Hiya everybody! Here we are in 2025, and I’m ready to get back into the swing of things. I want to start things off by a look back on my watching and reading in 2024, as I am wont to do. Before I go into that, though, I wanted to write for a bit about negative reviews.
Often, a real panning of a book or a movie or a TV show can be a lot of fun for the reviewer to write. You didn’t like whatever the thing was, and so you get to say everything that made you disappointed about what you read or watched. I’ve written a number of these over the years, and it felt good at the time. However, now that I’ve had more and more books come out of my own, I’m reassessing how I approach bad reviews. I’ve had a long-standing policy not to post reviews about books I didn’t like out of professional courtesy. Movies and television felt like fair game. But now . . .
I wonder how many books or movies or TV shows are made with the creator really sitting back and thinking, “Wow. That was absolute garbage. I should never have made this. It’s atrocious.” My guess is that number isn’t 0, but it’s pretty close to it. Any time you see something make it into print or to a screen, people were involved in that process. People who are (generally) trying their best and doing what they can to make something they think will entertain or make some sort of an impact on others. And while it can be tempting to treat media I loathed like a chance to do some metaphorical skeet shooting, I’m losing my taste for it.
Some of this obviously is because I’ve read reviews of my own books where the reviewers really (really) disliked them. Just to give a sampling, here are some of the one star reviews of my books on Goodreads:
- Poor character development. Ending was abrupt. I felt it was written for 5th graders.
- Typo on the date, page 104 is the least disappointing moment of this book. Do not waste your time. Zero believability, no character development, tedious and time-consuming.
- Poor character development and plot of this book made it insufferable to read.
- This is just poor writing at its’ finest.
- If I could give this zero stars I would!!! This was one of the worst books I have read so far this year! I wanted to DNF this book so bad! But I forced myself to finish it and I absolutely regret it!
- There were so many holes in the plot, I had a hard time following some of it. Parts were super dry and lengthy… there were a dozen times I didn’t want to finish. It was a hard book to read due to the writing and the poor plot.
Now, granted, none of these are actually good reviews. (Meaning, reviews that put much thought into expressing what they didn’t like about the book in any real detail.) But everyone’s entitled to hating something, and they don’t need to justify why. Clearly my writing didn’t work for these readers. And yes, there are plenty of great reviews of my books out there for me to read if I want to remind myself I’m not a complete hack, but I’m just focused on the bad ones for today’s topic.
As a creator, reading horrible reviews does me no good whatsoever. I would never, ever tell someone in person just how awful I thought their book was the way I might if I’m writing to a general audience. In many ways, it gives me the same vibe as anonymous chat forums. The comments section of any newspaper article. Bad reviews can come across as very mean spirited and petty, and that’s likely because they often are.
I’m not saying people aren’t allowed to dislike something or even hate it. And I’m not telling people who dislike and/or hate my books not to review them. Rather, I’m saying that I don’t think panning media is something I’m into anymore, at least not on a public forum like my blog or a review site. I’m going to extend my professional courtesy to pretty much all reviews, in a way.
What I’d like to strive to do is to remember real people are behind everything I read or watch. A team who are (hopefully) doing their best. And sometimes their best falls short (or very short) for me, but that’s no reason to treat what they did as if it’s nothing more than a hack job. Some reviews can really come across as personal. I don’t know if I’ve done that before, but I tend to think I likely have. It’s not something I want to do anymore. Someone spends hundreds of hours on a project that someone else then comes, reads or sees once, and tries to score some internet points by saying pithy, mean things about it, using a few minutes of their life to come up with those comments?
No thanks.
So when I post my year in review tomorrow, I’m just going to focus on the good and leave the bad alone entirely. There are tons of movies and TV shows and books to consume out there. I can get more mileage out of things by telling people what I really recommend than I can by telling them what to avoid.