In this article I’m going to break a golden rule and talk about a negative review I received. Normally talking about reviews of your own books is not a good idea. However, I do think it’s important that we talk about how useful and positive a negative review can be.
I want to talk about this review because I think it’s great example of how a review from someone who didn’t like the book but wrote something useful and positive thing for both authors and readers. I have nothing but appreciation for the reviewer, who took the time both the read my book and write about it, and I hope that the readers of my blog will show this reviewer the same respect.
This particular review will form a kernel around which I talk about the relationship between authors and reviewers, and how to deal with other sorts of negative reviews. Once again, please let me emphasise that this is not an attack on the reviewer, who I believe wrote and an excellent and accurate description of why they didn’t enjoy the book as much as others might. The main objective is to show why their critique is so well written, how to see the positives in someone not liking what you wrote (and potential lessons to learn), and then look more broadly at negative reviews.
By Readers For Readers
Reviews are by readers for readers. Nail this thought into your head. A good review helps readers who will like your book, find your book, buy your book, and read your book. And, although of course we as writers may want everyone in the world to buy and read our book, it helps people who will not like it to make the decision not to buy.
This, is turn, maintains the good reputation of the book. It creates stronger links with other books, authors and groups who like your type of book, and generates more sales. To take full advantage of it, you need to know what a “good” negative review looks like and how to react to negative reviews, good or bad.
XXX’s good bad review
The following review was written by “xxx” (not their real name), a couple of months ago. I have no idea who the reviewer is, but if I ever find solid proof of identity, I will happily send them a free copy of my next book. Here is the review, followed by a breakdown of why it is such a good “bad” review.
3.0 out of 5 stars I wanted to give 3.5 stars but apparently half stars aren’t possible…
Ok, first off, I really would have liked to give this more stars than I have. The writing was of a high standard, and there were lots of really deft touches to the book. For example, the fight scenes were really well-written (even down to details like how to load/care for weapons etc.) which I thought was really unique for a fantasy book. There were also some really interesting parts in the middle about the nature of truth etc. which had me completely hooked, and the plot-twists (when they came) were satisfying. However (and this isn’t really any fault of the author) this just ended up not being my sort of book. I’ll say why below, so you can hopefully judge better for yourselves whether or not you’ll enjoy reading it!
Firstly, I found the world-building quite confusing (and I’m a lover of fantasy, so it’s not like this was my first time reading about a new society with lots of hierarchies). It’s a real shame, because I could tell that a lot of love and care had been put into creating this world, but I just felt I was always on the back-foot with trying to remember exactly how town/castle/mine etc. were linked, who the Kindred were as opposed to Wardens, and so forth. I know there was a lot of detail to the society, but it just didn’t seem to transmit from the page somehow.
The other main reason this ended up not being my sort of book was the amount of sex/violence/death in it. Admittedly not as much as something like Game of Thrones, but there was enough that at times it felt gratuitous to me, and meant I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I might have done otherwise. But, if you like reading that sort of thing (and I know plenty of people do!) then you should probably ignore my review and buy the book.
All that being said, it was engaging enough that I read to the end, and I’d still consider reading another book by the author in future. I think there’s as many reasons I’d recommend it as not, hence wanting to give it a middling rating, so if it sounds like your sort of thing from the blurb then by all means give it a try!
By the by, before we continue, if this has made you want to immediately go out and buy my Science Fantasy novel Vile – you can buy it here [LINK]
The Shit Sandwich
First of all, xxx has mastered the beloved shit sandwich. Start by saying something good, then share your reservations, then finish by saying something (anything) positive. This isn’t just to save the author’s feelings – remember, reviews are by readers for readers. But the reviewer’s ability to start and finish with something positive shows a level of professionalism: the ability to create a balanced review, which should give you more confidence in the review. A reviewer who can see both the good and the bad is better than one who can only flame or praise.
For you the author, you should take this moment to give yourself a little pat on the back. We all know you’re going to focus on the bad bits of the review. Take a moment to appreciate that it wasn’t all bad. That there were things the reader appreciated.
I wanted to give 3 ½ stars
This was very sweet of them. Book review grade inflation (which I wrote about here [LINK]), 3 stars is a bad review, and anything less is either trolling or the book is an OCR scan filled with spelling mistakes thus deserving whatever it gets.
Of course, 3 stars doesn’t mean the same thing from every reviewer – just as some reviewers will give 5 stars to anything they like and others have to really love it to give 5 stars (they should ease up, see grade inflation notes.)
But asides from in this review, which let me come away pretending it was really almost a four (it wasn’t, this was a three star review and the reviewer was being kind), you should stop worrying about the number of stars. Seriously. Stop it. I’ll explain later.
The world was confusing
I found the world-building quite confusing (and I’m a lover of fantasy, so it’s not like this was my first time reading about a new society with lots of hierarchies). It’s a real shame, because I could tell that a lot of love and care had been put into creating this world, but I just felt I was always on the back-foot with trying to remember exactly how town/castle/mine etc. were linked, who the Kindred were as opposed to Wardens, and so forth. I know there was a lot of detail to the society, but it just didn’t seem to transmit from the page somehow.
Yeah, guilty as charged. I indulged myself in building a super-complicated world and it was, shall we say, a touch over-ambitious for a first novel. I was satisfied with the finished project, but I can totally appreciate why a reader might find it too much effort to follow (not in a too lazy to follow way, in a wow running the marathon looks like a lot of effort, maybe I’ll try something else instead.)
Vile is low rather than high fantasy: a world that is “normal” into which apparently magical events intervene, rather than another dungeons and dragon’s world (I’ve read and enjoyed lots of good dungeons and dragon’s world books.) That actually makes low fantasy more complicated for the reader than high fantasy: you lose the ciphers that usually make access to fantasy easy,
Low fantasy worlds present a set of problems for both author and reader. In High Fantasy you can take a lot for granted: dragons, check, magic, check, boob armour, check. Low fantasy, much like Science Fiction, must establish what normal is. As the reviewer points out, who were the Kindred? Who were the Wardens? What was their relationships with the castle? It makes world-building and understanding the world much more difficult.
To make things worse, I indulged my love of the unreliable narrator and chose to have the story told from the perspective of people who had little to no understanding of the world about them (The Kingdom of Trist, where the story is set, is neighboured by two enormously more technologically advanced nations – something the Tristians don’t entirely understand, in the way the old women who helped with childbirth used to get burned as witches.) Throw on top of that the fact that the narrators are unreliable, often both traitors and liars, and its totally fair to come away feeling it is complicated.
So why is this a good negative review?
I wouldn’t change how I wrote Vile (I mean, I’d completely change how I wrote all of it if I wrote it now, but you know what I mean – I’m proud of the product and it said what I wanted to say.) I enjoy complexity, I enjoy stories where I cannot trust the characters, and I love stories the introduce me to new worlds. I am a huge Iain M Banks fan, and he produced (sob) hugely complex worlds which he just let you get on with figuring out or not – meanwhile the action carried on regardless.
But everyone has things that click and things that do not; things they understand quickly and things that do not fit into their context. That’s the case of xxx. They point out that they read a lot of fantasy, so they’re used to complex worlds, but something about this one didn’t work for them. It might be because my low fantasy is science fiction in disguise. It may have needed more exposition, and that’s something to think about if I return to this sort of novel. But reader to reader, they are saying that this is a particularly tricky to follow world and if that’s going to put you off you might not enjoy the book.
Which is an absolutely fair point. If were to get annoyed with the reviewer saying they found my complex novel too complex I would be an idiot.
Equally, some people don’t enjoy complex world-building. There are many people who won’t touch science-fiction with a barge pole, because they find it confusing, because they don’t like having to figure out what things are as well as what is going on, and really just want to get on with the story.
Also, fair. Vile is much, much close to an Iain M Banks novel (I flatter myself) than a Terry Pratchett novel (also a great writer.) If what you’re looking for is a new book with jokes about witches, this is not the book you are looking for. I’m all politics, betrayal and sword fights.
You see what I mean about positive from negative? The reviewer is saying a bunch of things they don’t like, but they’re fair, they’re clear, they’re polite (which makes them more persuasive), and they’re helping get the right readers to the right book.
Gratuitous sex and violence
Gratuitous is a tricky word – meaning as it does both unwarranted and without good reason – so, well, in the true sense of the word it is always bad. Every author struggles with whether something is necessary or not. Vile is a book about power and privilege, and how those in a position of power quickly resort to violence when their status is threatened. Obviously, if I thought the violence was unnecessary I wouldn’t have included it. But that doesn’t mean I go it right!
For example, I also thought that a central character called Christophe who was struggling with his father’s rejection of his homosexuality and his obsession with the Kindred was necessary to the book. Until the developmental editor told me to cut him. Wow, that was a lot of work – I still sometimes think he’s in the book – but the editor was right and I was wrong.
If you succeed in finding a way to write only that which is necessary and true, you have become a master, and may I please come visit you on the mountain to learn the secrets! Just as it was completely fair (and helpful) for the editor to call out Christophe as unnecessary (I still miss him, the editor was still right), so it is fair and helpful for XXX to say they found the sex and violence unnecessary. It’s a subjective opinion and there are lots of ways to write a good (or bad) book; it describes a place at which the book stood for them and thus helps other readers figure out where it will position for them.
The important thing to recognise is that the sex and violence was subjectively inappropriate for the reader: which means they are defacto right. For them the book had too much sex and violence. Gratuitous often goes hand in hand with excessive: what feels like the right amount of to one person can be too much or too little for another. There’s room for plenty of interesting academic debate there, but not a lot of space.
What xxx says is as follows:
The other main reason this ended up not being my sort of book was the amount of sex/violence/death in it. Admittedly not as much as something like Game of Thrones, but there was enough that at times it felt gratuitous to me, and meant I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I might have done otherwise.
Their subjective experience of the book, and thus entirely unquestionable, was that there was too much sex/violence/death, and that it felt unwarranted. This is a very useful comment for a potential reader.
Much of whether the subjective evaluation of sex and violence comes from your empathy with the characters and whether you feel that is what the character would do. Some people get some characters more easily than others, some situations we feel close to or far from (or indeed to close to) because of who we are. We feel empathy for people and things that we recognise – check out my article on Mind Modelling for more on that [LINK].
I found the reference to Game of Thrones very interesting (and incredibly helpful), because the TV series uses a great deal of sex as a means of distracting the audience from the exposition. Is this gratuitous? It is certainly useful as a way to get people to pay attention during a dispute about the politics of Westeros. Was the sex and violence in Game of Thrones just too much sex and violence? For a lot of people, absolutely. Did the writers always get the balance right? I think probably not, but I both enjoyed the series very much and completely understand why some people just gave up around episode 6. (To be fair, the end scene of the first episode might have been enough for a lot of us!)
Everyone has a threshold. Some people won’t read violent books at all. Some people are triggered by certain types of events, which is why it’s a good idea to try and communicate that your book is going to be violent with the cover and the blurb. We all like different books.
For me, the sex and violence in Vile was essential, because it illustrated what I have experienced far too often – when people in power feel their status is threatened they tend to resort to their fists/soldiers/bizarre legal measures in congress, and, in a domestic setting, sexual violence. Other readers may feel I could have done this better by focusing on the political elements of the book, and they may be right. What xxx has helpfully done is pointed out that this is a violent book, including sexual violence (and my God the sexual violence was hard to write), and so if you don’t like books with that sort of content, or found Game of Thrones too violent, stay away. That also means if you like darker fiction, this may well be good for you.
Let me re-iterate. If somebody feels the sex and violence is gratuitous, then for them it was unwarranted and unnecessary, As a writer I need to keep working to make every part of my story feel necessary, and as a reader they have every right to keep on feeling and expressing and exactly what they feel. Over time, you’ll get a feel for the sort of people who like the sorts of books you like (and the contrary), and that’s how an apparently negative review can be so important: they help build communities.
For example, I really struggle with romance novels where an adolescent enters into a relationship with a much older person. I find it creepy. Lots of books like this sell very well (I’m thinking, for example, of a very well known vampire series). If someone puts in there review they didn’t like the age gap – or that the age gap is there – it lets me know to stay away, whatever the quality of the book itself. (Yes, I have read Nabokov – I think you’re supposed to feel uncomfortable there!)
The bread on the bottom of the sandwich
All that being said, it was engaging enough that I read to the end, and I’d still consider reading another book by the author in future. I think there’s as many reasons I’d recommend it as not, hence wanting to give it a middling rating, so if it sounds like your sort of thing from the blurb then by all means give it a try!
This was a lovely thing for the reviewer to add, and I do hope they try my next book (which comes out at the end of August) – although I fear it is pretty violent as well (although a very different sort of book). Ending on a positive note lends weight to their criticism in the middle. They sound like a reasonable person, thus their points that the world of the book is complicated and violent, and therefore not for everyone, also seem reasonable. Because they are.
The end result?
As an author, I don’t want to read that my world is too complicated to make sense and that the sex and violence feels gratuitous. But it is written in a fair way, the opinion is presented subjectively, reasonably, and in a way that helps people know if they like the book or not. Any hurt feelings I might or might not have should be stowed (I don’t have any hurt feelings at all). This is, bottom line, a great review, because it explains what the book is like from the perspective of someone who didn’t enjoy it very much – but gives information that make attract other sorts of people who like this sort of book.
How should you respond to this sort of review?
You shouldn’t. Reviews are by readers for readers. That, I’m ashamed to say, includes not writing a three-thousand-word essay about the review. I hope this hasn’t come across as me trying to defend myself from a negative review. For those of you who feel it is inappropriate to talk about reviews at all, I humbly disagree; this particular review was a perfect example to talk about a subject of great importance from my perspective as a producer and publisher.
As someone who writes a LOT of reviews and critiques (particularly for plays), I’ve seen far too many authors explode because not everything in the review was about how they were the greatest thing since JK Rowling (oh, wait, we’re not supposed to like JK Rowling any more. Erm, Hemmingway? Shit, misogynist. Germaine Greer? Wrong sort of feminist. How about Jean Rhys. Can’t go wrong with Jean Rhys, surely).
The moment you start fighting with your readers, even readers who do not like you, you are heading down a dead-end street that finishes with fire and unhappiness and you generally being a cock. Someone took the time to read your book and write an opinion about that. This is amazing. Now get over yourself and leave them to their next book.
Other sorts of negative reviews.
Not all negative reviews are as good as this one. I’m going to quickly run through them and how you should respond.
Type 1: This hoover came with a scratch on the cover.
Yep, people are going to leave reviews for your book which are about other books, or other items, or God only knows what. File a complaint and then watch as the powers that be probably do nothing. Try to laugh about it. Most people checking the reviews will notice, and if you get enough reviews then stars don’t matter.
Type 2: The hit and run 1*
They leave 1* (or 2* or 3*) and then they say NOTHING. Aaaaaargh! This is very frustrating. To be fair, though, if they say nothing, they probably didn’t have anything positive to say, so let it go, let it go, do not let it hold you back anymore. I will explain why stars don’t matter later.
Type 3: The troll
1*: “This is the worst book I’ve ever read. This author is clearly a transphobic misogynist/feminazi anti-free speech fascist. I bet they only wrote this because their wife beats them.”
Get the champagne out. You’ve made it. Your book is popular enough that utter twats are leaving reviews! Huzzah! You’re a real author now. Plus, there is a song from Frozen you should be singing now.
Of course, that’s not what you’re going to do. If somebody comes after you, particularly with racial or sexual harassment, but also anything personal, its going to hurt. I suggest getting the champagne out anyway, and if you can find somebody or something to hug. You wrote a book. You’re amazing. They wrote a shitty comment. They must be very sad people.
Most importantly, asides from reporting type 1 and type 3 if it includes racial or sexual harassment, do not respond. Don’t hunt them down to argue with them on the internet. Don’t write long forum posts about how wrong they are about your book. The best you can achieve is the Barbara Streisand[i] effect: you draw people’s attention to the rubbish negative review and thereby lend it credence. Just forget about it. Negative reviews are part of the business.
Why stars don’t matter: the wisdom of crowds.
Copying direct from Wikipedia (although I read the actual paper when I did my PhD, it was refreshingly short and to the point): In 1907, Sir Francis Galton asked 787 villagers to guess the weight of an ox. None of them got the right answer, but when Galton averaged their guesses, he arrived at a near perfect estimate.
You don’t need to get five-star reviews and brutally eliminate one-star reviews. You do need to do everything you can to get people to review the book. Over time, the wisdom of crowds will do its thing and you’ll end up somewhere between 3.5* and 4.5*. If you’re less than that, take a deep breath and remember that writing and publishing a book is an amazing thing, even if people don’t like it at first (not many people liked the Great Gatsby at first). Bad reviews are going to have a disproportionate effect, so keep on pushing until you have hit the magic 30 reviews. That is not easy, so that is what you should be concentrating on
What matters about reviews, particularly early on, is they give a decent idea to people browsing amazon looking for books if they will like it or not. What is so very good at xxx’s review, whoever they may be, is that there will be people who come from reading that review in both directions: some will buy the book thanks to that review. And some people who would have hated it, because they like their blood and guts firmly on the inside, will be spared the discomfort of wasting their money. This is all good.
We are not part of this discourse. We wrote the book. It belongs to the readers now, and it is up to them what it means.
In the meantime, I am – as you should be when this happens to you – thrilled that someone took the time to think this deeply about my book. I hope they enjoy the next one.
Thank you, xxx. You write great reviews. I shall endeavour to write better books.
Image by mcmurryjulie from Pixabay
PS. This article has gone through MANY revisions since it was first published, thanks to feedback from the Facebook bookconnectors group who helped me find the most objective way possible to talk about a review of my own work, and navigate the ethical maze that goes with it. Much thanks to every who pitched in to improve this article.
[i] A million internet points to anyone who remembers the incident I’m talking about
