If you write for publication, sooner or later, you will experience two things: being the subject of a review, and being asked to write a review. Proper responses to both are part of the business.
Unless you have just received a five-star panegyric that proclaims your work to be the best ever of its kind, receiving a review is seldom an unmixed pleasure---and sometimes there is very little pleasure involved. Your response should depend at least in part on what type of review it is. If it is an editorial review or a pre-publishing review specifically requested by your publishing house, pay attention. These reviews are there to deliver constructive criticism with the intent of helping you produce a better product. Even if they sting, you need to give these kinds of reviews careful consideration.
Fan reviews---and I am using the term "fan" loosely---are something else. Obviously, you do want to please your readers, and getting a lot of four- and five-star reviews is a solid indication that you are succeeding in doing so. The question is what to do with those painful one- or two-star reviews, particularly when the reviewer has taken the occasion to spew venom that would put a king cobra's to shame.
Some authors never read their reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, or whatever--they just note the aggregate rating and move on. This is a perfectly legitimate way to handle things. Only you know just how thick your skin is; if you suspect that reading a negative review would do your mental state and your writing more harm than good, even if there might be a nugget of something worthwhile to be mined, then don't bother reading individual comments.
If you do decide to read on, put things in perspective. You may get lucky and find a "panning" review that actually contains valuable insights, but most will not be that thoughtful or thought-provoking. Many will have more to do with the commenter's own positions and biases than with your writing, especially if you are covering a controversial figure or subject. (I have seen one-star reviews of some of Marguerite Henry's beloved horse books for children that were based on the commenter's position that "horse racing is cruel and should be banned," with nary a word about the quality of the story or the writing.) And no matter how wonderfully you write or how acclaimed your reputation, some people just won't like your work and will be happy to tell the world about it. A quick survey on Amazon revealed that 3 percent of readers gave one-star reviews to Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina, 1 percent gave one-star reviews to the complete plays of Shakespeare, and 2 percent gave one-star reviews to Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth---a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and contributed to Buck's becoming the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. If writers of this quality and stature haven't been able to gain 100 percent approval, chances are you won't either.
Now for the other side of the coin; you've decided to do a review. Perhaps you've been asked to review a manuscript by the publishing house you've been working with, or you've decided to leave a posted review or blog post on a book you've read.
Before dashing off your opinion and hitting the "send" key, it's worth taking a minute to think things through, especially if you're doing a paid review. This is serious business, because your opinion is being solicited because of your presumed expertise as a writer. Which leads to an obvious point: if you don't feel reasonably comfortable with the subject matter at hand---either because of the topic or because of the author's take on it---it's better and more honorable to decline the opportunity to do the review than to turn in a review based mostly on how you feel about the issue. Neither a polemic nor an attempt to push the author to agree with your position constitute constructive criticism. This admittedly is a delicate area, because sometimes it is both necessary and helpful to take a devil's advocate position if you believe that a point is being oversold or under-supported, but if you feel that you honestly cannot respect what the author is saying, you'd best leave the review to someone else. On the other side, if you cannot bring yourself to say something critical even when it is well warranted---for instance, pointing out a significant structural or factual flaw---then your review will not provide much help in improving the work.
Posting a review that has not been expressly solicited on a website or blog is a bit less weighty; you're likely to be one reader among many, with no more emphasis attached to your opinion than to anyone else's. Still, you should owe it to your own conscience if nothing else to be both as kind and as honest as you are able to be. Even if you can't honestly give a work a positive review, it may mean more to the author than you know if you can find something positive that you can say honestly. And if you find that you can be neither kind nor honest, consider whether you should post a review at all. There are enough trolls on the Internet without becoming one of their number.
Unless you have just received a five-star panegyric that proclaims your work to be the best ever of its kind, receiving a review is seldom an unmixed pleasure---and sometimes there is very little pleasure involved. Your response should depend at least in part on what type of review it is. If it is an editorial review or a pre-publishing review specifically requested by your publishing house, pay attention. These reviews are there to deliver constructive criticism with the intent of helping you produce a better product. Even if they sting, you need to give these kinds of reviews careful consideration.
Fan reviews---and I am using the term "fan" loosely---are something else. Obviously, you do want to please your readers, and getting a lot of four- and five-star reviews is a solid indication that you are succeeding in doing so. The question is what to do with those painful one- or two-star reviews, particularly when the reviewer has taken the occasion to spew venom that would put a king cobra's to shame.
Some authors never read their reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, or whatever--they just note the aggregate rating and move on. This is a perfectly legitimate way to handle things. Only you know just how thick your skin is; if you suspect that reading a negative review would do your mental state and your writing more harm than good, even if there might be a nugget of something worthwhile to be mined, then don't bother reading individual comments.
If you do decide to read on, put things in perspective. You may get lucky and find a "panning" review that actually contains valuable insights, but most will not be that thoughtful or thought-provoking. Many will have more to do with the commenter's own positions and biases than with your writing, especially if you are covering a controversial figure or subject. (I have seen one-star reviews of some of Marguerite Henry's beloved horse books for children that were based on the commenter's position that "horse racing is cruel and should be banned," with nary a word about the quality of the story or the writing.) And no matter how wonderfully you write or how acclaimed your reputation, some people just won't like your work and will be happy to tell the world about it. A quick survey on Amazon revealed that 3 percent of readers gave one-star reviews to Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina, 1 percent gave one-star reviews to the complete plays of Shakespeare, and 2 percent gave one-star reviews to Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth---a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and contributed to Buck's becoming the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. If writers of this quality and stature haven't been able to gain 100 percent approval, chances are you won't either.
Now for the other side of the coin; you've decided to do a review. Perhaps you've been asked to review a manuscript by the publishing house you've been working with, or you've decided to leave a posted review or blog post on a book you've read.
Before dashing off your opinion and hitting the "send" key, it's worth taking a minute to think things through, especially if you're doing a paid review. This is serious business, because your opinion is being solicited because of your presumed expertise as a writer. Which leads to an obvious point: if you don't feel reasonably comfortable with the subject matter at hand---either because of the topic or because of the author's take on it---it's better and more honorable to decline the opportunity to do the review than to turn in a review based mostly on how you feel about the issue. Neither a polemic nor an attempt to push the author to agree with your position constitute constructive criticism. This admittedly is a delicate area, because sometimes it is both necessary and helpful to take a devil's advocate position if you believe that a point is being oversold or under-supported, but if you feel that you honestly cannot respect what the author is saying, you'd best leave the review to someone else. On the other side, if you cannot bring yourself to say something critical even when it is well warranted---for instance, pointing out a significant structural or factual flaw---then your review will not provide much help in improving the work.
Posting a review that has not been expressly solicited on a website or blog is a bit less weighty; you're likely to be one reader among many, with no more emphasis attached to your opinion than to anyone else's. Still, you should owe it to your own conscience if nothing else to be both as kind and as honest as you are able to be. Even if you can't honestly give a work a positive review, it may mean more to the author than you know if you can find something positive that you can say honestly. And if you find that you can be neither kind nor honest, consider whether you should post a review at all. There are enough trolls on the Internet without becoming one of their number.