So, hey, I want you to look at this very fine review of Black Halo by my good friends at Porno Kitsch.
It’s worth drawing attention to, just because with it, I’m noting that I don’t get a lot of gushing reviews (where are you gushers on my Amazon page, hm? HMMM?) But I’m kind of pleased about that, really. I take a lot of pride in the fact that my books seem to stimulate a lot of discussion about art, writing and the process of trying, rather than just a press release blurb and then a number of stars, puntos or strippers at the end (note: if you’re reading this, Porno Kitsch, you should start rating books in strippers).
Which led me to another issue: given the fact that I’m pumping this one, and given the fact that I’m rarely disappointed by a review that at least takes the time to discuss what happened and why it worked or it didn’t, why don’t I pimp more reviews? I hope you bloggers out there who have been nice enough to take the time to read it don’t think I’m ignoring you. It’s not you, baby, it’s me. I know I told you that when we broke up, and when I dated your sister, and when I set your house on fire, and that one time I accidentally shaved your cat, but…
…hang on.
Anyway, to let you in on a little secret: I didn’t handle reviews that well when I was first starting out. I wasn’t mentally prepared and it really didn’t occur to me that anyone would think I was anything less than fantastic. So when I got a couple of bad ones starting out, I got really discouraged, depressed and my mood was ruined for days. I eventually learned to stop reading them (it still sucks, it never stops sucking), but I only really was able to do that after rationally figuring things out for myself.
The fact is: reviews don’t change the art form. A good review will not make the story different than a bad one. If lots of people say the same thing (in which case, it’s usually also occurred to me), then I do look at it. But in the end, the story cannot be dictated. Not by blogs, not by reviews, not by Publisher’s Weekly and not even, really, by the author. At the risk of going all douche nouveau on you, I’ll conclude this by saying that one of the methods of keeping myself sane was to not too heavily invest in reviews.
That said, though, if you really wanted to talk about a review or wanted me to bring attention to it/your site, please feel free to let me know and we can set aside a whole dang blog post for it!
On this note, though, I feel I should weigh in on this little tidbit that’s been making the rounds in publishing.
I blush to admit, despite the fact that we’re in the same publishing house, I’ve never read Steph Swainston and I was only barely aware of her up until today when I read on Mark C. Newton’s blog that she was stepping out of the book-writing business. I’m not going to reply word-for-word, I’m not even going to repost what she said (because, like the gentle oxpecker bird, I sit upon the leathery back of the great, scaly alligator that is Mark C. Newton and peck the parasitic bacteria off his flesh to feed myself), but I am going to address it because it’s been on my mind.
Specifically, this bit:
“I don’t have a problem with fandom,” she says. “But I don’t think fans realise the pressure they put on authors. The very vocal ones can change an author’s next book, even an author’s career, by what they say on the internet. And writers are expected to engage and respond.” She pauses. “The internet is poison to authors.”
There’s been a lot of hithering and thithering about this, of course, as to whether she’s weak, nutty, wrong, right. I’m not prepared to suggest any of that, of course; she’s doing what works for her and she’s not comfortable with what’s going on in her career. It’s a totally sane, respectable and laudable idea to bow out of it.
That said, though, I do sympathize with her standing here and that’s what brings me back to the notion of internet engagement. It’s essential: it’s great for interacting with readers, it’s great for marketing yourself, it’s great for getting in touch with other people and getting to know authors. It’s also incredibly irritating: people are always talking about you, at you or some notion of you that they think they know. There is positive and negative, push and pull, yin and yang, Twi and La.
And I’m not sure I can separate them yet.
That might sound like crying over milk that is not only not spilled, but sitting in a golden goblet, but before Richard Dawkins tells me to quit whining, I feel I should point out that it’s pretty stressful. To me, it seems like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, you need to have the internet presence: the website, the response, the facebook, the clever, witty blog in which you swear a lot. But on the other hand, you need to have a thick skin, the fact that people can sometimes take a dump on you is just taken as granted and you can never violate the golden rule: don’t respond to criticism.
A lot of people tell me that it’s easy to grow that thick skin and just ignore the negative and embrace the positive. It might just be me, but I don’t think it’s actually that easy, because while it doesn’t blend together, it does tend to run into each other. Someone praising you might invoke someone else coming in and calling you a hack. Someone saying you have a good point might invoke someone else coming in and saying “NO HE A WHINY BABY.”
Because this is the internet. And it’s not really compartmentalized.
It’s like standing in a big room at a party. Most of the time, you’re having a lovely time. But occasionally, you feel a wet smack of someone slapping a fish against the back of your head. You turn around and there’s a guy with a bucketful of fish standing in the corner, staring at you. When you turn away, he smacks you with a fish again. The people you’re talking to are perturbed that your witty repartee is disrupted by getting smacked with a fish. You get hit again and then you pick up the fish and smack him back and then no one wants to talk to you because you smell like fish now. And then three other guys with fish show up: one starts smacking you out of solidarity, one starts smacking you because he assumes you’re into that now and the third starts smacking you with a fish because you’re not paying the proper respect to prose poetry.
Granted, these are never the fans and I severely disagree with Ms. Swainston that the fans are the burden. I feel if you don’t like talking to people, you’re probably not in the right line of work (which, apparently, she agrees with), but I certainly do sympathize with the fact that it can be difficult to separate the good from the bad and to have very little recourse once you do. It’s generally considered poor form to come out and bitch about a reviewer that didn’t like you or a guy who hates you (see fish theory) and, let’s be honest, it’s hard to feel bad for a person whose chief issue is having too much attention.
There’s talking to other authors, of course (and this is an astonishingly supportive community for those purposes), but there’s only so much they can do. Everyone’s issues are different and they have problems of their own.
And yet…I can’t help but feel that it is kind of part of the territory. You do have to grow a thicker hide, you do have to get tougher, you do occasionally have to eat some doo doo with a smile. It’s tough, and I sympathize with that wholly, but it’s still something that kind of has to be done. Does the negativity and irritation ever stop sucking? No. But does it frequently pale in comparison with the people who love the work and, most importantly, the fact that you are writing, doing what you love for a living?
Hell yes.
And that’s why I’m certainly not asking for sympathy. I’m not weeping over what a hard life an author has. I’m not even sure I agree with the fact that receiving negative attention and finding it overwhelming is a good reason for ducking out. But I do understand. I do sympathize. I do wish Ms. Swainston the best of luck with whatever happens next for her.
But for now, it’s still a pretty sweet life.
This blog post is a proper six-stripper.
“Most of the time, you’re having a lovely time. But occasionally, you feel a wet smack of someone slapping a fish against the back of your head. ” is the best description of the internet EVER.
That’s the beauty of the interwebs, Sam. Potentially infinite users, infinite fish.
Having known and worked with celebrities (in all definitions of the word celebrity) in the past, I came to my own conclusion about this.
There are two ‘yous’ when you’re in this situation (not ‘you’ as in Sam, but a general ‘you’). There’s the one that’s the public face, the one who entertains, acts the fool, is supremely confident. And then there’s the private one who worries, gets depressed, can’t cope and wants to hide.
The trick to staying sane is to remember that criticism is directed at your public face. The person these people know, isn’t the real you. It’s certainly not false, but it’s not the person your closest friends know.
The danger is that as success builds, the private face disappears and people live the life of the public one. This is when celebrities go off the rails, because they let criticism wash over them and just surround themselves with yes people.
It’s therefore a balancing act, having those real life friends who know you for you and are prepared to call you a dork when you’re being one, and being that professional artist who people want to cheer or boo.
It’s difficult to manage these two personas, especially in this age of Facebook where the two yous get mixed up and the walls are constantly being broken down by social media, but don’t think that Rock Stars, Movie stars or anyone else with an iota of celebrity doesn’t have the same problems. In my experience, they’re all geeks, passionate about their arts to nerdiness levels who suffer the same problems.
Interesting timing since I am awaiting my first reviews of my book and knowing my skin is not that thick and I am unprepared for it. Probably lean on you to help me sort out how this works. Your contest for Black Halo reached top 10 hits on any post on my blog, FYI.
I still have all this fun to look forward to! Right now I’m pimping for blurbs, which means either some awesome person I admire is going to say blush-makingly nice things about my work, or that same person will say “Sorry, too busy”. And sometimes that will be an honest reply, and sometimes it might be “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything” – and I’ll never be 100% certain which. (OK, that’s not entirely true. At least one person has said nice things before now and I know she’s really, truly too busy this time.)
Part of me thinks I’m pretty thick-skinned. I know logically that not everyone’s going to like my work, because I’m a pretty picky reader myself and there are books that others rave over that have me scratching my eyeballs out rather than read another paragraph. Mostly, though, I’m hoping that the knowledge that people whose opinions I respect love my work will be a buffer against the fish-slapping idiots of the interwebs. Only time will tell…
Just had another thought……………
Isn’t there a certain element of scale and time here that has an effect? Namely that: given sufficient fans, and the often vomit/scream tendancy of fan to target-of-fan interaction (By ‘vomit/scream’ I refer to both the impulsive and expulsive nature of vomitting, coupled with the excessive emotion screaming implies….mebbe I should trademark it?) that interaction with fans inevitably degenerate into polarised noise?
To elaborate, do you lose the personal touch of interaction with fans purely by the volumes involved? From what I’ve read on a number of comment boards (I’ve no idea if this is the same with fame & facebook) it seems that the fewer comments, the more – ‘interactive’ – the content. People want to speak directly to the blog author. As numbers increase, so commeth the drive-byers which basically say “SQUUUEEEEE!!! LOVE YOU!!” then promptly talk about themselves for a paragraph (I wish I had a pound for every time I read the words “My book is about…” by an unpublished person on another authors blog).
Give this time and increased numbers and the blog author then has very little ability to interact with ‘the public’ at an individual level consistently. And so he has to address the general feeling (or the tide of feeling he wishes to acknowledge) in single entertainment packages ready for public consumption, or ‘blog-posts’. The experience already begins to feel depersonalised, until at last the volume of vomit/screams, from both the Pro- and Anti- camps reach a state where they drown out any true personal communication and transform into a lurching mob the author is desperately trying to keep moving largely towards the door marked “approval”. You are reduced to talking TO a crowd, because it’s almost impossible to talk WITH one.
Now I’m not saying that this is necessarily a death knell for anything, or that the process itself is unpleasant for everyone (I’m sure that building a nice background warmth of approval is often a prefered choice that igniting a single intense fire). All I’m saying is that as sure as Entropy is pushing us towards the heat death of the universe, the internet can vomit/scream over pretty much anything and spoil the exeriance for a number of people.
Now, let me tell you about MY book and how I came up with the idea…..
Maybe you aren’t in need of sympathy, but if you ever want a hug, there are plenty if people on the web who will stand by you regardless of the fish stink.
Very interesting post, complete with some fish-smackingly fantastic comparisons. I don’t have much to add to Adrian Faulkner’s perceptive comment, just that – as the author of one of the (somewhat) negative reviews you mentioned (sorry about that…) – the reviews aren’t directed at the author at all, but rather at readers. It’s less like the reviewer’s smacking you with a fish than like he’s smacking a picture of you while shouting insults. The criticism’s about the picture, not you, and is addressed to the other readers, not the author, even if he happens to be four feet away and staring with a binocular labeled “Google Alerts.” But, even if the author doesn’t have fish juices smeared on their shirt, they can’t help but get involved because it’s still their work* being fish-smacked.
*Alright, I’ll admit I totally lost the metaphor here and went from a picture to a work of art. But A Dance With Dragons is monopolizing my higher brain functions, so it’ll just have to do.
Saying that someone isn’t thick-skinned is akin to saying they’re touchy or defensive. These are not labels that one can easily argued against without falling into the trap of provocateurs whose sole desire is to generate interest in their reviews, blogs, etc.
Keep pressing on. Support your fellows. Accept theirs.
The first time I was called a pig, I got a bit upset. I have a strong flush response, so it was clear to the asshat I was stung.
Now, I just grin and say, “Sure, but I take the uniform off at the end of the day. You’ll still be you.”
Now, I know that comment ain’t all that original, but it suffices with 99% of the shits who say such things, and I reserve what wit I possess for the one percent that might have some counter to that line.
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