Awful good reviews

I've often said three-star reviews are the worst to get.

One-star reviews are written by assholes. Five stars some from friends or people are often too excited.

When I look at reviews, I discount the fives and ones. But if I see a book heavy with three stars, that's a book I might not care about. One-star people care. Five-star people care.

A three-star review says  "Meh. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. Whatever." Who wants to read that book?

And then there's this kind of review, one that says the book was great and the author did great work, but it wasn't exactly what the reader wanted.

What the heck are you supposed to do with that?

When Bad Things Happen to Bad Reviews

By Steve Weddle

We've all read books we've hated. We've all wanted that time back. We've all thought about telling the author what we think about the book. We've all Googled county land records to find the author's address and driven to his or her house and sat in the driveway for a half-hour trying to decide what to say when the author answers the door. We've all had to ask our wives to call Tammy over at Ned's Bail Bonds.

But things are getting even weirder. As Kieran Shea pointed out that other day, you can get sued for posting a bad review online.

A judge in Virginia has ordered a woman to change her negative Yelp review about a building contractor after the business won a key legal battle. Jane Perez was slapped with a $750,000 lawsuit by Dietz Development after she publicly logged complaints about construction work the company performed on her home.

The story about the Fairfax woman was in the Washigton Post, Huff Po, the UK's Daily Mail, and a billion other places.

The big sticking point seems to be that her review suggested the contractor who worked on her home had stolen her jewelry. If you're going to accuse someone of a crime that the police say he didn't commit, you're going to have some trouble.

What's interesting about this incident is the stuff on the edges, I think. A judge orders a woman to change her online review. I totally get that in terms of defamation.

And back in September I mentioned this post which seems to fall under the "Authors Behaving Badly" category.

But what responsibility do reviewers have? Legal, sure. Ethical? Moral?

And what happens when courts begin ordering you to alter your post on a review site? Imagine:

A judge in Nebraska has ordered a man to change his negative Amazon review of Dan Brown's THE LOST SYMBOL after Brown's attorneys won a key legal battle. Nick LeBottoms was ordered to remove his criticism of Brown's third Robert Langdon novel after it was revealed that LeBottoms had  read only the first 17 pages.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Steve, that sounds crazy." Because, yeah, strange stuff never happens in publishing.

What happens if authors decide it's no longer fun to blog about bad reviews, to tweet about bad reviews, to comment on bad reviews? What happens if an author can go beyond a simple claim of "material damage" and show that the reviewer really is a sock-puppet for a rival author?

What happens when those authors one-starred by "rival" authors on Amazon file a class action suit against Amazon? Or when a TV-advertising, personal injury lawyer is able to prove your review was false and malicious? Or when you review a book and expose the author behind the pen name? What happens when your review is so well written, so clever and cutting, that it can be proven to have caused substantial mental and financial harm to the author?

Can you imagine being called into court to defend your negative review of The Vampyre's Lament?

Plaintiff's Attorney: You claim in your one-star review that this book was like "eating a turd sandwich." Is that correct?
You: Yeah. I guess I said that.
PA: And how often have you eaten a turd sandwich? Is this a taste with which you are familiar?
You: Uh, it was a joke.
PA: Are you joking now or were you joking then?
You: Uh...
PA: Is BigBallz69 even your real name?

As Norman Chad would say, "Pay the man, Shirley."

The guide to being an author in the age of the internet

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Yes – that is a lofty title to this particular post. Perhaps too lofty for me to accomplish alone. However, I’m going to take a whack at it in hopes that if I miss something someone will come to the plate and take their own swings.

Aside from the start of the major league baseball season, last week featured a terrible online moment for authors/writers/bloggers. You might have seen it. A blog featured a review for a self-published author that wasn’t entirely favorable. The author then decided to confront the reviewer in the comments section of the blog. Actually, the author commented more than once and was not only confrontational, but a bit classless. Word about the review and the author’s reaction spread over social media, as it has a tendency to do, and within hours there were over 300 comments posted. The author’s book also took a beating over at Amazon in the reviews section pulling 1 star reviews from people who were commenting on her online behavior and not on her writing.

We’ve talked about reviews here at DSD. Reviews are part of life. Good, bad, indifferent – authors have to deal with reviews and they are under an obligation to themselves to deal with them professionally. In the old days (yeah – I’m referring to less than ten years ago here), an author would get reviewed, tell all their friends and readers about the good ones and mourn the bad ones with a gallon of double fudge chocolate ice cream. If you didn’t subscribe to the trades, you never saw the review. Nowadays there is nowhere to hide. Social media spreads the word about good and bad – and let’s face it – it spreads the word about the bad much, much faster. Had the author from this week’s review meltdown kept quiet, the review would have basically gone unnoticed by the book reading universe. Her friends would never heard about it. Almost the entire pool of potential readers would never have seen it. The world would have moved on.

So here is my list of dos and don’ts for authors. Yes, some of these might seem totally obvious, but hey this week demonstrated that maybe for some they are not.

1. Keep your emotions and your conflict on the page – writers work hard at ratcheting up those things in their manuscript. Readers love emotion and conflict when it is central to your story, but they don’t belong as part of your public author persona.

2. Never put anything in writing online that you do not want to follow you for the rest of your career. A piece of paper can be burned but the internet is forever. Agents, editors, bloggers, booksellers and readers all can and do use Google. Trust me – you don’t want them finding this stuff.

3. Don’t create fake accounts on Amazon or on other review sites just to bump up the number of good reviews. Yes, people do this, and, yes, people get caught.

4. Always think twice before hitting send on any post be on Twitter, Facebook, a blog, e-mail or anywhere else. Refer to rule #2 for the reason.

5. Do not create a Facebook or Twitter account if you know you cannot control your emotions. This doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad promoter. This makes you self-aware.

6. Call your friends, family or favorite pizza place when you get a bad review. Never share that disappointment in public. It makes you look bad.

7. Never post on a blog where an author has created an unprofessional spectacle of themselves. You do not want your name associated with that kind of train wreck in any way, shape or form. With that in mind, you also don’t want to post Amazon reviews as a way of kicking an unprofessional author when they are down. Get out of the way of the train, watch it pass by and move on.

8. Posting a reviewer’s home address or phone number on Twitter (or anywhere else) and telling your fans to contact the reviewer to disagree with the review is never a good idea. (I wish this one had never happened, but a NY Times Best Seller did this. She has since heeded rule #5.)

9. Remember the Golden Rule. How you treat others online will determine how you are perceived. Does this mean you can’t disagree with people? Hell no! The best discussions I have on Facebook and Twitter are ones where there is heated disagreement. But it is the manner in which you argue and fight and even how you agree that is important.

10. When in doubt, turn off the internet and write. Hey – we’re writers. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

Well, that’s my list. What rules on your list did I fail to mention?