Critics Are Part of the Package
Confronting Bad Book Reviews
By Rusty LaGrange, High Desert Branch
Part of getting your book published, beyond the marketing and having the book read, is dealing with the critics or reviewers that you hope will see the value and art in your product. As a new author, there will be times when you will need to face a bad review, a “troll” on the Internet, and a customer who wants to make a point before demanding his refund.
All authors come under some form of review because, as you well know, a pair of eyes must read your work, decide whether it was a good read, then share the find with other readers, or not. The following reviews will shock you, but be encouraged that even the best of the industry have taken hard hits from the public.
The Saturday Review, London cited Charles Dickens this way: “We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation.”
The eminent critic Clifton Fadiman in one of his reviews of a William Faulkner novel called it: “The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor talent.”
The Southern Quarterly declared that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is “sad stuff, dull and dreary and ridiculous.”
Here is the opinion of the works of two of America’s greatest literary icons. The editor of Bookman said this about Mark Twain: “A hundred years from now it is very likely that of Twain’s works, ‘The Jumping Frog’ alone will be remembered.” And a London critic said of Walt Whitman that “Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.”
Ouch. Learn to take the good with the bad and try to not give as much credence to the bad reviews as the number of readers who love your work.
Rusty LaGrange is editor of the CWC Bulletin
as well as the High Desert Branch newsletter, The Inkslinger.
This article first appeared in Inkslinger September 2015.