Snarky review Blues

Sonarbabe

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Try not to feel too bad about it. :Hug2: I've only had two reviews that boiled my blood. One was some jerk I knew outside of romance writing (this guy has his own thread here in BABC) and has gone out of his insane way to stalk me. I had to have one of his Amazon.com reviews removed since I knew he hadn't read it and he slammed me as a person and as a writer. The other one was from a blog reviewer that gave me a mediocre rating, but couldn't bother to get my hero's name right. That really irritated me.
 

AllieB

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Actually, I don't completely ignore bad reviews. Even though they hurt, sometimes a lot, I also find that often there's something in there that I can learn from. Yeah they're subjective, but they're someone's opinion, which still counts for something even if I don't agree with it. If you can't find anything to take away from a review, then read it, feel lousy, and then move on. For everyone who doesn't like your book, there will be another who absolutely cannot put it down :)

Here are the bad ones (both for my very first novel), in case you were curious:

"The heroine is such an irritating creature. She's stupid, which is bad enough, but she is also very emotionally needy, irrational, and neurotic. She overreacts too often. Maggie is like this black hole that sucks all the joy from the people around her because she demands that they cater to her all the time...Therefore, while I can appreciate many things about One Night In Boston, my failure to appreciate one single thing about the supremely annoying heroine is a huge stumbling block in my appreciation of this story. File this one under "I would love this book to bits if the heroine dies in an explosive car crash by page 16."

AND

I ran into all the cliche roadblocks of Woman’s Fiction and a few from Romance. The alpha hero comes off, most of the time, as having a little too much estrogen in his diet (one of my big pet peeves). Heroine’s big secret, which the reader figures out by the end of the first chapter, is so horribly hooked I wanted to tear my hair out. So many characters with so many individual stories - I almost wanted to say, ‘who is your heroine and your hero?’. The plot gets warped because I am trying to follow so many characters and none of them truly get to make their mark in the tale.

(OK, I have to add here that just in case you think this story totally bombed, it also got 5 Hearts from The Romance Studio and 5 Blue Ribbons from Romance Junkies. So go figure...)
 

L.Jones

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Allie - I laughed, I cringed, I commiserated.

btw - the book is probably being yanked today for the next round of books but it seems to have done pretty well, so...

annie jones
 

Manat

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I sympathize with all the bad review stories. I got one from a woman who counted all the sex scenes, (lord knows why, it's not an erotic) noted how many pages long they were, and then really annoyed me by giving away a major plot point from the second half of the story. WTH??? That's just wrong!!
 

Ameliexx

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I'm not published yet, but one of my biggest fears is a bad review. Someone told me that I need to remember they are not attacking me personally and not to take it to heart. I know I'll sit and sob when I get my first bad review though. In the words of Taylor Swift "Shake it off" . I bet your book is awesome :)
 

Maryn

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Psst! Ameliexx! You have "necro-ed" a thread last active in 2008, bringing it back from the dead. While this won't get you in trouble, it's rarely a good idea, since the participants may have left AW or stayed but forgotten what they wrote 8 years ago.

If the topic is of general writerly interest, use the search box in the lower left corner to seek a more recent discussion.

Maryn, pleased to meet you