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How to Handle a Bad Review
August 21, 2012

1. Skim new review for glowing words gushing praise.

2. Find no glowing words gushing praise.

3. Fixate on the most negative sentence in the review.

4. Have deepest, darkest fears about book realized.

5. Promptly forget every good thing anyone has ever said about book.

6. Rush to Amazon to see sales rank falls like the stock market.

7. Post angry and vague facebook status about philistines and people without senses of humor.

8. Bring it to the attention of agent, publicist, and editor. Say brightly, "All publicity is good publicity!" (Don't believe it.)

9. Bring it to the attention of friends, family, and cats. Say melodramatically, "Yours is the only approval I care about." (Sort of believe it.)

10. Bring it to the attention of spouse. Say tearfully, "I TOLD YOU THE BOOK SUCKED!" (Believe it.)

11. Decide reviewer didn't actually read book carefully enough.

12. Pick apart every grammatical error in the review, snort at the writer's inability to determine the difference between "complement" and "compliment" with friends on private Twitter account.

13. Read most negative sentence out loud in various accents and characters. (Inspector Clouseau, Eegor, Darth Vader, Cpt. Jean-Luc Picard)

14. Sob uncontrollably over the idea of Patrick Stewart hating book.

15. Look under bed, behind couch, and in closets for vanished thick skin.

16. Demand of cats and toddler, "Has [reviewer] ever written a book? I THINK NOT!"

17. Vow to never write again.

18. Drive to grocery story blasting Decemberists' "This Is Why We Fight" and Adele's "We Could Have Had It All" and anger-buy punishing food (kale, tonic water, and raisins, mainly).

19. Return raisins.

20. Write about it.




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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Copyright © 2002-2012
Stephanie Vander Weide Lucianovic