Every week I publish a post with a single Ask Me Anything question. I’ll start in the beginning with questions found on a website to ask authors, but leave comments with your own questions and I’ll get to them.
Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?
I don’t. Not unless I’m looking for sound bites for promo stuff, and even then I’ll often ask a friend or one of my kids to do that for me.
The closest I come these days is keeping a general idea of my overall rating on a book, and that’s only a loose idea and usually only for a few weeks after it’s released.
Have I?
Yeah, we all want validation, but then I realized a few things.
- I don’t write for them, I write for me. Does liking my stories be loved and bought help? hell yea. but in the end, that’s not what matters to me.
- Reviews are not for the author. Reviews are for other readers.
- People are MEAN. They don’t just address the product. They don’t review just the book. No. Many people will attack the author. As if the author themselves have done what the characters did, or as if it takes a murderous psychopath to come up with what’s in a book (and if you’ve ever read mine, and also read something like Dean Koontz or Stephen King, you’ll know my shit’s tame.)
- People are also idiots. What makes me say that? I had a shifter book that I used to market as erotica. It’s not. It’s a steamy romance story. But the review that made me stop reading them? “too much sex and not enough action.” Um. Did you not read the blurb? Clearly not.
I realized that reading reviews was not conducive to a good state of mind or a good place to write from. I haven’t read reviews in over ten years and I have no intention of going back.