone; but it’s particularly awful when people are absolutely excoriating your beloved baby. Your book. The Price of Desire, my second book, was not initially well received. There was too much history; there were too many interpersonal relationships, but they didn’t fit into any standard genre mold. There was too much discussion of political issues. The characters were too flawed. Which…none of that was fun to read.
And then, one day, while I was breaking my own rule and dwelling on my negative reviews, it came to me: one reviewer had, thoughtfully, provided me with the answer. “It’s not good science fiction, anyway,” he’d written. Which…he was right! It wasn’t! Because it wasn’t science fiction! It was speculative fiction. It was an alternate history (with, correspondingly, an alternate future). All the positive reviews, and comments from readers, had one thing in common: they kept calling the book “literary.”
Gosh, I realized, I’d written literary fiction.
People who actually enjoy this kind of book are my market.
All of this…was challenging to realize. Believe it or not. But once I did, I immediately felt better; because the problem wasn’t that my book wasn’t any good (I knew it was), but that it was encountering something of an ugly duckling problem. In terms of genre fiction, it was an ugly duckling. The issue, often, isn’t the quality of one’s writing but reader expectations. Finding success for your work can be as simple as finding the right audience. Now, “simple,” of course, doesn’t mean “easy.” Many straightforward, obvious things are in fact incredibly challenging to accomplish. But once I realized what the problem was, I had a goal.
And I realized, too, that I could use the feedback I’d received, both positive and negative, to help connect the book with people for whom these “flaws” were actually strengths; hearing that you’re not a duck can be hard, but knowing that you’re not a duck is one more step along the path to realizing that you are a swan.
When it comes to marketing your book, sometimes you get it right the first time around. And sometimes you don’t. Books on discrete topics, like how to self publish your novel, are pretty easy to shelve. But books that defy easy genre categorization are harder. Particularly when you’ve gotten comfortable of thinking of your book in one way, i.e. as a science fiction novel, and suddenly readers tell you different. It can feel a little like being cast adrift; but it’s also extremely liberating. Or can be, if you approach the situation with the right attitude.
The “right” attitude being, I think, what can I learn from this?
Yes, you can try to teach people what they should like in romance, or science fiction, or whatever. Or you can give the people what they want. Not by changing yourself, or your own writing, but by doing a better job connecting yourself with all the people out there who are already looking for you. Even if they might not know it. You are what someone wants; rather than fighting a losing battle, trying to convince someone (or a great many someone’s) to change their mind, go where you’re already wanted. Which takes a leap of confidence, assuming that those people do in fact exist but, like the commercial says, you’re worth it.
Thoughts?
