Authors should never respond to reviews?

Bubastes said:

She went to Harvard. She's published by Harper Collins. Her future in-laws are powerful publishing people. She had essays published in major outlets before this. How much more validation does she need?

Side note: I'm tired of people saying she's crazy for what she did. She doesn't strike me as crazy at all. Privileged, narcissistic, self-absorbed, entitled, clueless, and lacking empathy? Yes. Crazy? No.

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Yeah, I'm not even sure I'd agree with 'clueless'; she's definitely not crazy. She's got the word out about her book to a vast audience, some of whom will no doubt be curious enough to pick it up, even if 95% of people are disgusted by her actions. Yeah, she's made a blogger look bad despite said blogger having done nothing wrong, she's damaged author/reader relationships for some people, and she's promoted a vile hate group who've doxxed people. But from her POV I have no doubt that's a great trade.

jeffo20 said:

[FONT=&quot]She's a new author, she's struggling to get her book out and in a lot of hands[/FONT]

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As Bubastes said, she's published by Harper Collins. I seriously doubt she's struggling more than self-published writers, or writers with small presses.

I don't have a fiance who's a journalist and I don't have a big publisher's marketing department behind me. If I'm still capable of decent behavior despite that, I'm not giving her a pass.

I think this argument against bad reviews is again going to be a case of old day values attempting to be ascribed to modern instances.

Let's go back to pre-internet days. Reviews were in magazines, newspapers, and word of mouth. Limited sources, trusted names, and no ability to respond immediately. So back then, if you only got say 10 reviews, one bad review could destroy you.

Now we look at the internet days. Reviews can appear on hundreds of thousands of websites (Maybe an exaggeration, maybe not. Not sure). You've still got "trusted" sources but they are just a smaller voice now. And you have the insta-respond capability. Suddenly, what one review says holds no where near the weight that it used to. In the old days, the reviewers were segmented into genres so that you didn't have a romance reviewed by the non-fiction person, etc. Now, anyone can review anything. So a "meh, it wasn't for me" review really doesn't hold as much weight as people want to give it.

Hale wasn't crazy, she just didn't take full grasp of the context of the review.

The crazy guy who assaulted his reviewer? Um, he's in need of a strait jacket, but that is for entirely different reasons.

What these two definitely reek of, to me, is an escalation of the Author's BIG Mistake. Which is even scarier than finding dog poo in a mailbox.

aruna said:

I do wish these authors would speak for themselves.

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She can't speak for herself because every time she tries, she seems to stick her foot in her mouth again.

Gilroy Cullen said:

Hale wasn't crazy, she just didn't take full grasp of the context of the review.

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In my opinion, Hale is a manipulative person who is deliberately building what she sees as a quirky and charmingly self-deprecating persona. That she's brought a world of grief on an ordinary person doesn't seem to matter to her. It's all about her, her career, and her books.

eqb said:

In my opinion, Hale is a manipulative person who is deliberately building what she sees as a quirky and charmingly self-deprecating persona. That she's brought a world of grief on an ordinary person doesn't seem to matter to her. It's all about her, her career, and her books.

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Yup - think that sums it up perfectly. Shame more people aren't able to see this!

Marian Perera said:

As Bubastes said, she's published by Harper Collins. I seriously doubt she's struggling more than self-published writers, or writers with small presses.

.

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We-e-e-e-ll -- her book in paperback is currently ranked at #1,157,304 in the US.
Does't seem to be shooting up the charts -- in spite of HC. Hardback is a bit better...

No. No. This is NOT Shadenfreude....

eqb said:

In my opinion, Hale is a manipulative person who is deliberately building what she sees as a quirky and charmingly self-deprecating persona. That she's brought a world of grief on an ordinary person doesn't seem to matter to her. It's all about her, her career, and her books.

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I agree with this whole-heartedly. That article wasn't really Ms. Hale's introspective reflections of her own personal rock bottom. That's what she's dressed it up as. It's really just another tool to get back at this her "number one critic". The perfect coup de grace as dreamt up by an obsessive, mildly disturbed young woman.

I imagine her typing it, saying to herself...Yeah, you can criticize me on Goodreads, but look what I can do. I'm so powerful that I can use the Guardian to expose your 46 year old ass, your dilapidated house with its overgrown garden, and your dreary excuse for a life. I can paint you any way I want and make you look pathetic in the process. Don't F with me.
In my opinion, that article is nothing more than a blatant exercise in one-upmanship.

I didn't want to bring this up but I am rather proud of my investigative abilities.
Her whole justification for the stalking is based on the premise that BH, in a sly, underhand way, contacted her with a tweet (in response to a call for quirky suggestions for her next book) AFTER writing a bad review . Right? And then, according to KH, she checked out BH's reviews and saw the bad one. Which made her believe that something was going on. Because EVIL.

All lies. If you check out the timeline, you'll see that at the time of that "suggestion" tweet, BH had only written a few comments on the book -- and she was loving it. She commented among many other readers, and probably went unnoticed. She then stopped reading.

Then, a few weeks later, she began reading again, hated what she read, and posted regular updates about why she hated it and entered into discussions with other GRs who liked the book. That was it.

This was several weeks after the "suggestion" tweet.

I'm too lazy to go and dig up the screenshots right now, but they are there. Initial tweet was on 5th November 2013. Review started to turn negative on 10th November.

So, KH is lying when she says that because of the tweet+negative review she began investigating BH. She twists things around to show BH as kind of sneaky and eeebil. Very manipulative. It's all a fiction, that and the hints that BH carried on some massive abusive campaign against her. Never happened, if you read between the lines.

Bloggers are taking it really seriously -- talk of review blackout, boycott of HarperTeen, and so on, until the Guardian and Harper apologize.

Aruna, you and I should open an internet detective agency... I love a good mystery!

So it's just not possible to discuss this subject without using pejorative terms or dissecting people's mental health? Meh.

I think the emails etc going around trying to get Hale dropped, blackballed etc are just moving towards validating her outlook. It's not paranoia if....

Buffysquirrel said:

So it's just not possible to discuss this subject without using pejorative terms or dissecting people's mental health? Meh.

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Possibly not. Even the Salon article linked upthread by Quickbread -- which is a pretty balanced expression in my read of it -- calls some authors crazy and vindictive, while making the point that the Internet contributes to this situation in a specific manner:

There’s a long history of aggressive author responses to negative reviews. Before the advent of social media, for example, the novelist Richard Ford was notorious for spitting on one reviewer who’d panned his book and for mailing another reviewer a copy of her own book into which he’d fired several bullets. The latter victim, Alice Hoffman, is a novelist herself. Hoffman in turn lost it when a critic reviewed one of her novels tepidly and posted the reviewer’s home telephone number to Twitter, urging her fans to call up and complain. It’s not the Internet that causes such outrageous carryings on, but technology, of course, has shortened the period between impulse and execution, providing much less opportunity for better judgment to intercede. Not all authors are crazy and vindictive, either, but a surprising number seem to be, and there are fewer barriers than ever to prevent them from venting their spleen.

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I do wonder if it's possible for a group to look into this situation, speak truthfully about what we see, while staying clear of focusing on the triggering individual, in this case Hale, and getting caught up in what can be an endless spiral of dissecting the bad behavior.

Whether or not Hale is crazy, vindictive, foolish, self-aggrandizing, or whatever, her actions took place in a world where the rapid responses of everyone are escalating something beyond any control. My question is, how do you (anyone) want to relate to that? Do you want to go with that strong current and have your two cents feed the flood? Or is there some other way of relating to this?

Maybe Hale is "crazy", and honestly, I can understand the impulse to investigate what her motives might possibly be. For one thing, is this something I myself might ever do? I sure would like to be certain that is not so! Or, maybe it's something that is yielding a benefit that we can't see for sure yet, like publicity that Hale will ultimately gain from. Would I do this kind of thing if I thought I could gain such traction and remain outside of serious repercussions?

I guess I think that's where the fascination lies, with this.

Buffysquirrel said:

So it's just not possible to discuss this subject without using pejorative terms or dissecting people's mental health? Meh.

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I should've chosen my words more carefully and I apologize.

Bubastes said:

She went to Harvard. She's published by Harper Collins. Her future in-laws are powerful publishing people. She had essays published in major outlets before this. How much more validation does she need?

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Some people always need more than what they've got.

Marian Perera said:

I'm not giving her a pass.

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I sure hope it doesn't look like I was giving her a pass--definitely not my intention. Her behavior is abominable.

Lauram6123 said:

I agree with this whole-heartedly. That article wasn't really Ms. Hale's introspective reflections of her own personal rock bottom. That's what she's dressed it up as.

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Yes, she did. When I read it, every time she got to one of those 'this was my rock bottom moment' type of thing, I was waiting for some sort of eye opening realization from her. She followed up every one of those moments with 'but wait! I found out something even WORSE about her that totally justifies my reaction!'

Kylabelle said:

Whether or not Hale is crazy, vindictive, foolish, self-aggrandizing, or whatever, her actions took place in a world where the rapid responses of everyone are escalating something beyond any control. My question is, how do you (anyone) want to relate to that? Do you want to go with that strong current and have your two cents feed the flood? Or is there some other way of relating to this?

Maybe Hale is "crazy", and honestly, I can understand the impulse to investigate what her motives might possibly be. For one thing, is this something I myself might ever do? I sure would like to be certain that is not so! Or, maybe it's something that is yielding a benefit that we can't see for sure yet, like publicity that Hale will ultimately gain from. Would I do this kind of thing if I thought I could gain such traction and remain outside of serious repercussions?

I guess I think that's where the fascination lies, with this.

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Yes. Whatever Hale's issues may be, it's the role of the facilitating medium, the Internet, and our attempts to hammer out definitions of Internet civility and appropriateness, that I find really interesting.

Granted, some authors and reviewers had nasty, contentious relationships in per-Internet times. I don't think the medium creates the hostility, just makes everything escalate so much faster. I grew up pre-Internet, and the speeding up of everything makes my head swim sometimes.

I think for each of us, there are things we really weren't meant to see, things from which we can derive no benefit, and online culture can make them dangerously visible to us. We have to know what we can handle.

Does anyone remember the chapter in one of the Narnia books where Lucy gets to spy on her friends and see them talking trash about her? Her guide reminds her that what she is seeing is still not the whole truth, just one piece of the picture. (For instance, one friend could be slamming her just to impress the other friend, not because she actually feels that way.)

An author reading Goodreads status updates and reviewers trash-talking the book strikes me as similar. People are saying what they felt in the moment, or what felt appropriate to the community, without self-censorship or any attempt at politeness. The author is, essentially, eavesdropping, and eavesdropping on people who are talking about you seldom ends well.

Not saying it's bad for authors to be on GR, and I'm sure reading the actual reviews can be useful to many. But the candor of the discussion combined with the ease of responding can be a recipe for disaster if the author doesn't know how to take a deep breath and step away from the computer.

I think everyone using the internet should know and accept that people will say things there they would never, ever say to your face, and if you let yourself care too much, things will escalate. Hale's desire for a face-to-face meeting with Harris suggests to me she did not accept this as the reality of being online. She wanted to drag things into RL where Harris would (in Hale's view) be shamed by her own words.

Can you imagine if celebrities and politicians demanded that everybody who trashed them online do so to their faces? What writers experience seems tame by comparison.

Fuchsia Groan said:

An author reading Goodreads status updates and reviewers trash-talking the book strikes me as similar. People are saying what they felt in the moment, or what felt appropriate to the community, without self-censorship or any attempt at politeness. The author is, essentially, eavesdropping, and eavesdropping on people who are talking about you seldom ends well.

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I think there's a disconnect between the way readers and authors see comments about books. To most readers, it is about the books themselves, not so much about the authors.

jari_k said:

I think there's a disconnect between the way readers and authors see comments about books. To most readers, it is about the books themselves, not so much about the authors.

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Yeah, agree here. I saw someone comment yesterday that hatred for an author and hatred for a book was indistinguishable.

I don't think I'd necessarily say I hated any book, but they're really, really not.

It might be indistinguishable, depending on the reviewer... I mean ideally the author, as a person, is invisible. I suppose the author as a figure may exist and be hated. I don't think when people review they really think that there's a person behind the writing. And that's how it should be. Thinking about the people behind it makes it harder to enjoy.

veinglory said:

As a reviewer, unless they sent me the review copy I find being thanked weird. It assumes I did it for them. YMMV.

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Hmmm. I'd made a point of thanking reviewers on Goodread with a short note. I never argue with anything, just thank them for taking the time. You think that's creepy?

Barbara R. said:

Hmmm. I'd made a point of thanking reviewers on Goodread with a short note. I never argue with anything, just thank them for taking the time. You think that's creepy?

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I don't find it particularly creepy, but I think you have more to lose than gain from doing it, sadly. It's a nice thought, but I know some reviewers would rather authors didn't read their reviews.

Barbara R. said:

Hmmm. I'd made a point of thanking reviewers on Goodread with a short note. I never argue with anything, just thank them for taking the time. You think that's creepy?

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Not creepy, but I'd find it intrusive because it's like the author is hovering over my shoulder and reading something not meant for them.

I don't read my reviews and I even tell bloggers not to send me links to their reviews of my books if they offer to do so.

The only times I've responded to reviews were when I was invited to someone's blog. Then it's polite to say "thank you" for the invite. You've been brought into the conversation, and you're not lurking over someone's shoulder. Once I made a comment on a blog I'd never read before because the feature the blogger did was so awesomely unusual. (She turned my characters into the cast of a K-drama.) I'd never seen that done before, and it was exciting.

Two things worth noting, I think are that authors are told we need to have Google alerts on our name, titles, etc. (This doesn't work well if you happen to share a book title with the most famous chain of movie theaters on the West Coast, btw...) Even if we don't comment on a lot of things, we see most of them because they pop up in that alert feed.

We also DO see progress notes and @mentions on Twitter. Goodreads auto-tweets progress notes for the people who have their accounts linked. Whatever you put as an update on GR, if it's one of my books, I will see it and be sent a direct link. The same holds true for reviews. I think a lot of the irritations are stemming from that quirk. The reviewers are not linking their reviews - Goodreads is. If you mention a book, and include the author's name. It will show up in my Twitter feed notifications, too.

Thirdly, and this is especially important when someone goes off on a 3rd party site - Goodreads has a warning system in place. If I get a 1-star review (or even a 2 or a 3), Goodreads gives me a little warning not to post. (I've posted a screencap of that box on AW before, but I don't remember where.) What it says is this:

Ok, you got a bad review. Deep breath. It happens to every author eventually. Keep in mind that one negative review will not impact your book’s sales. In fact, studies have shown that negative reviews can actually help book sales, as they legitimize the positive reviews on your book’s page.
We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer. If you think this review is against our Review Guidelines, please flag it to bring it to our attention. Keep in mind that if this is a review of the book, even one including factual errors, we generally will not remove it.

For more on how to interact with readers, please see our Author Guidelines.

If you still feel you must leave a comment, click “Accept and Continue” below to proceed (but again, we don’t recommend it).

Accept and Continue

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That's why a lot of authors will take their grievances offsite, now, but if they're railing about a GR review, they've gotten this message.

Me, either, with regards to the Goodreads alert. I've gotten only one one-star review and I'm not even sure the person read the novel...but still, I wrote back to this person and said thank you ever so politely. It doesn't pay to be rude.

As for the 'bottling' incident, some people are simply nuts. If someone hated what I wrote, sure, I'd be pissed, but going over to where they live or threatening to visit them is way beyond rational and into the land of the cray.