"Top Ten Things An Author Should Not Do At Amazon"

[pith]

This list wasn't compiled with LKH in mind (see? She's spreading the infection!), but most of the points are a perfect fit: http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2008/07/08/top-ten-things-authors-should-not-do-at-amazon/

Before I delve into the list, note the sanity exhibited by author Jeaniene Frost:
JF: It’s a bad idea as an author to ever argue a review. I have an overall good Amazon rating for my books, but you can bet there are some pretty strongly-worded negative reviews mixed in there, too. Bottom line: personal tastes vary, so no book will please every reader. If I can’t handle that as an author, then I shouldn’t have my books available to the public. (Emphasis at the end is mine.)


Remember: all of these are things to NOT do.

1. Suggest that the reader does not have good reading comprehension.
Three little words that will haunt LKH's "fandom" forever: Dear Negative Reader. Nuff said.

2. Suggest that a reader is only allowed to have a lukewarm opinion of a book if she has published a book.
I don't think LKH herself has done this, but I've lost count of the number of troos who spout something like "And have YOU written a bestselling series? No? Then you don't know what you're talking about!" (Yet they, who have also presumably not published a bestselling series, somehow do. Funny how that works, huh?)

3. Insult the readers by suggesting that their opinions are “knee jerk” and that they don’t have the good sense to appreciate work that the professionals do.
I know nothing much about Diana Gabaldon, and I'm probably completely wrong, but I still maintain she's probably mortified by that "I've never met an author with a more fertile imagination!" [pp] quotation.

4. Invoke the name(s) of successful authors in the genre to buttress your opinions.
Or, in LKH's case, have a parade of fawning up-and-comers coo over her at conventions, signings, and in the fanclub newsletter.

5. Suggest that a reader giving an opinion about a book is tantamount to insulting the author’s child.
Her vision, watch her coddle it! Okay, so it doesn't work so well in LOLcat and LKH may have not said this word for word, but… actually, no. I do not in any way want to envision her books as children.

6. Ignore one’s own good advice to walk away from the encounter.
Jon "adding gasoline to the fire". I'm sure if I devoted the time to it, I could come up with a lengthy list of examples, but yeah. We're all basically supposed to shut up—if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all!—while she continues to drop snide remarks about those who don't like her vision.

7. Call the readers a bunch of witches.
Dear Negative Reader returns! She'd never deign to call us witches, per se—after all, witches are blessed by the "Diety" and are full of magic and love and light (but not TOO MUCH light, mind, or else her darkity darkness might suffer)—but DNR was pretty much this point, made in glaring ALL CAPS.

DNR. Dear Negative Reader. Do Not Resuscitate. Coincidence? I think not.

8. Tell the readers to do something more constructive than read and write reviews. (and invoke another big name author if possible and get it wrong)
Say it with me now: "If you don't like it, don't read it!"

I get that negative reviews are hard to take, even for a seasoned pro. After all, not only is writing a novel a job, it's also a creative endeavour. It hurts, even if only a little bit, if someone doesn't like the story you wrote or the sketch you drew or the song you played. Your goal, to whatever degree, is to entertain, and if you didn't entertain, you feel like you failed. However, the whole "interrogating from the wrong perspective" frame of mind is for people who can't take criticism.

And if you can't take criticism, both the good and the bad, then you shouldn't launch yourself and your work into the public sphere. PERIOD. By all means, continue to write—but keep it in your computer file or your notebooks or whatever. Those are the only places your work is guaranteed to be "safe" and unconditionally loved.

Comments

[pith]

Even previously-sane authors are starting to get iffy. Maybe it's Author's Disease or something.

[easol.livejournal.com]

Such authors should be required to have a piss-taker-outer working beside them at all times, to deflate their egos.

[atypia.livejournal.com]

And I think they should employ said P-T-O's from this community :) We'd help them out, no worries.

[morriganscrow.livejournal.com]

And we're highly experienced professionals!

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

One of the most disturbing things, to me, about the Internet is this sudden immediate proximity that fans have to professionals. (Not that I'm against it -- I read and comment on author LJs just like everyone else, and am happy when I get replied to, especially by the ones I really admire.)

But it's like all the filters are gone. It doesn't take any hard work to communicate any more (write/type, buy stamps, walk to mailbox -- yes, very "hard" :-D) and so there's less self-censorship from brain to mouth to other people. There's not enough... distance, which can be nervewracking (to me). I hold Amazon especially guilty -- not that Amazon is doing anything wrong, but by its very nature it's a place where that aspect of the Internet is distilled. LiveJournal is another such place. (Who wrote that cartoon where "Regular guy" + "opinions" + "anonymity" = "raging trolling Internet asshole"?) Maybe it strikes us as worse when it's not a random idiot but an author whose mind we've had a glimpse into through their work, and whom we admire and think we "know." I am NOT friends with [insert author name here], even if we have had deep discussions about politics and our feelings about life, and made little comments in asterisks like *hugs you* when someone is upset. But the intimacy of the Internet tricks us into thinking that we are (that goes in both directions) It feels more real than it is.

That was weird and I'm not sure it made the sense I wanted it to, but I gotta work so I'm cutting it short. Shortish.^^

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

Why yes, yes it would be! Thank you!

(I was mistakenly thinking it was that other webcomic, done in stick figures, whose name is a math formula that I can't remember right now -- xc somethingorother -- the one that did the "I can't go to bed yet, SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET!" strip. Close, but not quite. ^__^)

[thesaneminority.livejournal.com]

That would be XKCD (http://xkcd.com/386/).

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

Thanks! If I had sense I'd have just added it to my Google feed ages ago...

(Your icon is subtly terrifying. Which is the best sort of terrifying.)

[drho.livejournal.com]

She's so edgy. She breaks all the rules! LOL!

[sharkbytes.livejournal.com]

It's such a turnoff for me to find out an author I like trolls the internet, responding to their own reviews and getting all butthurt about anything other than glowing praise. I know it's tempting but nothing makes a writer look like more of an asshat than that.

Great list, and it reminds me once again how enormous LKH's ego has become. She's convinced that she's writing the gold standard of genre novels, and we're but hopeless peons who can't grasp her vision. It never fails to crack me up :)

[sap-girl.livejournal.com]

Victoria Laurie went psycho a few months back on ye olde Amazon, too, over a 1 star review of Demons are a Ghoul's Best Friend. Amazon actually deleted her comments, though, so I'm guessing they must have been pretty terrible. Why don't they learn? It's not like this is new ground they're treading; the count of crazy genre writers is growing steadily.

[karmyn75.livejournal.com]

She did? Damn, I like both her series. She seemed so sensible.
You'd think a professional psychic would know better. Guess she didn't listen to the voices in her head that day.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

AH HA, I was reading that last night and eye-rolling over how it totally applies to LKH. It also brings to mind the small argument naeko had on Amazon with Karen Chance, author of the Cassie Palmer books, where naeko left a bad review, and Chance decided to argue the merits of her book re: historical accuracy and issues naeko had with the book. (here (http://www.amazon.com/review/RKQR2LOK21IKR/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm), if you're interested)

The whole thing was terribly polite, and at the same time saddening, because Chance came across as an intelligent person. I could have forgiven her if she was some kind of asshat about it all, but no...she sounds like she knows what she's talking about and is a genuinely nice person. It's just that Touch the Dark was a truly terrible book (or it was to me, and I didn't even read it all the way through -- just the end and that was enough to make me go D: because IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE) and from what I've skimmed of the others, they're not much better. Chance is writing what she thinks is awesome, great, but trying to tell other people that you're awesome is a bad idea.

[lucky-ninja.livejournal.com]

Anne Rice, if you're reading this, please take notes.

Thanks.

[pandorasblog]

The comments on that page are also very interesting. I liked the points about how authors don't always grasp that reviews do not exist as promo for their work, particularly on a site like Amazon where the reader feedback exists to help other customers. Also that bit about how they don't realise that a negative review is often necessary to catalyse a positive one...

What we have here seems to be authors entering a world they don't understand and trying to interact with it on their own terms. You'd think the ones who, like LKH, made multiple attempts would eventually learn from the experience, but apparently not.

[moonsinger.livejournal.com]

"And if you can't take criticism, both the good and the bad, then you shouldn't launch yourself and your work into the public sphere. PERIOD. By all means, continue to write—but keep it in your computer file or your notebooks or whatever. Those are the only places your work is guaranteed to be "safe" and unconditionally loved."

I totally disagree with you on what you say in that quote. It isn't easy to take what you've written and allow other people to tear it up. It is akin to being told at work that you are lazy, don't deserve a raise, and a waste of space. Writing is very personal, and while I think that writers should do their best to ignore criticism that just tears them apart and isn't constructive, it is hard to do. Not to mention, you can get bad constructive criticism that makes you over haul something you've written and take it from bad to worse. The Internet has some good features, but being able to look for reviews of an author's work isn't one of them. A writer should try to ignore the harmful criticism, but sometimes it is hard to do. I know I personally have not spent the past 13 years writing to keep my books in my computer for no one to see. Then again, until I think the drafts I've written are good, I'm not going to send them to a publisher. Still if you never take the leap, you'll never know if you're any good and despite a fear of negative criticism and self-doubt, it is better to try then to keep it hidden on a computer or in a drawer (Imagine how Emily Dickinson's life might have changed had she sought publication of her poetry).

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

Actually, I don't think the paragraph you've quoted disagrees with you at all. It IS hard, terribly hard and painful, I think we all agree. But it's also professional and ideal. (Now, how many normal humans can actually live up to an ideal, ANY ideal, is another story, of course!)

[pith]

Thanks :) I thought I was clear, but I guess I wasn't. I know writing for a living is damn hard, but that doesn't mean I expect that I'm only going to get shiny happy reviews when I finally get a novel published. And that's okay. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, and criticism helps us grow, right? (As long as it's constructive criticism, like "The author spends too much time describing the architecture and not enough on character development", not "This book sucks".)

[moonsinger.livejournal.com]

I figure should I ever get a book published on Amazon and get a horribly negative review, I won't read it. If I do, I'll be depressed for a day at least and ticked off. I definitely don't want to get into a flame war either, so I'm thinking that I'd let someone else read stuff for me and let me know what is useful (aka critical but not saying you just suck). That would make the most sense.

Sounds like we don't disagree from the poster's response to my comment btw.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

(Imagine how Emily Dickinson's life might have changed had she sought publication of her poetry).

Emily Dickinson did seek publication, and had several poems published during her lifetime in newspapers and magazines.

And it was her great dream to publish a collection of her works, but she was dissuaded from it by her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

See, now in her case, "learning to take criticism" could and probably should have meant "learning to politely ignore this Higginson putz." (Not necessarily synonymous with "learning to accept, agree with, and abide by aforesaid criticism.")

[moonsinger.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I didn't know that first fact. I just remember hearing that her relatives found a bunch of poetry in a drawer when she died. Admittedly, poetry especially American is not remotely my speciality. I stand corrected.

[pith]

I'm not going to trot out my resume here, I promise, but trust me: I know writing is tough. I have a degree in Creative Writing. I have poems, short stories, and essays published. I've been in more workshop sessions than I care to count. And yes, I've had my writing "torn apart". The key is to realizing what you*, as the writer, want to do with the work, and digesting the criticism in kind.

The key of what I said is if you can't take criticism. I can. From what you've said, you seem to be able to. LKH, however, and several other authors it seems CANNOT. So perhaps it's clearer this way: "If you* only want positive accolades, don't try to get published, because you* will be disappointed. There will always be someone who doesn't like what you* wrote, and just because they don't like what you* wrote does not make them wrong or stupid or anything else."

* = generic "you"

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

This.

Anyone who cannot deal with criticism should avoid publication. Full stop.

And "deal with" is going to be a completely individual style, of course. Some writer friends of mine don't read reviews; some have their agents send them only the good reviews; some just wade right into the reviews as they come. I've learned a lot from some bad reviews, and others I've just taken in as, "Eh, they don't get it."

[moonsinger.livejournal.com]

Putting it that way makes much better sense. I do have a hard time taking criticism, and I will say that it has messed with my head a few times. However, I willing to listen to the constructive sort and frankly I find the sort of criticism that says the writing is good or bad to be useless. Still I hope some day to have some sort of accolades.

Oh, and I've done the workshop circuit a time or too with a mixed bag of results. I would prefer to find a group of people I'm comfortable with who want to help me be a better writer (and vice versa). I haven't found it yet. I'm thinking of trying to set up an online group with some friends.

I've had a few minor things published but nothing for pay although one short story was in a fanzine that had national readership, so that was pretty cool. I'm still working on getting the novels out there.

As for LKH, she does need to listen to some constructive criticism and probably take a 2 or 3 year vacation from writing to recharge. I truly wish she would as I used to like her writing and characterization. Now she has no internal consistency at all. In fact, one of the reasons I'm waiting until I write all five books in my series that I'm working on before I seek publication is so that I can have good internal consistency.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Diana Gabaldon...probably mortified by that "I've never met an author with a more fertile imagination!" [pp] quotation.

Maybe she was just referring to Whorenita's many pregnancy scares.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

Did she say that herself? About herself?!

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

DG said this about LKH, according to DG's page at fantasticfiction.co.uk:

"I've never read a writer with a more fertile imagination and fewer inhibitions about using it."


That's a bit of an equivoque right there...

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

Heh. That actually sounds like something someone might have said about De Sade.

(Caveat -- I have never read any De Sade, but I intend to at some point. I did see Quills. ^__^)

[ana-beachcombe.livejournal.com]

I maintain that authors who are just starting out should publish some of their writings online in places where they'll get plenty of feedback (perhaps by writing fanfiction). Not only do you get useful advice, but you'll quickly learn how to deal with bad reviews that are in this case directed at you personally.

It worked for me. I didn't enjoy it, but in the end I finally realised that all you can really do is say "well, I'm disappointed that you didn't like it, but I did my best". And sometimes you can add "thankyou for telling me what needs work". Anything else is a one-way ticket to Flameville. If I ever get to the point where I'm being reviewed on Amazon, I don't plan to read any of them. If I do, I'll stick my head under the pillow before I start ranting and screaming. The Internet won't know about it. Frankly the idea of making a fool of myself online (again) makes me cringe.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

Toughens your skin and is cheaper than shelling out thousands for an MFA. ~__^

[ana-beachcombe.livejournal.com]

Exactly!
I'm only just starting out as a professional, and I don't know if I'll ever be famous, but thanks to this comm. and others like it I *do* know one thing: I do NOT want to be like LKH one day.

Thanks Lashouts! You showed a budding young author what she could become one day if she doesn't watch herself and listen to critics! (I almost hope I do become famous, just so you guys can pat yourselves on the back about that).

[pith]

*L* When you're famous, you can give the comm a mention in your Acknowledgements page :) "LKH Lashouts, thanks for getting me jaded well and early!"

[ana-beachcombe.livejournal.com]

I might just do that, in fact. I love this place.

~K.J.Taylor, who prefers not to write about sex.

[moonsinger.livejournal.com]

An MFA is not so useful if you write genre fiction if you ask me. I dealt with enough literary snobbery when I was working on my MA in English.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

I think it did me good -- but I also think I was lucky. I primarily got a kooky professor that the students in my first semester hated (at that point I was 22-23, the youngest person in the entire program by decades in some cases -- it was part-time and a lot of the students were returning and some even retired adults, lawyers and things finally following their bliss -- and I was the only one trying to write sci-fi/fantasy).

By my second year I was in class with people who wanted to be Danielle Steele and were taken seriously. And I met my "kooky" professor, who taught experimental fiction and was amazing -- and by that time all the snobs had graduated and I was surrounded by people who wanted to do magic realism and read "The Cat in the Hat Runs for President." And I met Stephen Barnes. *squee!!*

I'm grossly oversimplifying. But like I said -- lucky. I know of some very famous and prestigious courses in the U.S. that would have crushed me in buglike fashion whilst turning out a succession of Raymond Carver clones to dance upon my corpse. But where I was, I was never put down or made to feel silly or unserious; the worst inconvenience was just trying to explain the rules of fantasy EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME. ("No -- see, the point of having this character be a healer? As in, employing magical healing? Is that this kid is HEALED, so no, it's actually not unrealistic for her broken arm to be not-broken the following week, hence this long-ass explanation of healing on the second page." You learn who to ignore fairly quickly. ^^ There are always two.)

The second worst part was, in the required workshop classes, trying to explain to fellow students jumping on the fantasy bandwagon in my third year that magic has to follow a system, any system, but there has to BE one. Otherwise what you have is deus ex machina and that is ungood.

I think that for the development of a tough skin, the Internet can help you nearly as well, the drawback being that if you post original stuff you can be more easily plagiarized, and you can't necessarily verify the credentials of your critics. But it's free and you can 1. do it longer. 2. revise more. And it's easier if you want to go longer than short-story format. And I think you're more likely to retain your own style, although I could be wrong about that. (I do like the fact they taught me to do public readings, and that if push comes to shove I've got teaching credentials. Sorta. I wonder if they'll need writing teachers in the oncoming apocalypse? I swear I shoulda taken up plumbing...^__^)

[moonsinger.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you were lucky. I thought about going for an MFA at one point and a PhD in Creative Writing at another, but I didn't do it primarily because of my negative experiences over genre writing in the two writing classes I took. I got A's in both classes, but I didn't bother with writing fantasy when everyone jumped down my throat about writing it, so I worked on my technique more than anything else.

If I could afford it, I'd try to get into Clarion or Clarion West. That would just rock.

I've thought about doing a web page at some point with some poetry and short stories, but there is no way I'd put my novels on the Internet. I want to publish them for pay and not lose first world rights.

You might see about teaching ad hoc in a junior college. It doesn't pay all that well though as it pays by the class, but it is still money. I did a little bit of it. If I had it to do over, I'd have gotten a teaching certificate though. Pays much better to teach elementary through high school than college unless you get tenure.