Writer Rants

What is it with writers penning long, rambling, insulting posts to anyone who dares to criticize their books? First we had Anne Rice expressing on Amazon her utter contempt for anyone who a) didn’t like her books and b) thought she needed to take that “no editing” clause out of her contracts. (If you missed it, it’s here, although you’ll need to scroll down to find it). But Laurell K Hamilton really outdid her with the recent blog entry, Dear Negative Reader. According to Laurell, if you don’t like LKH’s books, then you must be stupid, shallow, and lazy. So there.

I will admit I can get pretty irate when readers post attacks on my books that are based on false or petty gripes. I’m always having people pick at my books for “historical inaccuracies” that aren’t inaccuracies at all. I remember one irate Amazon reader who attacked SEPTEMBER MOON because she said the children in the book were obviously mental cases since they’d put a poisonous snake in my heroine’s room…except the snake wasn’t poisonous, and I’d said it wasn’t at least a half a dozen times. And then there was the time an on-line reviewer—a seasoned romance reader, no less—attacked THE BEQUEST because the hero was brave and the heroine was beautiful and came from New Orleans. Excuse me?

Those attacks fire me up because they’re unfair—or, in the case of the BEQUEST review, because the book obviously pushed some button the reviewer is refusing to acknowledge. I know there will always be readers who don’t like my characters, who don’t like my stories, who think my books are too dark, my prose too dense or not dense enough, whatever. That’s the way this whole wonderful world of books works. I know very intelligent readers who don’t like the books I love. So as long as we’re talking about a pure, gut reaction, I know it’s nothing personal.

One of the reasons I hate Amazon’s reviews is because they can and frequently do provide a forum for ignorance and spite. And I think LKH had one valid point: if her former fans don’t like her books any more, they should quit buying them. Why continue buying them, only to complain about them? I gather some of the remarks made were rather tasteless and personal. However, the remarks that set LKH off were actually made on her own Bulletin Board, something she willingly set up not just to give her fans someplace to talk about her books, but to increase her visibility and up her sales and, basically, multiply her take home pay. I guess she forgot to announce the rules: Now children, you can only post on my Bulletin Board if you’ve got something nice to say, otherwise go play someplace else.

Fan bases are funny things, especially with a series. A writer sets up expectations and lures readers to fall in love with her characters. And while it’s true that the writer must, in the end, tell her own stories, I can understand how a fan might feel betrayed and outraged when a writer takes off in a radically new direction. Expectations were set up, then deliberately broken. (And when you write weird stories, you gotta expect some weird fans.)

Success has its own dangers, and I suppose one of the most common (along with the belief, apparently, that one no longer needs an editor) is the temptation to equate book sales with superior writing ability: i.e., I sell lots of books, so it therefore follows that I am a brilliant writer, and if you don’t like my books you obviously don’t have either the intelligence or the emotional maturity to understand or appreciate them.

Oh, and if you’re tempted to take Anne Rice up on her offer and mail her book back to her, you should be warned that she no longer lives at the address she gives. I’ve heard the post office is simply returning them to the senders.