The novelist Alice Hoffman and the down-to-earth philosopher Alain de Botton have posed an interesting problem for anybody who writes anything that gets reviewed.
Both write bestsellers regularly, and both recently suffered from reviews of their latest books that, to put it mildly, suggested those works were less than first rate. Whereupon they both lost their cool and issued rants against the reviewers for the world to see. Within minutes everybody who follows anything remotely literary was informed of all the details. Both authors half-heartedly apologized. Twitter nearly caught on fire.
Is their a lesson in this? I'm not sure. Should writers be above it all, and ignore reviews? I've always maintained that any review is better than no review--reviews, good or bad, are free publicity. Besides, irate fans often write letters to whoever published the reviews complaining of injustice, and that's more publicity. Therefore, some say, it's best to ignore those insults.
But maybe Hoffman and de Botton have stumbled on something worth considering. Those rants produced more publicity than twenty essays praising the books to the sky would have. People who never heard of either one of them now know they exist.
I've written a few hundred reviews, and almost none of them were unstinted praise. (My stinter works overtime, I guess.) Maybe five percent of the authors thanked me for the reviews. Nobody ever issued a rant condemning my comments. But think how pleased I would have been had somebody blasted my review in some widely read publication, or in 140 well-chosen screaming tweetly characters? That would be priceless publicity for *me*!
So I'm about to conclude that authors should raise hell when a reviewer issues even a whisper of criticism. That rant might catch on and pay off for all concerned. More people would buy the book, and readers would flock to read my next review to see whether I'm drawing and quartering another victim.
But I'm not quite sure yet. Politeness has long been considered a virtue. Maybe in these changing times we should reconsider that, but maybe not. What do you think?
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