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Let me start by saying, I by no means am writing this to get any sympathy at all. I'm writing this because of the beautiful interaction I just had with a writer I reviewed a book for. It was a good discussion, and it really got me thinking.
You may have seen that a few weeks ago I reviewed a book, and I was honest. Maybe too honest, I'm not sure, but the fact of the matter was I liked that book a lot. What I didn't like I noted in the review and I thought that what I was doing was giving great advice so the writer could use that to perfect the book.
Well, I was wrong, and I got a lot of flack for it. I was told "It's obvious you hate the book" and there was a lot of drama. So much drama in fact that there are people who really hurt my feelings what was being said about me, and it wasn't coming from the writer. It was coming from readers.
So that got me thinking, was the critic (me) being criticized (yes) and was I accepting it? (Maybe?)
We all get criticism at some point in our lives. Some of us take it well. Some of us do not. We either can use that criticism to grow, or we can use it to crush ourselves. It's going to come through, and we have to figure out what to do with it.
“The trouble with most of us is that we’d rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”– Norman Vincent Peale
So what do we do when we are criticized? For me, I try to boil down the critique of what the points are. If it's constructive criticism that helps, if it's destructive criticism, well there may be a lot of boiling.
Case in point "If you liked something, please say you like it, but don't make the review sound like you're hating it through the process and end it on 'i liked it,' it makes us feel stupid."
That was constructive. That actually helped me a lot to figure out how my thoughts were coming across. As I've said many times, I'm an ISTJ on Meyers Briggs. I'm very logic driven, I like data, and I sometimes forget that others do not enjoy data as much as I do. So when I start spouting off the information, I assume that the other person will see it like that. That's not how people take it sometimes.
I hurt someone's feelings terrible with my data on a review. It took me a bit to really understand what had happened, but I did that, and it's never going to leave me as long as I live how bad I hurt someone's feelings unintentionally. In return, my feelings got hurt back by others, and it almost was a circle of pain. I say almost because, after learning the hard lesson on how my critique came across, I've made some adjustments. I'm going to do my best to be less cold with my data-driven points if I'm giving a critique and more honest with how I feel about things.
I am not here to hurt anyone's feelings or make life hard. I want to just score a book and get some reviews out there. Every Indie Author is hoping someone will review their writing, and every Indie Author deserves a well thought out critique of the work. I am going to try to make that my mission. I want to help the world see the beautiful writing that is often lost under the weight of the "Bestsellers" who crush upon it.
But, please make no mistake, just because I word it differently will not take away my commitment to be as honest as I can be.
I'd like to thank Author Tim Allen tonight for helping me to see that Authors and Reviewers can live in harmony. That we can have a discussion about reviews, and books, and we can all do that for the betterment of literature.
And, please go check my review for "Prisoners of the Game" and show Tim some love with reading his book if you can. It's a good book, it really is.
