Ambrose & Elsewhere

Maybe I’m more haunted by the Zeitgeist than I think. While I was mulling over my post on negative reviews this weekend, writers stung by bad reviews were bouncing all over the internet.

For instance, a guy who bragged about his cunning plan to give a one-star review to the woman who had the temerity to give him a two-star review on Amazon. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work.

(I link to the Making Light entry because the reviews themselves have been expunged. Also I don’t want to drive traffic to the guy’s site. He doesn’t even have lists of things!)

A more productive response to a bad review (not just a negative review) appeared at Salon.com around the time of the King slapfest and I was remiss in not mentioning it before. (This came up in the comments section, along with other good points by Charles Stross and others.)

In passing: Making Light is one of the few places on the internet where reading the comments section is not a waste of time, due to their ruthless and humane moderation policy.

I was reading an extremely negative review of my third book the other day, and found it a strangely painless experience. I felt like I was watching a cat chase the red light of a laser pointer around a room: there was something essential about the process that the cat (and the reviewer) just didn’t get.

That’s not necessarily the reviewer’s fault. It’s a writer’s business, especially a writer of genre fiction, to make an impact of a certain type on the audience, and if that fails to happen it’s most likely the writer that’s to blame.

On the other hand, I sort of feel that if someone thinks the last eighty pages of one of my books is genuinely irrelevant to what has gone before, they weren’t reading attentively enough to have their opinions taken seriously.

Shortly after reading that dumb takedown of one of my own books, I read a dumb takedown of Stephen King.