Remember what I said about never commenting on reviews? Fuck it.

I was doing my six-month review of reviews update when I saw a neat little gem among my erotica reviews. The reviewer’s main complaint and reason for giving it a one star?

The book had spanking in it.

This would make sense if I wrote cozy mysteries and slapped in a spanking scene out of nowhere. But I don’t write cozy mysteries. This book was written under a pseudonym which is a well-known spanking author, published as spanking erotica by a well-known spanking fetish publisher and given a sales blurb that clearly indicated it was about spanking.

For the reviewer to complain about spanking in the book is like me buying a jar of olives at the grocery store and then attempting to return them because there were too many olives

And as of right now, my policy on not commenting on reviews? Done. I have changed my mind entirely.

In the past, I’ve kept my mouth shut about bad reviews out of some mistaken sense of decorum. I thought I was being a professional. I used to be all like “well, Stephen King, he gets one stars all the time. Janet Evanovich, she gets one stars every day. They don’t respond.”

But I’m not Stephen King and I’m not Janet Evanovich. I don’t have millions of dollars in sales to comfort me when someone calls me a pervert on the internet.  I’m a fucking nobody and what does it matter if I do whatever the fuck I want, whenever I want?

You don’t get to tell me how to behave. So you’re a reader and you have an opinion? Well I’m a breather and I have an opinion too. Most of the time, that opinion is “you’re a fucking moron.”

In the past, I’ve held myself to a standard out of some mistaken sense of decorum, but tonight I realized I’m dealing with people who can’t even be bothered to read a sales blurb before they complain. Why the hell am I trying to act like this consummate professional when people feel no reason to respond in kind? The customer isn’t always right. In fact, most of the time, they’re just being an asshole.

And now it’s my turn to be an asshole.

So here’s my responses to all the reviews I’ve gotten, that I’ve been dying to respond to, but held my tongue on.

Let’s make this clear. You paid to read all of my Sal books, but don’t like them?  Then stop reading them! Seriously, no one is forcing you to read your way through an entire series that you don’t like. In fact, I’m genuinely requesting that you stop reading everything I write right now. You’d be doing us both a favor. Also, side note, I dig being corrected on grammar by someone incapable of turning their caps lock off.

Seriously, suck it.

It probably obtained the rating it did because other people than you actually liked it. Imagine that. Your tastes aren’t everyone’s. If they were, we’d all be wearing sweater sets and creating macaroni pictures of Jesus at some shitty community center while planning birthday parties for our cats.

If I insulted Christians and portrayed them as fanatics, you have my utmost….thanks. Most Christians are fanatics. The very definition of fanatic is “a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal”. Now, I don’t know about you, but I consider basing my life on a rule book of 2000-year-old riddles and praying to an invisible father figure who lives above us in the sky fanatical. I do indeed consider those people crazy fanatics and have no issue at all with the fact that they disagree with me. In fact, I’m a bit relieved by it. It indicates to me that at least all my facilities are still intact and I’m still capable of logical thought.

So that’s all I feel like commenting on for now but I can’t guarantee that this will be all. I’m thinking about setting up a page where I openly respond to reviews that piss me off.

I’m not afraid of badly behaving author’s groups or stupid internet campaigns because I know three things. One, if you get a real fire going on a book, all the bad reviews in the world won’t stop it.( See Stephen Leather). Two, the vast majority of you book reviewers one star me while drooling over the next piece of vampire erotica, indicating to me that you wouldn’t know good writing if Earnest Hemingway rolled out of his grave and bitch slapped you with A Farewell to Arms.

And three, I have nothing to lose. The vast majority of my books are languishing in the dregs of Amazon. What’s the worse that will happen? I piss off a bunch of people and make myself EXTRA-unsellable?

What will I do without those extra $27 in royalties every month?

Well, guess I’ll just create a new pen name. Yeah, that internet anonymity works both ways. The bitch you hate this month could be the author you love next and you’ll never even have an inkling.

So all that stuff I said about never commenting on reviews? Fuck it. Comment away. If someone has the nuts to say something nasty about a person online, they should have the nuts to back that opinion up when confronted. People who get upset when an author comments on their reviews are being hypocritical assholes. You’re allowed to comment on someone else’s writing, but they can’t comment on yours? Because that’s what a review is. It’s writing. And based on your own definition of reviewing, someone else is entirely entitled to give you an opinion on that writing.

You know how so many of you say “if you can’t handle a bad review, don’t write?” Well, here’s Essa saying; “If you can’t handle a bad review of your review, don’t write.” Works both ways.

The internet isn’t a glory hole where you get your rocks off and walk away. Sometimes shit comes back, and sometimes it comes back because you were being an idiotic asshole. And no one, not other readers, not writers, not the god damn president, is required to be nice to you while you’re being an asshole, regardless of what medium you choose to be an asshole in.

That’s life. Deal with it.