Authors shitting themselves over negative reviews

[bradsternum]

I came here specifically to mention the "Dear Negative Reader" rant. It's not the most insane or hateful author rant ever, but it's stunning both in its pretentiousness and utter lack of introspection. Right from the first few paragraphs, you know you're in for a ride:

What a dumb bitch. She's a pulp fiction writer. There are thousands of books like hers out there, of varying quality. To suggest that her beach towel novels challenge anybody is laughable and infuriating.

 

[Meeko]

What a dumb bitch. She's a pulp fiction writer. There are thousands of books like hers out there, of varying quality. To suggest that her beach towel novels challenge anybody is laughable and infuriating.

Yeah... she's "special" and I'm a little ashamed to say that I'd followed the drama with her for a while. At one point she got freaked out that her address was out on the Internet and automatically assumed that it meant that her haters were going to track her down and do something. The whole reason it was out there in the first place was because at one point in time she and her husband had it up on their website for fans to send in gifts and books they wanted her to sign.

One of her ex-assistants later wrote a book about working with her under a pseudonym and claimed that it wasn't actually about Hamilton, but it pretty obviously was. The only part of it she admits is true is a portion about her boss freaking out over a flower delivery truck, thinking that it was a sniper out to get her.

EDIT:

Here's a link to a person talking about the book, if anyone's interested.

 

[lindsayfan]

This is sort of the other side of the coin, but: Poppy Z Brite, a horror novelist, was kicked out of a livejournal fan group dedicated to him because he asked the group a question http://docbrite.livejournal.com/2004/01/02/

I was googling Brite because I remembered he used to respond angrily to negative Amazon reviews, but actually this little nugget of back-in-the-day LJ drama is much funnier.

 

[Sanae Kochiya]

This might be a bit off-topic, since it's not addressing literature and it's addressing video games, but it falls generally under the same category so I thought I'd mention it.

To anyone who may have been paying attention to some recent Steam-related news in the past few years, there's been a number of "games" out that were, and I'm speaking rather generously here... "poorly made," and were criticized as such. The developers (authors in this case) of these games, as they're able to post freely on their game forums on Steam as moderators, reacted in a very mature manner... by which I mean that they deleted criticism, berated negative reviewers, and showed pure and utter contempt to anyone who addressed their game as anything more than literal perfection, to the point that they actual issue Copyright Strikes on YouTube videos that criticized their work. For those not in the know, Copyright Strikes put your channel in bad standing as well as removing the video from YouTube, and having three of them on your account at any given time basically gives YouTube the grounds to cancel your account, deleting all of your videos and essentially removing you from YouTube entirely aside from making an entirely new account. There's a lot of prolific YouTubers that take... quite some serious issue with that.

The Slaughtering Grounds debacle, where developer ImminentUprising reacted to Internet critic and entertaining Jim Sterling bashing their game by... throwing such a big hissyfit that I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the guy took lessons from Chris-chan.

Day One's Garry's Incident incident, where developer Wild Games Studio gave Total Biscuit a key to review their game. He did, called it shit, got his review taken down, and WGS immediately said that they never gave him the right to profit from their game. TB gave out screenshots showing that, yes, he did, and shit hit the fan. Hard.

Earth Year 2066, where the developer's near stranglehold of suppressing criticism and generally throwing shit around forced Steam to remove the game and offer refunds. This was before the formal refund system that's out now.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Do science fiction authors get butthurt about bad reviews, or is it more of a fantasy thing?* I'd imagine that authors of any genre have acted unreasonably towards criticism.

*(from what I've seen, fantasy seems to attract a lot more IRL drama than scifi for some reason)

 

[Ravenor]

Do science fiction authors get butthurt about bad reviews, or is it more of a fantasy thing?* I'd imagine that authors of any genre have acted unreasonably towards criticism.

*(from what I've seen, fantasy seems to attract a lot more IRL drama than scifi for some reason)

I've not seen many of the mainstream ones chimp out, some of them are really cool Arron Dempskey-Bowden who wrights for the black library is really good interacting with the fan base and is more than willing to engage in poking a little fun at the rare cannon cock up he has made.

Dan Abbnet is the same, although not as involved in the community (read his book embedded by the way it's awesome).

The fantasy fan base seems to bread the nuttier variety of fans though, sci fi isn't immune to that but the ones in fantasy that I've seen take things a bit to far.

 

[AnOminous]

Do science fiction authors get butthurt about bad reviews, or is it more of a fantasy thing?* I'd imagine that authors of any genre have acted unreasonably towards criticism.

Nobody likes being criticized, but it's usually the worst writers who have the worst chimpouts. It's basically Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

There are some exceptions, like Anne Rice. While a lot of criticisms can be fairly leveled at her work, it's vastly popular and she's worth something like $50 million. You'd think she could just be satisfied with that, but no, she acts like she's entitled to have absolutely everyone love her unreservedly and sometimes chimps out about bad reviews.

This doesn't necessarily have to do with whether reviews are fair, either. People who are well adjusted and confident in their writing don't give a shit if some moron has a moronic opinion, at least not enough to chimp about it.

 

[Lunete]

There was one guy that worked for several years on a book and it was a total piece of shit.
I can't remember his name to save my life though.

 

[autism420]

There was one guy that worked for several years on a book and it was a total piece of shit.
I can't remember his name to save my life though.

George R. R. Martin

 

[LagoonaBlue]

There's a German "author" calling herself Simone Kaplan who self-publishes ebooks the orthography, grammar and plotlines of which make Gloria Tesch look like Charlotte Brontë in comparison.

She has a novel dedicated to people who rate her "1 star" (nearly everyone) on Amazon: Der Hobbykritiker ("The Amateur Critic")

In this novel we learn that people who criticize her work do so because of jealousy and erectile dysfunction. (...yep...)

I am sorry but what the hell. Erectile dysfunction?

 

[Meeko]

George R. R. Martin

Yeah... depending on where you criticize his work you can get some pretty pissy customers.

Speaking of more authors that went batshit crazy, I remember hearing about two female authors, one in paranormal romance and one in historical romance.

The PNR author is Victoria Laurie. She writes these psychic detective cozy mysteries and they're not awful or anything, just not anything that would set the world on fire. She's slightly like Laurell K Hamilton in that she tends to use her work as a soapbox for her personal viewpoints, specifically anyone that is skeptical of psychics is usually someone that either Comes to Jesus by recognizing the psychic's power or they're humiliated in her books by being depicted as the lowest of the low. She also has a bad habit of falling into stereotypes and someone called her out on this in a book review for one of her series, only for Laurie to royally freak out on Amazon. She called her minions out to vote down any review under 4 stars and told the reviewer that she was going to turn her into a transgender prostitute with VD in one of her books, or something to that effect.

Then there's Deborah MacGillivray, the historical romance author. I never saw her work firsthand, but she's pretty much considered to be the queen of mean when it comes to author meltdowns. Not only did she send out people to vote down a 3 star review, but she got someone to research the reviewer and located the personal information of the reviewer, her immediate family, and a few other people in her family. She posted about it on her website and the implication that she wanted to use this to threaten the reviewer was pretty blatant.

 

[sparklemilhouse]

Author Laurell K. Hamilton

lol I just catalogued some of her books today at work.

 

[Daario Naharis]

I submit as an example Dylan Saccoccio

As much as I wanted to stop reading when I saw "For fans of..." I really wonder how many people get that that isn't a good thing. If your story is good it should stand on it's own merits, not on the idea that it is like _____.

But I read on.

Woden Caliph.

The main character is named Woden Caliph.

That is the most asinine name I've ever heard, disregarding the fact that Woden is the Anglo-Saxon name for Odin and the Caliph is the spiritual and political successor to Muhammad and the head of the Islamic community.

 

[Rin]

Stephenie Meyer, like the teenage fanfic authors her writing resembles, has issues handling criticism. She is so sensitive that she cannot read her own fanmail; you have to send it through her brother. She also flounced from the series because part of Midnight Sun got leaked online. According to her, "I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being."

 

[LagoonaBlue]

Stephenie Meyer, like the teenage fanfic authors her writing resembles, has issues handling criticism. She is so sensitive that she cannot read her own fanmail; you have to send it through her brother. She also flounced from the series because part of Midnight Sun got leaked online. According to her, "I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being."

Was trying to remember what that book was called. If only someone would leak EL James version of that (Grey, Fifty Shades of Grey told from the POV of Christian Grey) then that'd be brilliant. Then again, that's out soon isn't it?

Also, seriously? Smeyer doesn't like getting fanmail? Weird.

 

[Furina]

Stephenie Meyer, like the teenage fanfic authors her writing resembles, has issues handling criticism. She is so sensitive that she cannot read her own fanmail; you have to send it through her brother. She also flounced from the series because part of Midnight Sun got leaked online. According to her, "I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being."

Didn't she also discourage her fans from writing Twilight fanfiction? Something like that.

Was trying to remember what that book was called. If only someone would leak EL James version of that (Grey, Fifty Shades of Grey told from the POV of Christian Grey) then that'd be brilliant. Then again, that's out soon isn't it?

It's like writing two books but with only one idea! The literary equivalent of splitting movies up so you can make people pay twice for what should have been one film.

http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/2006/12/dear-negative-reader/

Do you have an archive of this? The link seems to have been deleted and I really want to read the insanity.

 

[Scribbler]

Do you have an archive of this? The link seems to have been deleted and I really want to read the insanity.

https://web.archive.org/web/2015041...llkhamilton.org/2006/12/dear-negative-reader/

Here's one.

 

[Rin]

Also, seriously? Smeyer doesn't like getting fanmail? Weird.

But people might write her mean emails, and her ego couldn't handle that.

 

[Meeko]

Was trying to remember what that book was called. If only someone would leak EL James version of that (Grey, Fifty Shades of Grey told from the POV of Christian Grey) then that'd be brilliant. Then again, that's out soon isn't it?

Also, seriously? Smeyer doesn't like getting fanmail? Weird.

Apparently someone has stolen a copy of the book. I think it'd be kind of funny if the same thing happened to EL James' work, especially since it's just Twilight with whips and chains.

It's also interesting to see the amount of control that James has over her work. It looks like a professional scriptwriter wanted to change up most of the dialogue, but James refused her changes. She puts this same amount of control over everything. There isn't a FSOG product out there that wasn't personally approved by James. In any case, it looks like James is the reason that the film stank as hard as it did. It's not like they had much to work with, but apparently there was the potential for it to suck less. Looks like James' husband is going to be writing the next film's script and the first film's director bowed out because the work was "difficult" (read, James was probably a PITA to work with).

 

[LagoonaBlue]

Apparently someone has stolen a copy of the book. I think it'd be kind of funny if the same thing happened to EL James' work, especially since it's just Twilight with whips and chains.

It's also interesting to see the amount of control that James has over her work. It looks like a professional scriptwriter wanted to change up most of the dialogue, but James refused her changes. She puts this same amount of control over everything. There isn't a FSOG product out there that wasn't personally approved by James. In any case, it looks like James is the reason that the film stank as hard as it did. It's not like they had much to work with, but apparently there was the potential for it to suck less. Looks like James' husband is going to be writing the next film's script and the first film's director bowed out because the work was "difficult" (read, James was probably a PITA to work with).

Not seen the film and I don't want to, it looks like complete and utter TRIPE.

I remember tweeting James once, she was fairly humble towards me.