I recently saw a thread on Bluesky where some authors were talking about bad book reviews and how to deal with them, and I thought I’d offer some thoughts here on the topic, having received my share of zingers for both my books and for reports I wrote during three decades as an intelligence analyst.

To give you some context for my comments, during my professional career (I’m retired now) I wrote on the order of a thousand or so intelligence reports and assessments and reviewed or edited somewhere around eight or nine thousand. I’ve also published seventeen full-length novels and a few other odds and ends. Now, I’m not going to tell you I’m the greatest writer, reviewer, or editor in the world! I’m not. But I received a hell of a lot of critiques and criticism (some deserved, some maybe not so much; some kind and constructive, many not so much), so I know a great deal about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the flamethrower.

Getting blasted, be it justly or otherwise, hurts. People saying your writing sucks, your story sucks, your book sucks, and YOU suck, either in combination or all together, shoves a spear into your ego that draws blood and can cause a lot of pain. You poured your soul into that book (short story, poem, etc.)! You spent thousands of hours crafting it! Don’t they realize how important that book is to you? How could people be so cruel! It’s not fair! Heartless bastards!

Heartless bastards: that’s exactly what reviewers (be they readers, bloggers writing reviews, or professional reviewers) can sometimes be; that’s not to say all of them are, but there are certainly enough to make it seem that way sometimes.

You can also get negative reviews from people who haven’t even read your book. One of my books, First Contact (In Her Name, Book 1), got a one-star review from someone who hadn’t even read the book. They were giving it a one-star review because they’d downloaded it during a Bookbub promotion and “got tired of Amazon telling me to review it.” So they gave the book and the author (moi) a one star review, claiming that the free books were usually bad, anyway, so mine probably sucked, too. Okay, fair enough, but First Contact as I write this has over six thousand ratings on Amazon US with 4.4 stars, so I invite you to draw your own conclusions.

That’s an illustration of the “not fair” category. In a just world, people who didn’t even read your work shouldn’t be allowed to review it, but life’s not fair and we have to learn to embrace the suck.

Beyond those, readers typically give bad reviews because they didn’t like the book(s), your writing (e.g., poorly written or edited), your writing style, your characters, use of foul language (that one’s earned a fair number of downchecks for some of mine), and graphic violence, especially things like rape (which appears in book six of the In Her Name saga; and no, it’s not gratuitous).

But here’s the thing: you can look up any book, even the one you think may be the best ever written in all time in the entire world, and it’s going to have at least some bad reviews.

Dear fellow author (or aspiring author), that right there is something you need to tattoo on the inside of your eyelids. No matter how great a book might be, there are going to be people who hate it.

“Okay, fine, but EVERYONE hates my book!”

Right, so let’s get to it, then.

Ignore Reviews or Comments On Things Over Which You Have No Control

You can scratch off quite a few bad reviews simply by asking yourself, “Do I now, or did I before I published this book, have control over this?”

If the answer is NO, move on. Ignore it. This is a learned skill, as not everyone is born with a thick skin, but ignore these. Amazon pestered you? I have no control over Amazon. You read my book, even though it’s not a genre you like, and you gave it a bad review? I have no control over readers who are clueless or decide to act like jerks.

Also, many people read a book and just don’t like it. Sometimes they’ll say why, but often they won’t. “This book sucks. Huge disappointment.” You have no control over whether someone’s going to like your book. Unless they offer something in the way of constructive criticism (more on that shortly), ignore this.

Again, if you didn’t or don’t have control over something the reader is complaining about: MOVE ON.

Now, reviews that go something like, “I Didn’t Like This Book Because” can often be a source of valuable nuggets, and the mental approach I’m advocating here also applies to comments from editors, which can often be brutal:

Learn to love red ink. People telling you WHY your writing or your book sucks is the path to making your writing and your book BETTER. We don’t become better writers because of people patting us on the head and praising us; we become better writers when people tell us what we’re doing wrong so we can focus on those weaknesses.

This, my fellow author, is hard. Very hard.

When I first started out in the intelligence business back in the mid-1980s (yeah, I’m ancient), I was a twenty-three year-old know-it-all who, as it turned out, was born to it. I loved the job and I was extremely good at it. But I was absolutely awful when it came to anything but gentle critiquing. Alas for me, the group of folks I was in, almost all active duty and retired senior Army noncoms (I was a civilian), were generally not inclined to be gentle about it. On the flip side, they recognized that I had some potential, so they kept hammering on me until I finally got the idea: criticism, even when it’s harsh, is one of your best learning tools. I didn’t use the hammer and chisel model myself when I was later the one doing the mentoring and critiquing, but I understood quite well how important critiquing is, and how vital it is to learn to accept it as something to learn from, even if it stings.

That, Grasshopper, is what you must learn to do. It’s like the folks who came to be my book editors. In my heyday, I had four who hacked and chopped my manuscripts before it went to the beta readers. Two of them, in particular, were absolutely merciless. But their critiques and criticisms really helped improve the stories, the writing, and the published work.

Again: it is vital that you learn to embrace red ink.

So, back to reviews. If you’re going to look through them (I’m a bit divided on this; it can be useful, but can also be very addicting and incredibly corrosive to your ego), first ditch the ones I mentioned earlier. Then set aside the ones stroking your ego – save those as a balm for after you’ve gone through some of the not-so-nice ones.

Instead, concentrate your time on carefully and objectively reading through the reviews that offer any details about why the reader didn’t like your work. Sometimes there’s not much you can do about it; other times you may not want to do anything about it. For example, you enjoy writing in a certain style that a reviewer didn’t like. Mark it as a fair critique but not something you’re going to act on.

But other things, like, say, “Uses way too many em dashes!” Look back through the manuscript and ask yourself, “Okay, do I?”

“I’m supposed to be on an alien planet, but the worldbuilding is pathetic and made me feel like I was in Anytown USA.” Unless you intended for the reader to feel like they were on an alien planet that felt like Anytown USA, that’s something you can probably dig your teeth into, right?

“The main character was consistent through the book until the final act, where their actions weren’t at all consistent with their motivations as established earlier in the story.” Yeah, I think there’s some meat on that bone.

You’ll also likely see things like, “The characters were all two-dimensional, boring tropes.” That’s something else to take a look at.

Now, one caveat here: the more of a given type of critique you see, the more weight I’d attach to it. For example, if you have fifty reviewers saying they loved the characters and two saying the characters are two dimensional cardboard cutouts, I probably wouldn’t worry much. But if you’ve got a lot of readers saying a particular thing(s), that’s a pattern and you need to go back and dig into it.

“What if I get a lot of reviews saying my book or my writing just sucks?”

I’m going to now give you a brutal critique that’s going to test your ability to “love red ink.” If readers are consistently panning your book because of poor writing, etc., then the manuscript may need a lot more work than you thought before you published it. That work may involve reworking the story (plot, characters, settings, etc.), improving your writing (grammar, spelling, etc.), or a combination of both.

This is particularly the case in the age of self-publishing, which is what I’ve been doing since 2008. More brutal honesty: just because anyone can publish a book doesn’t mean they’re really ready to. You may have what you think is the greatest story ever and it’ll be a book you know readers out there will love. Well, maybe and maybe not. How good of a writer are you? How good of a storyteller are you? Did you have some folks you trust to be honest read the draft? What did they really think? And this is a big one: did you have someone who really knows how to review and edit go over it, or did you “edit” it yourself (which means it wasn’t edited at all)?

This isn’t to say that if you don’t have years of experience writing in some fashion that you can’t learn to be a good writer, or that you can’t learn to structure a story with an engaging plot, interesting characters, and awesome locales. But if you don’t have that experience, you’ll need to learn, and that takes time and effort.

Writing well takes a lot of work to learn. I took most of my English courses (I was in mostly advanced classes; I was a nerd) in high school, but in college I majored in Russian, had a minor in French, and took a bit of German, too; and it wasn’t just speaking or translating, there was a lot of literature and — gasp! — poetry thrown in. That foreign language experience really helped me improve my English and storytelling skills. Then I wrote intelligence reports for five years before I started writing my first book; some major work on storytelling (LOL). Then I wrote my novels in my free time while I wrote and edited intel reports at work, until the day came that I started writing novels full-time.

This is something else you have to take to heart along with embracing red ink: if you don’t have a background in writing and some form of storytelling (e.g., fiction writing, journalism, etc.), it’s probably not realistic to think you’re going to be able to just sit down and churn out a decent book.

This is also a bit of a catch: you can be an excellent writer but a terrible storyteller, and vice versa. These are very different skills and talent areas, and you need both to write a good novel. Again, this isn’t to say that you’re doomed as an author; I’m simply saying that you may need to train yourself up in one or both skills. Embrace the red ink, learn what sucks, and work on hammering those weaknesses into oblivion.

Before you publish, get at least a dozen or so people to read your book and give you honest, brutal feedback, then take to heart what they’re saying. Tell them specifically that you’re not looking for an ego boost, but want to know the honest truth. This is a great way to avoid a lot of unpleasant surprises from reader reviews.

But don’t be like some authors I’ve known who did this and then argued with their reviewers or threw their comments back in their face. Don’t shout, “My story does NOT suck! My writing does NOT suck! You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Please don’t be that person.

Last but not least, if you’re driven to write, for whatever reason, write. If your writing or storytelling needs work, don’t get hung up on your ego; admit to yourself that you need to improve your craft and put the time and effort into improving it. Trust me: you’ll be glad you did!

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