Surviving Your First One-Star Review

TL;DR: Be thankful someone bought your book. Ignore the naysayers. Eat pizza.

Have you ever been so embarrassed about something that you considered packing your bags and moving to a remote island where there was no chance you’d run into anyone you knew?

That’s how I felt when I got my first one-star review recently.

It was like a punch in the gut. My debut novel, TimeBlink, had been singled out as boring, too wordy, and lacking in the advertised romance. I wanted to disappear, but there was nowhere to hide—the review was out there, and anyone with an internet connection would be able to see it.

Instead of running away, I crawled under a blanket and sulked. While I was there, I remembered that one-star reviews are a rite of passage in this business. No author—whether independently or traditionally published, famous or otherwise—is immune to them. They are as inevitable as zits on a teenager.

But it did get me wondering about this hypercritical reader. Who was he to crap all over my hard work?

Did he even look at the other reviews (most of them positive)? Didn’t he know I spent years pouring my heart and soul into this novel while working a full-time job and caring for aging parents? Didn’t he realize how much money I’d invested in cover design, website development, editing services, marketing seminars, ad design courses, graphics programs, writing software, and books on craft to help me write the best story possible? Didn’t he care how much effort it takes to create social media content, blog posts, book trailers, and newsletters?

Didn’t he think about any of that when he trashed six years of hard work with two poorly constructed sentences?

No! The reviewer didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of it. Nor should he have because it wasn’t his job to care about my backstory. His sole job was to read my book.

All that other stuff? That was on me.

So, after the initial sting subsided, I realized I should actually be grateful for this reader’s attention. HE CHOSE MY BOOK out of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS and then took the time to provide his opinion about it. Most people don’t bother.

Readers crave connection. They want to empathize with the characters and to care about their plights. They want to be whisked away to other worlds and plunged into chaos, embroiled in drama, or wrapped in love. This reader obviously didn’t get any of that from my story. Period.

That being said…

Apparently, there’s a phenomenon in this business whereby a certain demographic of readers will grab just about any free or heavily discounted book. They tend not to read the description or sample chapters first, and then write a scathing critique when the story doesn’t meet their expectations. In my case, the one-star review appeared a few days after I’d put my book on sale for 99¢, so this concept might actually hold weight.

Not all bargain hunters do this, of course. I myself download cheap books all the time, often without doing my due diligence first. But hey, if the first few chapters don’t grab me, I’ve only invested 99¢, so I’ll just cut my losses and move onto the next book. I’ve spent five times that amount on a fancy coffee I didn’t enjoy, but I’m not about to blow a hissy fit and announce it to the world.

So, how does an author move on?

As for me, I’m throwing a party.

I’ll be serving ham and pineapple pizza. Some of my guests will love it because it’s their favorite kind of pizza. Others will politely accept a slice, even if they prefer pepperoni. One of the guests will spit it out after a single bite and call me a hack who has no idea how to host a party. Boring. Too many pineapples. Not enough spin the bottle.

That’s okay. My pizza wasn’t meant for him. It was meant for the ham and pineapple lovers, and those people will rave about it and recommend it to everyone they know. The guy who flat-out hated it, well, we already know what he’s going to do.

For moral support, I reached out to some writer friends to ask them what they do when faced with a bad review, and they all had the same suggestion: ignore it.

What? How? That’s like telling someone to look away from an accident scene.

What they meant was read it once, and then forget about it. Unless, of course, several readers have the same complaint. Then it’s an opportunity to fix the problem in the next book.

I love this approach. Don’t obsess over the things you can’t change. Fix the ones you can. Strive to improve your craft. And most importantly, don’t let one disparaging voice drown out all the passionate ones.

Oh, and if all else fails, eat ham and pineapple pizza. It really is the best.

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TimeBlink, a domestic thriller with a time travel twist and a dash of romance, is the first book in The Syd Brixton TimeBlink Series. Book two, Flight 444, picks up five years later when Syd and her estranged half-sister are trapped on a plane about to crash. Will Syd’s power of time travel be able to save them?