I’ve been watching some BookTok drama lately where a new author with a big following has run up against a reviewer that really didn’t like their book. I wouldn’t give any more details if you put a gun to my head. There’s no reason to make a messy situation worse by covering it, and I get enough screwball mail as it is. It does, however, raise the age-old question: should an author respond to a bad review?
Short answer: probably not.
To be clear, there are bad reviewers out there. Spend any time in the 1-star section of even celebrated authors on Amazon and Goodreads and you’ll see some people simply are not typing their reviews from the same reality you’re reading them from. Some people have bizarre axes to grind about the subject matter, some seem to have read a completely different book, and some are just mean or think it’s funny to be awful.
So, yes, maybe your anger is justified when someone says your book about an elvish war has too many elves in it or something equally ridiculous. There are a few ways to deal with that.
The first, and best option, is to ignore it. As a journalist and a fact checker whose work is literally taught in college-level courses on critical thinking, I can tell you that explaining things to people who are wrong has a 5 percent success rate on a good day. Do it gently, sternly, pleadingly, authoritatively, or a combination of them all, and some folks are just going to be wrong on purpose. To amend an old Ron White bit, “you can’t fix stupid that doesn’t want to be fixed.”
If you find that a misconception about your book has gotten out of control and spread virally, you can always post an answer to the general question on a forum that you control. Never respond directly to a review unless you want to answer a question that seems to be asked in good faith.
Conversely, you can do what local horror writer Patrick C. Harrison III does and enjoy his 1-star reviews. He takes them as a badge of honor. I’d almost think it was a marketing trick if there weren’t so many of them. Hell, I took the last piece of hate mail I got and turned it into my Facebook cover photo. It can be very cathartic.
However, it leads to a different problem, and the crux of the BookTok drama I mentioned. All our algorithms prioritize engagement, and nothing engages like a good fight. A lot of parasitic independent reviewers know this and target a certain level of author. Ideally, they want someone with a good-sized following (500,000 or so), but not a lot of experience in the industry, so they can pray on insecurities.
With any luck, their evisceration of the work leads the author to talk about it on their own channels, a flood of defenders shows up, there’s a backlash to that, and the next thing you know you’ve won the algorithm’s favor. Next stop, a Raid: Shadow Legends sponsorship!
Of course, this often leads to targeted harassment, death threats, doxxing, and other vile internet behavior. It’s nice to know fans have your back, but increasing the base amount of toxic drama on social media is a losing game. Get big enough and the fight will end up on a damn wiki for posterity. Even if you make it crystal clear you don’t want people acting so awfully on your behalf, with a big enough mob it is inevitable. The last thing you want to give a gadfly is a solid basis for a persecution complex. That’s where the money really starts to flow for them.
Yes, you have the right to respond to a review. Their freedom to comment on your work extends both ways. I will say this, though. Every moment you spend worrying about that bad review is a moment not spent writing.
The best parable of this whole phenomenon comes from John Irving’s The World According to Garp. The titular Garp transitions from writing books to answering his hate mail. His wife calls it “building bookshelves.” Garp starts out responding with thoughtful, well-intentioned letters. At first it goes not terribly, but it quickly descends into acrimony and threats.
This poisonous habit manifests even further as he starts to pick fights with a fringe cult that irritates him. Instead of writing books, he writes articles about why they suck, prolonging their public exposure and bringing them new recruits. One of them eventually kills Garp. Cause of death: not learning to leave a bad review the fuck alone.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
