It’s no secret that authors hate bad reviews and one-star ratings. There are plenty of reasons for that. Algorithms boost books with favorable reviews and ratings averages. Low ratings and bad reviews drag a book down. One-star ratings are sometimes handed out by trolls—people who haven’t even read or bought the book. Sometimes, even well-intentioned readers leave unhelpful feedback: sometimes, they focus on things like spelling mistakes (or perceived mistakes, even).
That said, plenty of authors get so riled up about negative reviews and ratings that they engage a fair bit of bad behavior themselves. We’ve all seen one author or another pitch a veritable fit over sub-3-star ratings or another author pick a fight in the comments of GoodReads.
And I get it. Negative reviews and poor ratings don’t just hurt our books. They can hurt our feelings too. Authors pour a lot of sweat, tears, and blood into their books. We’re emotionally attached to them (even if we’re sick of reading them by the time we actually hit “publish”).
There’s something to be said, though, for the bad review. Call it counter-intuitive, but authors should leave bad reviews well enough alone. Bad reviews can actually help you sell books.
One Reader’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure
It can be easy to forget that readers aren’t a monolith. One bad review doesn’t mean everyone hated your book. In fact, it might mean nobody hated your book. See above about trolls leaving ratings without ever reading your book. These people don’t hate your book. They hate something about your book, but they’re not your readership and you don’t need to be concerned about them.
More importantly, though, we have to remember an old adage. There’s no accounting for taste.
I mean, just look at the reams of good reviews and five-star ratings for what basically amount to Harlequin romances. These books are not necessarily well-written. They’re often ridiculous in terms of plot, and their characters are usually as thin as the paper they’re printed on. Yet people love them.
Other people love mysteries, some love high fantasy, others still read thrillers. And of course you have the snobs who are reading nothing but “lit fic,” who wouldn’t touch a romance or sci-fi, unless it’s Margaret Atwood writing sci-fi.
That’s something we always have to bear in mind when we receive ratings or reviews. Each person leaving you feedback is an individual, with individual tastes and preferences.
You might think those tastes and preferences are wrong, but we need to here remember another pearl of wisdom. Don’t yuck someone else’s yum. That works in reverse too. Someone else is entitled to think something is “yucky,” and they are allowed to express that opinion—even in the review section of your book’s GoodReads page.
But that brings me to my next point. Sometimes, those bad reviews can actually do the hard work of convincing someone else to read the book.
A Case Study: A Bad Review Sells My Book
We’ve all heard jokes on social media about bad reviews that sell books they’re meant to be slagging. The best ones usually decry the amount of “spiciness” in a book or the LGBTQIA+ content, which other readers—usually the ones who are the book’s target audience—find appealing. So one person’s objections become the basis of purchase from readers who actually do want that content. In short, a bad review can sometimes act like a neon sign, shouting about all the features that your target audience wants to read.
Of course, this doesn’t always happen. A review that rants about a book not having any plot, for example, isn’t likely to sell many people on reading it. By contrast, a review that rants about a “nonsensical” plot might actually convince people to buy the book—just so they can experience the zaniness first-hand.
I recently had an experience where a bad review did sell my book. The reviewer decided to nitpick what they called “woke” language in the Omega on Top series. (Which, LOL, honey. Read the blog; you know what kind of shit I’m writing and that you need to stay far, far away).
I’d happened to give the book a shout-out over on my socials, and a curious user clicked through. They then decided to peruse the reviews. They found that one review calling out the use of language as being “woke nonsense.”
The curious user was baffled as to how someone reading mpreg was upset about the use of gender-neutral language. But they were convinced they needed to see for themself what was going on in the book.
My Book Gained a New Fan
This story has a pretty happy ending. The new reader reached out to me via socials and let me know that they read the book, partially because of this review. We had a bit of a laugh about the review itself, but the reader capped it off by complimenting the book, suggesting it had handled some fairly difficult themes with nuance. They admitted that the genre wasn’t their typical read, but they were going to keep the title handy on the off-chance anyone came to them for a recommendation.
Any author knows that’s high praise. Now, we could also say this reader maybe would find other books they liked better if they were an avid reader of this particular genre. Maybe my book stands out because it’s one of the very few they’ve tried. At the same time, given that it’s not a genre they really love, it’s pretty high praise for someone to say “this is the book I’d recommend to anyone who wanted to give this genre a go.”
Even if no additional sales come from this exchange, it’s certainly one that will live in my heart for a while. I might even print it out and pin it to the wall to look at it when I’m banging my head against said wall, wondering why the hell I write anything ever. (It’s true; authors are melodramatic, moody creatures that oscillate between manic and depressive.)
You Can’t Please Everyone
The reviewer and the subsequent reader couldn’t have had more different opinions about my book. That should be reason enough for authors to realize they need to stay out of reader/reviewer spaces. I’ve said it before: I don’t interact with my reviews, generally speaking. This is often for my own preservation as much as my readers/reviewers. I used to write fanfic, folks. I know I have a hair-trigger when it comes to getting negative feedback on my work. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now and something I will likely always have to work on.
I simply don’t read my reviews—nice or not. You can say whatever the fuck you want. I do generally have an idea of what kinds of ratings my books are getting. Backing out how many “good” reviews you have versus how many “bad” ones there are isn’t difficult when you’re getting sub-20 ratings on most of your work. I’ve also had friends look at reviews, not usually at my request, but upon their own curiosity. They don’t usually report exactly what was said, but they sometimes relate the vibe.
I did make the mistake of reading some of the reviews for a couple of books more recently. When I read them, I was doing some digging into a GoodReads troll account.
I admit, I didn’t like reading those reviews. I did employ my new tactics, though. First, I vented to a friend (who laughed with me about the content of the reviews when I got to being sarcastic about them). Then I logged off and went out to the garden for a bit. When I came back, I still cared, but I didn’t feel the need to hop on socials and shout about it.
Readers Are Entitled to Their Opinions
I suspect that the bad reviews were coming from folks who were outside my usual readership. They weren’t not in the target audience (c’mon, I write mpreg; there aren’t that many of us), but even among writers, there is a pretty wide swath of approaches. Some writers trend to the “Harlequin romance” type book. I’d say my work is pretty far and away from that, so if you walked into one of my books expecting, say, a Lorelei M. Hart story, you are going to be sorely disappointed. And that’s no shade to Hart or her readers. There’s probably a bigger section of mpreg fans that prefer what Hart’s doing. And that means they are not going to vibe with my books. In turn, they’re less likely to give them a good review.
I don’t blame them. Sometimes, I’m sitting here writing something and thinking, “What the fuck is that?” (Those drafts usually end up in the recycling bin before anybody else sees them, though.)
Authors Need to Keep Their Noses out of Reviewer Spaces
The long and short of this is that there’s no place for an author or their ego when it comes to reader/reviewer spaces. You have to check that at the door. Your work is not for everyone, and you’re never going to please everyone.
Generally, I look to pleasing the folks I consider my core audience—the ones who come back time and again. Are they enjoying the book? Then I’m probably writing “on brand” for me. And, to some extent, I write to please myself, which means that anyone else who likes the kinds of things I like in my mpreg stories is also going to be pleased.
At the end of the day, I think that matters more than trying to pander to everyone. And if that means someone leaves me a bad review? So be it. As proven, sometimes, a bad review can be just as effective at selling your book as a good one.
