“The Cat Discusses” is the general essay portion of my SubStack. The first few posts will be rewrote essays from my old author blog, revamped to match my current morals and thought processes.
Being a voracious reader means I’m constantly searching for books to add to my TBR, reading them, and spending a while afterwards thinking over the knowledge I’ve digested and how I feel about it. It’s a feeling many can relate to, especially if you’ve ever taken an English class.
And yet, being a reader and being a writer are two grossly different spheres. This is obvious enough to people who are one or the other, but it gets murky when the two spheres intersect. One particularly ugly intersection reading and writing have tends to be is in the reception of a person’s work. Particularly, Goodreads.
As a reader, I am inclined to think readers can judge a book however they wish. As a writer, I try to think the same. Sure, strong positive or negative opinions can sway a neutral audience. If a book has mostly negative reviews, it can be for a variety of reasons. Some will make readers flock to you in droves to see what the fuss is about (Twilight, The Night and Its Moon, Lightlark…) but not always. And, in a marketing sense, reviews can make or break an author’s work.
I’ve seen a lot of authors recently bemoaning their negative reviews, and as a writer I get it. It hurts to have something we’ve spent so much time and energy (and often, money) on. It’s our baby! Why is someone harming our baby?
Here’s the thing, though. Once we release our books for public consumption, it isn’t our baby anymore. People are free to shred and 1-star and paper mache and love and write fanfic of and write scathing reviews of the work we produce. Writers all too often seem to forget that. We get so caught up in what people are saying about us—about our work—that for some, it’s worth trying to kill people over. For others, it’s worth going on twitter threads and harassing comments and blogs and…
That is not how we should be treating our works. Our readers deserve better than that. Our books deserve better than that. Instead of obsessing over negative reviews, or calling reviewers names, or trying to dictate who should and should not write reviews in the first place, we should take them in stride and just fucking write.
At the end of the day, how a reviewer sees your work doesn’t matter.
It is not fair to police a reader’s reception of our work just because we do not like it. The best thing we can do is take note of their words, keep any criticism in mind, and move on. To do anything else would be to cheat our readers and, more importantly, cheat ourselves.
What is your stance on reviews? Do you read them? Do you write them? Does being a writer make you treat reviews differently? Let me know them down below!