I've been thinking about this a lot lately, ever since I became addicted to Amazon.com reviews. Yes, it's a bad habit, I know. After that I started looking up professional reviews of books, and have found out there is only one undeniable truth to writing:
Someone will hate your book. Someone, somewhere, will hate everything you've written with a passion. It's inevitable.
I suppose bad reviews aren't the end of the world, but then there are reviews like these that just seem like they were over the top:
Yes, yes, I know. Easy targets, and there are plenty of worse reviews out there. But you get the point.
From big named writers to the newly published, authors love their books. They pour their heart and soul into them. It has to feel horrible when someone rips them apart.
How do you deal with scathing reviews? Have you ever had one? Do you tend to just ignore them as hard as you possibly can?
Someone will hate your book. Someone, somewhere, will hate everything you've written with a passion. It's inevitable.
I suppose bad reviews aren't the end of the world, but then there are reviews like these that just seem like they were over the top:
"(Dan Brown is the) worst prose stylists in the history of literature...the writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad." - Geoffrey Pullum on the Da Vinci Code
After trying valiantly to get past the first chapters (of Twilight), all I can say at this point is "WOW." What a load of grammatically incoherent, sexually repressed, Mormo-Victorian manipulation. I tried to pull my hair out after the first chapter, the syntax was so perplexing. - Eric Vogeler
(Stephen King is) a writer of penny dreadfuls...but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allen Poe What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis." - Richard Snyder
Yes, yes, I know. Easy targets, and there are plenty of worse reviews out there. But you get the point.
From big named writers to the newly published, authors love their books. They pour their heart and soul into them. It has to feel horrible when someone rips them apart.
How do you deal with scathing reviews? Have you ever had one? Do you tend to just ignore them as hard as you possibly can?
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