How to handle a 1-star review?

Tomorrow starts National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, and thousands of writers will embark upon writing their novels. Some of them will actually finish and publish or self-publish their NaNoWriMo books. 

Which means thousands of writers will soon undergo that rite of passage: their first 1-star review.

If you happen to watch a lot of online writers’ groups, the reactions to the first 1-star review usually predictable. What should the new writer do? Should they contact Amazon and demand that the review be taken down? Should they confront the reviewer and explain what they got wrong about the book? Should they rewrite the book from scratch to address the reviewer’s criticism? Should they unpublish the book since it’s clearly not ready for prime time? Or should they give up writing altogether since they’re obviously no good at it? 

Of course, the truth is that none of these reactions are helpful or constructive, and some of them can be highly counterproductive and even destructive. 

So, how best to handle that first 1-star review? 

The very first bad review you get as a new writer is painful, there’s no doubt about it. 

I can still remember the first bad review I ever got. However, this was like almost twenty years ago at this point. There have been hundreds of bad reviews since then, maybe thousands if you count Goodreads, and I have a better chance of remembering what I had for lunch today (soup and a bag of frozen vegetables, I think, or maybe it was a sandwich?) than any of those bad reviews. 

You can say I have some experience in the matter. Based on that, here are some tips and tricks for dealing with bad reviews. 

1. ) Acknowledge that it is a painful experience.

No one likes to be told that their work is bad, and depending on the review, it could contain various personal insults as well. It is normal to find this unpleasant.

However, everyone has unpleasant experiences, and some experiences are quite a bit more unpleasant than someone saying they don’t like your book on the Internet.

How you react to an unpleasant experience is very often more important than the experience itself, so let’s move on to that.

2.) Reflect that people have a right to their opinion, and not everyone will like your book.

The great thing about self-publishing is that you can pretty much write and publish anything you want, so long as you don’t violate any of your local laws. This is an excellent freedom that we should cherish, since it’s a lot better than having to deal with agents and acquisition editors.

However, if you accept that, then you also need to accept the other edge of the sword – that just as you have the right to self-publish anything you want, people have the right to think and say whatever they want about what you wrote. You cannot have one without the other. It is fundamental to the nature of the enterprise.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion – but more on that below. 

3.) Realize that a billion people speak English.

It always feels bad when someone doesn’t like your book. However, if you’re reading this, you probably read books in English. According to Google, something like 1.5 billion people in the world speak and read English, and a very large percentage of them have ereaders or read stuff on their phones.

So if one person doesn’t like your book, oh, well – there are literally tens if not hundreds of millions of other readers who might enjoy it. It’s just a matter of finding them, which is a separate topic.

4.) Under no circumstances engage with the reviewer.

Never, never, never, never, never respond to a bad review. (Especially on Goodreads.) It almost always never goes well. At best, you might have an awkward interaction with someone. At worst, it might go viral on Twitter and you will have an Internet mob show up to complain on your social media pages. 

If the review contains incorrect information, you might be tempted to respond to point it out. It’s almost always a mistake to do that. Like, an exception could be if the review complains about the bad formatting, and you could say “that has been corrected, contact Amazon support and they’ll push the updated file to your device”, that kind of thing. However, it’s best to do this judiciously and rarely.

Don’t cyberstalk the bad reviewer and start leaving anonymous comments on their pages, or sending angry phone messages to their employers. There have been numerous documented cases of this, and they never end well. 

Never track down a bad reviewer and confront them in person. There have been a few cases of angry authors turning up at reviewers’ houses to vent their complaints. And for God’s sake, don’t show up at the reviewer’s workplace and attack them with a wine bottle. This actually happened in Scotland a few years ago.  

Remember – you have the right to write whatever you want, and the reviewer has the right to write whatever they want about your book, and it’s best to leave it at that. 

5.) Acknowledge that most people’s opinions are generally pointless. 

That said, it is also good to remember that most people’s opinions on most topics are pretty pointless. 

The modern age is an egalitarian one, where even billionaires and politicians feel the social pressure to make gestures that show they are part of The Common Man, and everyone thinks their opinions are just as good as everyone else’s. Overall, I think this is better than the sort of society where one can be executed for making accidental eye contact with one’s social superior or arrested for using astrology to determine the day the King will die. However, this overlooks the fact that most people’s opinions on most topics are useless. 

That isn’t harsh, that’s just the nature of opinions. Like, if I were to offer an opinion about the current state of Welsh politics, it would be pretty useless because 1.) I’m not Welsh, 2) I don’t live in Wales, 3.) I don’t speak Welsh, 4.) I’ve never visited Wales or the rest of the UK, and 5.) I can’t name a single actual Welsh politician. (I do know that the Welsh parliament is called the Senedd, but only because I was considering something similar as a character name and I Googled it.) 

A lot of negative book reviews are like that. Many of them boil down to “I don’t like this book for reasons I am unable to articulate clearly.” Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that doesn’t mean the opinion contains any information other than “I don’t like this”, and that’s no reason to stop writing or to completely remake your book. 

6.) Acknowledge that sometimes criticism is hallucinatory, outright insane, or just looking to stir up trouble. 

Then there are the bad reviews where you wonder if the reader actually read the book, or if the reviewer might actually be insane. 

Occasionally, I have had bad reviews or readers write to me about things that did not actually happen in the book in question. I once got a very angry email from a reader offended at the violent rape scenes in GHOST IN THE FORGE. Except…there are no violent rape scenes in GHOST IN THE FORGE! Not one! Or in the entire GHOST series, for that matter. I would have assumed that the reader got me mixed up with some other writer, but she mentioned several characters and locations from GHOST IN THE FORGE. So, either the reader 1.) imagined scenes that didn’t happened, or 2.) was bored and was trying to sir up some trouble. 

I definitely didn’t respond to that email.

There are also times when someone’s personal experience causes bad reviews. There was one reviewer who just hated, hated, the love triangle in one of my books and wrote a lengthy review complaining about how it reminded her of her ex-husband, and then went through and left a one-star review for every other book in the series. For obvious reasons, it was especially wise not to respond to that one, nor to share my opinion that her ex-husband was probably quite a bit happier now.

And sometimes people are just looking for a fight. One time I got a Facebook message from someone saying that his wife was an English teacher who was sitting on the couch laughing at my books because they were so bad. Obviously, any number of snappy comebacks come immediately to mind – that it’s nice of his wife to give him permission to have an opinion, that his wife might need a reading break after seeking satisfaction elsewhere because he was quite obviously unable to provide it, etc – but, of course, I simply ignored the message.

(Also, if you’re going to send angry messages to someone, best not to use Facebook Messenger – the recipient can see your profile and many of your pictures.)

There are also bad reviews caused by utter failures of reading comprehension. 

Once someone went through FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT and reported to Amazon that every instance of the word “manetaur” should have been “minotaur.” But the creatures in question were in fact named manetaurs! They appear in several of the FROSTBORN books. Poor Brad Wills had to push his voice to make “manetaur” voices in the audiobooks, not “minotaur” ones. This is just bad reading comprehension. 

So if you have a bad review caused either by hallucinations about the book’s actual contents or poor reading comprehension, it is definitely best to ignore them. 

7.) If you own or control the platform in question, delete the bad review.

If someone leaves a bad review on your website or social media page, go ahead and delete it. There’s absolutely no reason to allow bad reviews or negative comments on any pages you control. You don’t have to be contentious about it – just hit the delete button without replying. Facebook has as surprisingly useful feature called Hide Comment. A hidden comment is invisible to everyone except the person who posted it and people on their friends list. That means most people will not see the comment, and human psychology being what it is, the commentor will just assume no one is interacting with the comment and forget about it. 

Also, if someone leaves bad reviews in comments on your website, go ahead an delete it. If you have a website and let bad reviews appear in the comments, that means you are literally paying to host a bad review! Why spend your money doing that?

Never respond to a bad review, but neither are you obliged to actually host the bad review on your site.  The delete button is there for a reason. 

8.) Sometimes the bad review is right, but that can be validating. 

As you gather more experience writing, you tend to make more and more specific creative choices. Not everyone will like those choices, and will sometimes express themselves in a bad review.

If you get a bad review like that, it’s a good thing – it means you achieved what you set out to do. A couple of times I’ve gotten bad reviews that say “I HATED the way Character X did this” or “I HATED this plot development.” When they’re things I’ve specifically set out to do, that’s a good sign – it means I did them. Returning back to item #2, not everyone will like your book, and that means not everyone will like the creative choices you made in that book. 

So if you get a bad review complaining about something you intended to do in the book, that means you hit the nail on the head.

9.) Continue writing.

A bad review is no reason to stop writing. Keep working on the next project, and the next project, and the next project, and eventually you’ll have so much stuff that you’ll arrive at the next point.

10.) It gets easier with experience. 

I’m coming up on publishing my 135th book. I’ve written so many books that I had to go and double-check that yes, in fact, I am working on book #135. I tried to write a novel for the first time in 1997, I was Traditionally Published for the first time in 2005, and I’ve been self-publishing since 2011.

So I can say that if you do this long enough, you get to a place where the bad reviews don’t really register for long and quickly slip from your memory, and eventually the unsolicited opinions of strangers start to matter much, much less than they did with the first book.

I realized this had happened to me a few years ago when I saw a long, ranty review on one my audiobooks. I thought it was hilarious and started to read it aloud of a family member, expecting it would get a laugh. Instead, the family member in question was horrified and sincerely asked if I was okay. I was baffled by this reaction, but then I understood that I had been writing for so long that I had, indeed, developed the thicker skin that comes with experience. 

That turned out be a really long post! So here’s the TLDR version.

1.) Bad reviews happen. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. You aren’t obligated to listen.

2.) Never respond to or engage with a bad review.

3.) Keep writing.

Hopefully, if you are a new writer who has just gotten than first 1-star review, this will prove helpful. 

-JM