Eight things about book reviews
The Bullet Catcher’s Daughter has today received its 300th review on Goodreads. A good moment, then, to share eight things that reviews mean to me.
1) Publicity. I can hear every publisher cheering at mention of the P word. If people don’t know a book exists, they aren’t going to be able to buy it. Ideally the review should be newspapers and magazines with wide circulation. I was thrilled to be mentioned in Entertainment Weekly and the Washington Post. But reviews in genre specialist websites are arguably more important.
2) Ego. Being called an egotist is bad, right? But what if we have no regard for ourselves? Call it self-love or self regard or self respect, but we need some of it to have the belief to keep on writing. So I just keep repeating it in my head - 300 people on Goodreads have reviewed my book. Three hundred!
3) Bad Reviews. Not all those 300 had good things to say about The Bullet Catcher’s Daughter. Just under one percent of the ratings give it a single star. What does my ego have to say about that? Well, surprisingly I don’t mind. It’s only a few people. And to give the lowest rating must mean they really hated it. It feels good to cause a reaction. One of them complained that it was feminist and political. That’s all win as far as I’m concerned.
4) Good reviews. Forty-four percent of the reviewers gave it four stars . That means I’m giving a lot of people a good reading experience. It makes my writing work feel more like service, which is very positive for me.
5) Suggestions. Some reviewers include suggestions of what they’d like to see happen. Particularly, they would like to see a love relationship developing between person X and person Y. (I have to use X and Y here rather than give names, because different people want different relationships to develop.) I can’t follow those suggestions, because that aspect of the stories is already mapped out in my mind. But I enjoy learning about the way people are thinking.
6) Excellent reviews. Eighteen percent of the reviewers gave the Bullet Catcher’s Daughter the maximum five stars. Ultimately, these are the people in my mind when I am writing. Reading their comments gives me a sense of which aspects of the story they are responding to. I’m sometimes surprised by the things they say. For example, there was widespread...
The full article can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/gaslitempire...
1) Publicity. I can hear every publisher cheering at mention of the P word. If people don’t know a book exists, they aren’t going to be able to buy it. Ideally the review should be newspapers and magazines with wide circulation. I was thrilled to be mentioned in Entertainment Weekly and the Washington Post. But reviews in genre specialist websites are arguably more important.
2) Ego. Being called an egotist is bad, right? But what if we have no regard for ourselves? Call it self-love or self regard or self respect, but we need some of it to have the belief to keep on writing. So I just keep repeating it in my head - 300 people on Goodreads have reviewed my book. Three hundred!
3) Bad Reviews. Not all those 300 had good things to say about The Bullet Catcher’s Daughter. Just under one percent of the ratings give it a single star. What does my ego have to say about that? Well, surprisingly I don’t mind. It’s only a few people. And to give the lowest rating must mean they really hated it. It feels good to cause a reaction. One of them complained that it was feminist and political. That’s all win as far as I’m concerned.
4) Good reviews. Forty-four percent of the reviewers gave it four stars . That means I’m giving a lot of people a good reading experience. It makes my writing work feel more like service, which is very positive for me.
5) Suggestions. Some reviewers include suggestions of what they’d like to see happen. Particularly, they would like to see a love relationship developing between person X and person Y. (I have to use X and Y here rather than give names, because different people want different relationships to develop.) I can’t follow those suggestions, because that aspect of the stories is already mapped out in my mind. But I enjoy learning about the way people are thinking.
6) Excellent reviews. Eighteen percent of the reviewers gave the Bullet Catcher’s Daughter the maximum five stars. Ultimately, these are the people in my mind when I am writing. Reading their comments gives me a sense of which aspects of the story they are responding to. I’m sometimes surprised by the things they say. For example, there was widespread...
The full article can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/gaslitempire...
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