Dealing with Bad Reviews

For obvious reasons, we authors tend to share our good publication news and hope the less-good stuff gets buried in the far corners of the Internet, but I thought it might be interesting to discuss one of those less-good things.

I’m talking about bad reviews.

While I generally stay away from Goodreads and Amazon reviews, I will read my trade reviews—good, bad, or ugly. I like to know what critics are saying about my work before it circulates throughout the publishing industry. When the first trade review came out for my new book, The Hitchcock Hotel, it was… not nice.

No matter how many books or [insert your art product here] you’ve put out into the world, no matter how many bad reviews you’ve received for previous projects, it still hurts—a lot!—when you get that first lousy critique on a new project. The people pleaser in me wants to make every reader happy, and the first bad review is proof that, once again, I have failed. (Note: you will never make everyone happy with your art; this is not something to which you should aspire. I’m working on it.)

Here’s how I deal, in the hope that maybe it helps you deal too.

Cry. Most of us have failed or gotten underwhelming performance reviews at some point in our working lives. Now imagine if that crappy review was posted online for literally anyone with a Wi-Fi connection to see (parents, colleagues, potential future employers, exes, etc.), and will remain there for, I don’t know, the rest of your life or until your company of employment implodes—whichever comes sooner. What follows is shame, defeat, and remorse. Those are heavy feelings! I let them out.
Get back to work. This is not for the faint of heart, nor something I always achieve. After a bad review, my confidence in my writing abilities is usually shot for a little while. I usually need to lick my wounds. On a good day, though, I channel my anger and embarrassment onto the page, determined to prove the critic(s) wrong.
Help with someone else’s work. Beta read a fellow writer’s WIP. Blurb a friend’s new book. If I’m too down on myself to work on my own project, I like to lose myself in someone else’s. I’m not nearly as judgmental of—or, and this is important, emotionally attached to—my peers’ writing, which takes the pressure/focus/self-pity off of me. Bonus: you get the positive feeling of being helpful. Now we’re counteracting the negative feelings with some good ones.
Exercise. Feeling incapable as a writer? Go feel capable elsewhere. For me, exercise takes the steam out of big emotions and helps settle (read: exhaust) my nerves.
Shower. Listen, I never said this list was going to be revolutionary. At the risk of being overly literal, wash it off. Start fresh.
Read bad reviews of great books. I’m not proud of this one, but I am being honest. Award-winning books have shitty reviews. Bestselling books have shitty reviews. If I’m really struggling, I’ll look up the current top books in my genre on Goodreads and read some of the stinkers. They don’t make me feel good about my own writing, but they do make me feel less bad, if that makes sense. Everyone gets bad reviews—that’s the nature of the job. It helps to remind ourselves we’re not alone in our mortification.
Match every loss with a win. I never manage this on the same day I get a bad review, but the next day or the day after, I can do it. No book publication has ALL good news or ALL bad news. When bad news keeps nagging at you, snap back at it with some good news. That review was terrible. Yes, but my publisher is sending me on a book tour, so they must believe in the story. The good news can be as small as someone tagging me in an Instagram post, saying they’ve added the book to their TBR.
Remember that art is subjective. Here are excerpts from two trade reviews for my last book, This Might Hurt: “…the genre-savvy will see the twists coming from miles away…” AND “…will leave readers guessing until the very end.” What one critic thought was dead obvious, another never saw coming. I’ve kept these quotes in a note on my phone ever since to remind myself that art is subjective.
Keep writing. Similar to #2, but I mean this in a longer-term sense. Get better at my craft. Focus on the part of my career I can control (writing), and let go of the part I can’t (publishing). Refuse to quit. Prove the reviewer wrong.
Wait for time to pass. The day I read a bad review, I can recite the insults verbatim. A handful of days later, I can only remember a word or two. The shame, the defeat, and the remorse will fade with time, as all bad news does. While the moment of impact still hurts as much as it did with my first-ever bad review, I’ve noticed my recovery time shortening the longer I’ve been an author. That in itself is a win.

This post was originally published on my Substack. You can read it here.