Handling Criticism

With the wide span of social media, it's easy for a new author to be eaten alive by the Facebook and Twitter masses. The reality is that even if your book doesn't become a bestseller, you will still have your fair share of critics. Everyone isn't going to like your book, and you need to be sure that you can handle reading those gut-wrenching, negative reviews.

Reviews are crucial. For most Americans, reviews of restaurants, books, and movies guide our lives.

If a book has too few stars, I won't read it. I'll typically thumb through the pages of the reviews to see why it was so poorly rated, but that's it. A few bad reviews on your book and it can be difficult to recover, and that's why it's important to prepare yourself for criticism and to learn how to handle it once your novel, which you love, is published.

It can be difficult to hear the opinions of others, and if being attacked on social media is new to you it can be earth-shattering. Luckily for me I have already experienced what it feels like to enrage thousands of strangers and can share with you what I'm sure you already know: it fucking sucks.

A few years ago when I was just catching my bearings as a writer, I wrote a column for my college newspaper on the implications of shopping at Wal-Mart. When I wrote the piece, I thought nothing of it, surely there were many people on my college campus who felt as I did, and those who didn't, I assumed would ignore the piece altogether.

But the demographics of my college skewed conservatively and the next day after the column ran, I got a call from my editor telling me that radio talk-show pundit Neal Boortz had read the article and was discussing it on his morning show.

At first, I panicked. I wasn't sure why of all the columns I'd written, this guy decided to pick up on this one, and I didn't realize just how popular of a radio host he was. Hate mail flooded in to the newspaper almost simultaneously. People that I didn't even know were talking about me, saying rude, judgmental things, and then to top it off this guy wrote a column about me.

I could have let this break me, shatter me to pieces and give up writing all together, but instead I used it as fuel to the fire. This guy thought I would never amount to anything, and I decided to prove him wrong.

With the release of my debut novel Logost, I'm reminded that there will be those who love the book, there will be those who feel they can't relate, and the there will be those few hateful people who never seem to like anything. Ignore those people, have faith in the product you created and don't let their opinions of it drive you crazy. Do you like your book? If the answer is 'yes' then that's all that really matters.

Love,
Kris