I mean, setting aside the hubris of comparing one’s work to The Once and Future King or Lord of the Rings.

That was the BEST read I’ve had in quite some time! LOL! (Ricockulous! still giggling about that one…)

Talk about light years separating that authors response from the nutjob Amazon review response……

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I received not a bad, but a tepid, review from a woman who complained that “the lack of men in the story…threw a balance off.” I wonder if she would have complained that the lack of women in “The Once and Future King” or “Lord of the Rings” threw a balance off. When people are confronted with a story told from a point of view with which they’re unfamiliar, they feel most the “differentness” in it. For some people, that’s mind-expanding. For others it’s just uncomfortable, for reasons they often can’t articulate.

Toni Morrison has been asked repeatedly, Why don’t you write about white people? Stop and think for a minute what that reveals about the questioner. It could mean, I can’t identify with black people, or with black women. It could mean, Why don’t you write about the people who are really important, people who really matter?

But I believe that behind the surface meaning is a deeper meaning, that says, “I feel excluded. I am the mainstream. I read books about me all the time. I’m in all the books, the movies, the songs, the stories. Now suddenly I’m nowhere to be seen. I feel excluded from your world, and I don’t like it.”

That may or may not be true about the woman who panned my books, but as others have pointed out on the Worst Review Ever website, bad reviews from people who are not our audience should give us momentary pause, while we consider if there is justice in their complaint, and then a longer pause, to consider what that reviewer brought to the book and why they felt strongly enough to complain about it. If someone has a strong enough response/reaction to my work that they felt compelled to write about, I must have done something right.

Interesting, no? It seems that this happens a lot with bad reviews (in fact, in so many we see on this blog): People aren’t so much panning the work, but getting annoyed that the work didn’t accurately portray their own life experiences—which, frankly, is so very sad.

….

x-posted to the making light thread:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1BA0D6J2GS59/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg32?ie=UTF8&cdPage=32

Apparently Sams is trying to recruit friends to pump up Harriet and the two or three other positive reviews. She alleges a vast internet conspiracy, claims we’re all LB Taylor’s minions, says LB Taylor and the other neg reviewer are known for doing this, that they did it to Linda Lael Miller among others, and says she’s the victim of people trying to shut her up. (This is on her Facebook wall.)

Incidentally she seems to be under the opinion that Amazon should be like her personal site, as in the main thread, she asked why people were coming here to be mean….ignoring the fact that Amazon is a review site, among other things, and that by trying to pressure people to not mention negative experiences she is attempting to undermine the review system’s utility for buyers.

I’d feel sorry for her–did earlier–except she has persisted in digging that hole deeper and deeper even after people point out that there is no conspiracy, people just take it amiss when you try to dismiss their experience of your product by calling them illiterates and parasites.

PNH, all I know is that my editor is kind and wise and good and smells of gingerbread straight out of the oven.

*blink* You put your editor in the oven? Was it to see how he smelled when he came out, or for some other reason?

Patrick, how’s Scalzi’s oven?

Telling me, especially in great detail, why you don’t like something I’ve done? That’s awesome stuff. I might not agree with you, but finding the flaws in what you do is how you overcome them.

The only thing I dislike are the occasional “this custard is not pie!” comments people sometimes make. Those people I want to smack, but assume their parents smacked them plenty when they were kids for them to be so dumb. They deserve only my pity.

The one time I had an author comment on my book blog (which is woefully out of date thanks to a broken Amazon plug-in that I haven’t figured out how to fix) it was for a book with which I had some issues. She was gracious and wonderful about it!

All of which made me much more willing to pick up her next book. If she’d been nasty (or apparently insane as is the author in question) that wouldn’t have happened.