on reviews, comma, bad, and engaging, comma, not
- January 21st, 2016
- Posted in business of indie music
- Write comment
Seanan McGuire posted an article today on why you need to leave reviewers alone. Authors Behaving Badly is kind of a perennial lol-topic in reader circles, and a stunning percentage of those stem from authors reacting – badly – to negative reviews.
She has a bunch of good reasons why you don’t engage such reviews, even if they’re just being mean. And all that’s fine. But a couple of people have posted about how hard that is, and I realised there’s something Seanan didn’t say, to wit:
If you’re staring at a negative review and itching to say something, don’t, not just because of all the obvious reasons, but because being reviewed at all – no matter how negatively – is a kind of compliment in and of itself.
Remember that. Even vendetta reviews are compliments, really, because they mean the reviewer thought you were important enough to talk about, even if just to try to take you down.
And leaving aside vendetta reviews – like the Rabids attempt to game Goodreads – a sincere but negative review also means they thought you were worth the actual time they spent. Even if they don’t admit it, the facts on the ground are that you were worth the time they spent actually reading or listening to or watching your thing, and the time they spent writing a review about it.
Remember: no matter how much they may’ve hated whatever they’re hating – and let’s say they hated it a lot – they still cared enough to take the time to write and post a thing about your work. In a world flooded with opportunities to read/watch/listen to/react to material, they listened to yours, and wrote about yours, which means that you’re worth that much to them, at very least.
And it’s not symmetrical. They’ve handed you the big advantage. After all – you’re not writing about them, now, are you? No.
Good. Keep it that way.
And as an added thought: And even negative reviews can help you. I still have the rejection from Seattle Farmers’ Market declining to book me on the grounds that I was insufficiently generic posted on my reviews page. That kind of negative review is a goddamn badge of honour!
And, no lie, negative reviews can help sales. We had a late, pretty solidly negative review of my latest album come out, in December. A music blogger, who likes ambitious projects from unknown bands but didn’t like ours. And we had a spike in sales to people coming to Bandcamp from that review. Why? We can’t be sure, but I’m thinking it’s because they’d never heard of us before, but we were someone worth a review – even a negative one.
One of the best radio ads for Fight Club was Penn Gillette reading the negative reviews of it. (Most of which made clear, if you were paying attention, that what the reviewers hated was how the movie made them feel about themselves.) You can honestly tell a lot about a work from some negative reviews of it. There are certainly books I’ve bought because the negative reviews made me go ‘No, that is /exactly/ what I’m looking for. Sorry it wasn’t this person’s cup of tea, but it’s absolutely mine.’
That’s pretty hilarious. 😀