"HELP: my book got a bad review in a legit media outlet"
Has this happened to you? Are you afraid of it happening to you? ::pats bench:: Come sit by me. I've got a little emotional first aid kit for you here, and I hope it helps you dress your wounds.
If a mass media outlet has just published a bad review of your book, this post is for you.
It’s also for you if you’re an author with deep and granular anxieties about getting bad reviews in mass media some day, which, spoiler alert, is most of you.
Take heart: getting a bad review is not ALWAYS a miserable experience. Sometimes the review in question is so transparently un-self-aware as to constitute tragicomedy; the public embarrassment is very much the reviewer’s.
Sometimes what the reviewer thinks is a diss (“this book for hippies is too mean to squares!”) is in fact the best possible advertisement they could give to the book’s target audience.
Most of the time, however, getting a bad review feels awful for authors. Not just awful—dysregulatingly awful, like getting dumped or fired. And as a literary agent, mom, and compulsive soother of other people’s emotional pain, I hate that for you.
If you’re thrashing around in the pain of a bad review right now—or zapping yourself with anticipatory dread—please know that it’s going to be okay. No, seriously.
The best way to show you why it’s going to be okay, I think, is to start with the big picture and drill on down from there.
