The Write Path 17: Coping With Negative Reviews

by Brian Lancaster

In a past life, before I retired to write gay MM romances full-time, I travelled across Southeast Asia as a corporate leadership trainer.

One of our popular courses was “Leading Effective Meetings,” and specifically the module on running successful performance reviews. If you’ve ever had a corporate job, you know the drill: annual appraisals, awkward feedback sessions, and, hopefully, some constructive guidance to help you improve in the year ahead.

The section typically took learners through the structure of the assessment meeting, reminding assessors of a few crucial points:

· Balance the negative with the positive. Don’t just highlight an individual’s shortfalls.

· Factual, not opinion-based. Whether positive or negative, validate the feedback with factual examples.

· Critique the behaviour, not the person. Ignore the individual’s dreadful tie and focus on performance.

· Be prepared for emotions. An underlying personal issue might explain a person’s underperformance, provoking a strong reaction.

In short, remember that feedback is an opportunity to help someone maintain positive habits or rectify performance issues.

We also provided training on how to receive feedback. Points covered typically included:

· Listen without interrupting. From the outset, mentally frame the input as valuable and worth hearing.

· Don’t get defensive. Avoid cutting off the appraiser to justify your actions or interrupt them to argue a point.

· Ask for specific examples. Use a simple question such as, “In your opinion, what would have been a better way for me to handle that?”

If I’m perfectly honest, I consider these guidelines applicable to many situations. I like to think that I have embraced them to help friends and family through difficult times. When I submitted my first manuscript to a publisher, I did so because I had heard good things about them and because they provided helpful feedback to aspiring writers on why a story was not quite ready for publication. Back then, I thought I had fully absorbed these life lessons and learnt intuitively how to respond to constructive feedback with grace.

Then my novel, Companion Required, landed a dreaded One-Star Review on Amazon.

Grace? Forget it. I felt betrayal, humiliation, and outrage. The words felt like a personal attack. How could anybody be so hurtful? What had I done to them?

To make matters worse, the horrible review stayed at the top of the novel listing for weeks, even as positive reviews kept appearing. Every time I went to check, there it sat, like pigeon poop on the lamp post outside my front door: offensive but untouchable. What I found most frustrating was that I could not ask the person to explain their remarks or question what I could have done differently—all the things I could do in the workplace.

I wanted to send the reviewer my crib sheets on delivering effective feedback, or even invite them into a conversation. But alas, as I have come to accept in the modern world of “like and subscribe,” it is deemed acceptable to review without care, consideration, or fear of consequences.

I reached out to everyone I knew—reader friends, other writers, my publisher, and even Amazon to ask why this review still sat in the top spot. Not surprisingly, that last action produced no results, not even the courtesy of an automated response.

During this process, I learnt a valuable lesson: You cannot please everyone.

An established writer friend laughed good-naturedly and told me I would need to strap on my “author armour” if I wanted to survive in the publishing world. To cheer me up, she sent me a link to a Goodreads review of Sense and Sensibility. A fourteen-year-old had ripped Jane Austen’s classic to shreds, calling it dull, passionless, and “just a bunch of people visiting each other’s houses,” recommending a popular YA vampire romance novel instead. You can probably imagine some of the hilarious responses from readers to that particular review.

The point my friend was making was that everyone sees something different in the written word. That someone took the time to write a review at all should be viewed as a positive sign. Some readers might grace us with a cursory DNF (”Did Not Finish”) to let us know this was not for them. Many simply stop reading without a word. People have different expectations, believing their own tastes and opinions matter most. Delve into the world of social media today and read the comments sections if you need further proof.

What else did this teach me? When it comes to ourselves, we give far more weight to criticism than to praise. That’s not to say we should ignore negative feedback, but give yourself time to digest what has been said and try not to take the comments to heart. Moreover, don’t gloss over favourable reviews. If someone has taken the time to write about their positive experience of your work, keep that close to your heart. That was always the first rule of our feedback training sessions.

As I say, do take time to read and absorb critical responses. You may find them unfounded, and you can move on knowing that you’ve at least considered their words. Such is the nature of feedback. But you might also find a diamond in the coal scuttle.

Around the same time, my publisher sent me an article on how to remove negative book reviews from Amazon. By then, I had decided to roll with the punches and take the reviewer’s feedback at face value. I took my writer friend’s advice, made my peace with the comments, and stopped obsessively checking the listings.

Oddly enough, when I looked again months later, the review had disappeared.

But I did read the article. One particular line from an aspiring author jumped out at me: “I’ve just received my first-ever one-star review on Amazon. I guess I’m a real author now.”

I think I might have found my epitaph.