Should authors respond to reviews of their books?

Short answer: No. Long answer: NOOOOOOOO...

This is an ongoing discussion in the book community. It always flares up when something like this happens:

Jack reads a book and it really rubs him the wrong way. He has a solid online presence so when he posts a review, it gets around. It’s a negative review and he puts a little extra mustard on it (for the clicks) but in all seriousness this book really offended him. 

And eventually that review makes its way to the author...Karen.

And Karen’s not having it. Because Jack didn’t GET her book. Because his review actually has factual errors, because he misinterpreted that thing she said on page 92, whatever. She engages. She responds, she tweets, she comments. And intentionally or not, she sics her fans on him in the process, and then we all have the same discussion once again where the loudest and most prevalent message is almost always this: Reviews are for readers. Authors, stay out of it. 

Then, inevitably, a few authors who weren’t directly involved in the kerfuffle will speak up in defense of responding to reviews. What about discussion? What about healthy debate? I heard one argue that it’s no different than an event in which authors and readers/attendees engage in a Q&A. Is there anything wrong with that? No! Also? It’s absolutely NOT the same thing.

Readers attend events with the express purpose of interacting with an author. They want to engage. So does the author!

Readers do NOT publish reviews with the express purpose of interacting with an author. They want to engage with other readers.

A better analogy for authors responding to reviews would be authors barging in on a book club meeting to which they were not invited and making everyone SUPER uncomfortable.

I don’t seek out and read reviews of my books. I don’t search my name or title hashtags on social media. I did when my first book came out, yes. It’s hard to stay away. It’s surreal that people are actually reading the thing you wrote and yes, I did check Goodreads multiple times a day back in 2014. But that was a decade and over twenty books ago.

Now? When my editors send me a trade review, by which I mean a review in Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, School Library Journal, etc, I absolutely read them, good or bad. There’s something to be learned from most negative critiques, and I want to learn and get better. It might sting, but that’s fine, I know I’ll get over it. 

But I don’t look up my books on Goodreads or Amazon or search for blog reviews or scroll those hashtags etc. And it’s hard to explain why. It’s not that I don’t care, because I do—I care. Of course I care whether or not people are reading my book and what they think about it. But I don’t have the itch anymore, the desire to go and look. It gradually faded over the years.

I know not all authors feel that way. In fact, I know more than one who has given a friend control of their Goodreads password so that they actually cannot login, I know authors who have left social media entirely because seeing chatter about their books was anxiety inducing, and I get it. I’m trying to identify how and when and why I came to this place of zen about it, and I think I know the answer. So now we’re going to go back to that first question—should authors respond to their reviews—and why my answer is no. 

I’ll start with a positive example. A few years ago I read the sequel to a novel I really loved. The first novel was actually a standalone, but it was so successful the author wrote a sequel, and I will admit I had my doubts going in. I loved how the first book ended. But holy damn, did this author surprise me with that sequel. It didn’t drag the protagonist on the same journey—in fact, this was a new protagonist and a new cast of characters. It didn’t retroactively destroy the cool world-building from book one—actually, it expanded on the world in ways I hadn’t even considered but that immediately made me go oh, yeah, of course that’s how things are now. And it wasn’t a repeat of the first plot and themes—it was a whole new original story with new themes.  

If you’re a fandom person, you know the word headcanon. But if you haven’t heard that before, let me explain. Headcanon is you, as a fan, as a reader, your interpretation of what is real and true about the story. You infer things from the text, from the canon, and in your mind, these ideas about characters, backstories, worlds, etc, are as good as canon. Often, this is a conscious choice. We take facts from the story and come to a conclusion that the author never explicitly stated but we accept it as truth. Sometimes, it’s not conscious. Based on ourselves, our personalities, our histories, we might infer things about characters especially, but also about the world of the story, that feel real and could be accurate but it actually isn’t what the author intended. You might know your headcanon is not what the author intended. But sometimes you might not. You might think your headcanon is canon, because no other interpretation makes sense to you.

I think that’s why sequels are so often a letdown. We expect certain things because of our headcanons and the author doesn’t deliver. In the case of that sequel I read, the opposite happened, and no headcanon I came up with for what would happen next was nearly as cool as what that author delivered. But hey, we know when we talk about authors responding to reviews, we really mean responding to BAD reviews, so let’s shift gears and use a different example.

To illustrate my point, I want you to try something. Think of as many novels with bisexual protagonists as you can—sadly, it will probably not be that many—and look them up on Goodreads. Try to find one that doesn’t have both glowing reviews about the excellent bi representation and also one-star drag this author through the mud reviews for having the worst representation possible. I bet you can’t find that book. 

Now I want to say upfront that yes, some of these books might be objectively poorly done, and some might be truly excellent, and everything in between. The core of this particular issue is that there aren’t enough books with bisexual protagonists, which is not the fault of any single author. Because there aren’t enough of these stories, whenever one comes out readers have expectations and hopes that no one story or one protagonist can fulfill. 

Some readers will want to see the bisexual protagonist with a love interest of their same gender. Others will want the opposite. Some will scoff at the happily ever after; others will rage that there ISN’T a happily ever after; some will be mad that the bi character is overly sexual; others will complain that the bi character didn’t get any; and then there’s the “why does this have to be about ROMANCE, there should be more to this character’s identity than being bi!” camp.

Look, all of that is valid. All of those books should exist and then some. But when you’re reading one of those negative reviews trying to decide if you want to read this book, it’s often hard to tell whether the book really was poorly written, or if maybe that reviewer really wanted an apple and they got an orange instead (or if maybe it’s just that negativity gets the clicks?). It might be the book. But it might not. That’s what I’m trying to say.

So what does all that have to do with authors reading reviews? Well, I think really understanding and accepting this reality is why I personally feel pretty zen about my reviews. And it’s also why I do NOT think authors should ‘start a dialogue’ with their readers and reviewers because I’m sorry, authors who do this, no matter what they say their reasons are, they are defending their story and their choices and…look.

Authorial intent is valid.

But so is headcanon. 

Authors build ideas and characters and worlds in their heads, and then they write the words, and those words are the canon, but those words do NOT include ALL that stuff in the author’s head. We hope our readers will infer certain things. Not all of them will.

Readers read our words and build MORE ideas and details about characters and worlds from them. In my opinion, an author-reader discussion that amounts to ‘this is what those words I wrote mean’ vs ‘this is what the words you wrote mean to ME’ in many if not most cases is not going to be productive or helpful because both parties are right. 

Once I finish writing a novel and it is printed and bound and in stores with a price tag and a reader comes along and buys it...it’s their story now. They literally own it. It’s their story to read and interpret and maybe their interpretation jives with my intent but maybe what they get out of it is not the same as what I put into it and I am a hundred percent okay with that. In fact, I think it’s kinda cool. 

And yeah, sometimes books get trashed for the wrong reasons, as in our bisexual protagonist example when a reader got an apple instead of an orange. Say that’s your book that you wrote, and you get ripped for writing bad representation...except it represents YOU and YOUR very real experience? How absolutely soul crushing would that be? 

You’d want to defend yourself, right? But I AM the apple, you cry! Even though you KNOW, you KNOW, it ain’t gonna end well and no one, not you and not the reviewer, are going to feel any better about it. You end up sitting on your hands and letting reviewers rip it to shreds. How do you deal with that?

Remember this: only a fraction of readers publicly review books and/or email authors. What does that mean? It means your book is going to resonate with so many readers that you will never hear from. I love getting emails from readers but you know what? I’ve never in my whole life emailed an author to let her know how much I loved her book. Maybe I should. (I probably should.) But I think the majority of readers don’t. For every review you get that hurts, you will never know how many readers you’ve touched. And if you only focus on the negatives, if you look at your reviews and allow yourself to believe that this is representative of the opinions and feelings of every person who has read your book, you will struggle to write another book, and all those readers you might reach in the future will really miss out. 

So yeah, when your first book comes out, I get it. It’s almost impossible not to take a peek at those reviews. I do recommend you have some sort of anxiety coping strategy in place before you do, though. Maybe you buy a notebook or start a Word doc in which you write your responses to bad reviews to get it off your chest (and never show anyone). Maybe you find an author buddy you can vent to (privately). And if you feel like for you, the temptation to respond to negative reviews will still be too great, just stay away altogether. Focus on the readers out there who are loving your stories, and write your next book.

---

The posts I publish here will remain free. But I have a new series called Ask the Editor, which will publish every Friday. The short pitch: Dear Abby for writers.

The longer pitch: paid subscribers ($5/month or $50/year, cancel anytime) will receive a link to a form where they can submit pretty much anything within a two page limit. Things like…

• Queries

• Synopses

• Pages from their novel

• Questions about writing or traditional publishing

• A current problem or situation in their writing journey (ie: trying to decide if an agent is a schmagent, disagreeing with beta feedback, etc)

• A rant about this whole “trying to get published” endeavor to a sympathetic ear

Every Friday, I’ll respond to/critique as many submissions as I can and publish them together in one post. Because they’ll be behind a paywall, there’s some privacy—your query, pages, or rant about that one really horrible rejection won’t be online for editors to discover when they Google you.

That’s it! I hope to see you over there. :)

Michelle