Getting reviews for your book is never easy and if you do seek some people to read your work, you will have to get used to the ‘joys’ of negative book reviews. Even if you believe you have written something really good there will be sure to be someone out there will bring you back down to earth with some cutting words. Regardless of the nice comments about your book, you will definitely remember the words used by your negative reviewer a lot more than the pleasant ones! In the end there’s nothing you can do about the bad reviews and so you just have to accept them. After all, the negative reviewer has just as much right to express their feelings about the book as anyone else, provided they stay within the bounds of decency.

Dodgy reviews?

I always think it looks odd if a book only has amazing reviews. You almost suspect that the author has gone round their friends and asked them to write something positive – or perhaps they engaged in darker practices to have something nice written. Recently, there has been a lot of criticism of Amazon for removing reviews from a number of books. A lot of people complained that this was censorship, although there has been discussion on whether it was intended to crack down on so-called fake reviewers.

While I don’t think you have to agree with the negative reviewers it can be interesting to see what they focus on. I have met a number of my readers and everything crazy and wacky that they seem to get enthusiastic about in my books pretty well equates with what the negative reviewers detest. I guess you can’t please everyone – some people object to talking frogs whereas others instinctively know that they are brilliant conversationalists.