writers vs. critics then--and now. Writers are encouraged (expected! in some cases) to be personalities online. So . . . does that mean responding to reviews, or not?
My books are kind of specialized, being aimed at roleplayers and specifically at the GURPS community (though I understand there are people who buy GURPS books for research support for other games). But I do get some reviews; an average PDF release gets one or two, and those of my books that appear in print get reviewed on amazon and elsewhere
( ... )
Nodding along here. That's an excellent point about locational context, if the phrase makes sense. I know I'd respond more fully and without agonizing over every word if someone in my blog posts asked about some thing I wrote, whereas I wouldn't say anything at all if the same question came up at a review site.
Not. It's an engraved invitation to someone behaving badly, feelings getting hurt, and so forth. Maybe it doesn't always end badly, but why risk a public display of childishness on someone's part, whether your own on not?
As authors, so many of us have fragile self-esteem. One moment we're invulnerable, lords of our creative realms, and the next a careless negative comment can send us crashing. While few of us can resist reading reviews of our work, we can also strive to maintain (or regain) the professional distance we need to then tear our skins off and go to work.
Conversations are something else, and they can be part of a review (comments on book + interview with author in which questions are asked and background provided).
Yes, conversation combines neatly with the locative aspect, to me.
As you know, Bob(tm), I don't write fiction, but my rn is labeled an "author" on Goodreads and LibraryThing for something else. For the first such (technically a bestseller), I trawled Amazon for reviews because it amused me, but I kept one hand on the computer mouse and the other behind my back; none of those folks would've wanted to read anything I had to say, whether positive, negative, or neutrally informative. *shrugs* I figure that they get to have their chance to air opinions, too, without my coming down on them like one brick or a little pile....
I've got a very strict "do not engage the reviewer in their space" personal rule. I do occasionally thank someone for a review, but only if I'd had contact with them beforehand (gave them a review copy, say), or if they actively tag me on a social media platform that allows that (like Twitter) and therefore obviously wanted me to see it, and in those cases it's as minimally as possible unless they invite more interaction
( ... )
I used to keep lists of my reading on my (read-by-a-dozen-people) blog, with little two-sentence reviews (because my friendslist were mostly also SFF fans and this was a way to share recs with them). A fairly big-name author must have been ego-googling, because they showed up on one and did a really snitty correction to a pretty positive review (about a small detail about the language they'd devised), with an eye-rolling emoji. It did not make me keen to read more of their books. (It also made me write fewer reviews, so the book chat on my blog went down.) Why did they bother? It didn't improve their day or mine, it certainly didn't improve my opinion of them, it didn't make any difference to the weight of critical opinion on their books...
Yeah; back in an earlier decade, when I used to post on a different blog about books I'd read (not reviews so much as just chatting about my recent reading), I still remember having an author show up in my comments to argue vociferously with me about a minor technical point in a post about a book I'd otherwise really liked! He was VERY adamant that I had completely missed the point on the thing I hadn't liked about the book.
It didn't leave me with an urge to read more of his books.
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As authors, so many of us have fragile self-esteem. One moment we're invulnerable, lords of our creative realms, and the next a careless negative comment can send us crashing. While few of us can resist reading reviews of our work, we can also strive to maintain (or regain) the professional distance we need to then tear our skins off and go to work.
Conversations are something else, and they can be part of a review (comments on book + interview with author in which questions are asked and background provided).
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As you know, Bob(tm), I don't write fiction, but my rn is labeled an "author" on Goodreads and LibraryThing for something else. For the first such (technically a bestseller), I trawled Amazon for reviews because it amused me, but I kept one hand on the computer mouse and the other behind my back; none of those folks would've wanted to read anything I had to say, whether positive, negative, or neutrally informative. *shrugs* I figure that they get to have their chance to air opinions, too, without my coming down on them like one brick or a little pile....
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A fairly big-name author must have been ego-googling, because they showed up on one and did a really snitty correction to a pretty positive review (about a small detail about the language they'd devised), with an eye-rolling emoji. It did not make me keen to read more of their books. (It also made me write fewer reviews, so the book chat on my blog went down.)
Why did they bother? It didn't improve their day or mine, it certainly didn't improve my opinion of them, it didn't make any difference to the weight of critical opinion on their books...
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It didn't leave me with an urge to read more of his books.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepreneur/383497/
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