Reviews

When you first publish your book and you still enough copies. Figure suggested to me is that you get a review per 50 to 100 copies for yourself. Some of those reviews are going to be five star fantastic. And you will love those people. However there will also be people who give you one stars. And on the Internet people are extremely rude. They will tell you your work is utterly worthless, but you're an imbecile, that you have no talent at writing, they will undervalue everything you do. And in the most brisk way.

And then you look at those reviews and you will cry and you're not sleep and you will rage and I don't want to find those people and kill them, but when you look at those reviews what you will find is that many of them are internally inconsistent. For example I had a review once that said that a particular story was predictable and directionless. I thought I thought well if it is predictable it can't be directionless because to be directional this is not to be predictable. Then you will have a review Sue will be right your grammar and they themselves be full of basic grammatical errors.

I think the key thing to do in the situation is to look at the same story, all the same piece of work, and compare the reviews it says your main character is interesting, that the story kept the reader gripped, and that they were into it from the first page. And put them alongside the review that says your main character is shallow, unbelievable, whiny and obnoxious.

I was reading an article on the Internet by Chuck Wendig, Who is commissioned to write a Star Wars sequel novel. He garnered 111 one star reviews. If you don't know Chuck Eendig you should read his blog. It is thoughtful, entertaining and above all funny.

Chuck had been talking to some representatives from Amazon, and they told him that as far as Amazon is concerned it is the number of reviews the drive is traffic. So the quality of the reviews, and what those reviews say it's not as important as the number of reviews you have on your book. That's an interesting fact, and I do not doubt that it is true.

The only time I would suggest that you take account of reviews is when they are not simple simply abusive or ecstatically praising, but when they point out something in your stories. Example I had one story where a couple of readers had pointed out that they would like extra description. One asked me to describe the main character more. The second suggested that I do more description of the physical world that the character inhabited – the objects in the room. I think that would both of these reviewers were suggesting was that I wasn't spending enough time anchoring the reader in the scene. Neil Gaiman One said, and I paraphrase, that when a reader tells you that they have an issue with something in your story, you should listen to them. Because even if they don't know exactly what the problem is they will have sensed that something is wrong. He also added that while they may be nearly always right incensing a problem, you should never take your advice on how to fix that problem, because it is nearly always wrong.