Dealing with Negative Reviews

Wow! I actually had an idea for a post today! WOOT WOOT. Yeah, I been suckin' in the bloggin' world cause honestly, I'm tryin' to find some sort of unique angle/twist to my posts and nothin' has been comin' to me. (Let's see how many times I can kill the g in my ing verbs :-) ).

But, today I was lead to a blog post with a review on someone's self-pubbed book. The review itself was actually pretty good, but the reviewer did mention that some of this author's sentence structures, typos, and grammatical errors sometimes disrupted the flow of what would have otherwise been some compelling and emotional scenes. Sometimes the scenes worked great, and sometimes the reviewer felt pulled out of this author's story because of the afore mentioned problems. Overall, the review was really nice. Unfortunately, the author read the review and apparently felt a need to defend herself and her writing. As I read the back and forth posts between the posters and author's posts, I was utterly flabbergasted by her responses. She was so angry and defensive and started posting positive reivews from other places and she went so far as to start telling posters to (and I quote) "Fuck off!"

Wow. Can you say professional suicide? Turn off? Have no intentions of buying her book and supporting her career? That chick will be needing a pseudonym and some major plastic surgery to change her appearance if she has any plans on making it in this biz. I mean, she acted COMPLETELY out of line and really upset A LOT of people who follow this reviewer's blog. And you know how that goes. Remember the Faberge Organics commercial from the 80's with Heather Locklear? "And they'll tell a friend, and they'll tell a friend and so on and so on and so on."

Anyway, it got to the point where this author sounded like a little brat having a temper tantrum. She hears one review she doesn't love and she flips out completely. I mean, I can imagine how hard it is to have your book out there and even though you know there will ALWAYS be someone who doesn't love your work and will tear it up, that those negative reviews hurt. So, I started thinking that if I ever when I get one of my books published, will I read all the reviews? Will I read the negative ones as well as the positive ones? Will I ask people to just send me the positive ones to keep me encouraged or is it important to at least consider some of the points made by those who had issues regarding your writing/story telling. I guess it's hard to say/know until I'm actually there, but I do know that the bad will come with the good. It's inevitable.


My question to you fellow writers (published and wannabe published), what is your take on this? Do/Will you read all the reviews both positive and negative, when your book gets published? How will you prepare yourself to handle it? And to those who are published and have had to deal with this, please share your take on this! How have you handled it all?