R is for Reviews

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. That’s my cardinal rule.

I know that some readers love interacting with authors on their books’ review pages, and I know that some indies try to make it a point to respond to every review, but I’ve seen that sort of thing blow up so many times that I strictly avoid it. Just this past week, a spat between an author and a one-star reviewer turned so ugly, the author calculates that he lost $23,000 over it. Whether or not that’s true is anyone’s guess, but the author’s response to the reviewer certainly hasn’t made anything better.

Reviews are an inevitable fact of life when you’re an indie writer. If you value your sanity at all, you have to learn not to attach any emotional value to them. Sure, the positive reviews feel great and can really boost your ego, but the negative ones can really throw you into a funk if you let them. The sooner you can learn to shrug your shoulders and shake it off, the better.

But aside from the emotional dimension, so reviews have a practical effect on sales of your books? Probably, though I suspect that the number of reviews matters a lot more than the average star rating. Plenty of readers report buying a book after reading the negative reviews, and plenty of others say that they just ignore the star rating altogether. Also, having lots of generic five-stars can hurt more than they help if they all sound vapid or fake.

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. That means that I stay out of the review sections as much as I can. On some very rare occasions, I’ve popped in to clarify an obvious mistake, but I never stick around or engage longer than I have to.

For example, here’s one of my one-stars on Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I):

Boring in the extreme. No new ideas – just shooting up aliens. Big deal. I could have gotten the same watching my kid play his video games.

The book actually has nothing to do with aliens (or space battles, for that matter), so in order to clarify, I responded with the following:

Hi, I’m Joe Vasicek, author of the STAR WANDERERS books. I don’t normally respond to Amazon reviews, but I thought I should point out that you may have reviewed the wrong book in error. There aren’t any aliens or futuristic gun battles in this particular book. Perhaps you found it boring for other reasons, or perhaps you meant to attach this review to another of my books. I’m not opposed to negative reviews, but I thought I should point that out in case there’s been some sort of mistake.

Either way, thanks for giving one of my books a try!

The reviewer was actually quite nice and responded with an apology, saying that he would check out the book again and remove the review if it turned out to be a mistake. He hasn’t removed the review yet, probably because it’s slipped his mind, but I’m not going to push it. There’s really no way that I can graciously do so, and besides, the review probably isn’t going to do much harm anyway.

Every once in a while, I’ll receive a negative review that does bring up enough good points to make me wince. When that happens, I try to remember that reviews are subjective and that just because one person thought the book was horrible doesn’t mean that everyone will. No two readers are alike, just like no two books–thank goodness for that! And if the review stings because there’s an element of truth in it, at least I can take lesson to the next book.

I do read all my reviews, but that’s because I’ve got a thick skin and I’ve learned how to deal with it. I wouldn’t recommend that to everyone, since some authors really do get worked up over the negative ones. Personally, I’d get more worked up not knowing what people are saying about my books than knowing that they’re saying something bad.

As to whether I solicit reviews, I can’t entirely say that I don’t do it, because at the end of every book I include an author’s note where I encourage readers to leave an honest review if they liked it. But I never, NEVER pay for reviews, or participate in review exchanges, or do anything like that to game the system. Reviews are for readers, not writers–gaming the system is one of the worst possible ways to violate that. Besides, readers aren’t stupid–they can tell what’s real from what’s fake.

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. At the core of that rule is the principle that readers should have a safe-zone where they can talk about books without having to worry about any sort of blowback from the author. Towards that end, even positive, gracious engagement with reviewers can turn around and bite you. There really is no way to win this game–or rather, the only way to win is not to play.

By Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.

2 comments

  1. That’s a very wise approach, given you want to point out misinformation, though I could still see that going either way. Your response was very tactful.

    The self publishing boom has led to a lot of the backlash IMO, though I have also seen bad author behavior by traditionally published authors (and sadly in at least one case I witnessed, their agent). Writing is a tough gig–I’m still on the beginning end, but I know what it’s like to be rejected by agents and to receive negative contest feedback. Some of it is legit, other times it’s someone’s opinion that may even be totally uninformed (I write YA and for a submission that was historical a judge said that teens wouldn’t want to read about things that happened “a long time ago.” Um… okay).

    In the wilds of the internet, you may be able to self publish, and you may be able to say whatever you want when ever you want on any platform. But there are consequences. The people who understand that will be the ones who have a lasting career.

    Hope you are enjoying the A to Z Challenge. Here’s my post for today on Memorable Characters.

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