When we first publish a book, we want it to receive the best reviews. Mostly 5 stars, a few 4 stars, editorial reviews guaranteed to get readers to buy our book. We dream our works will make it to the big screen, like that of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight or Stephen King’s Carrie or Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. Our beloved books would be the apple of the public’s eye. We’d have a New York Times Bestseller endorsement that confirms just how innovative our work is. We imagine a world where everyone loves our works, and the naysayers are just crazy to reject them.

Well, it happens. Occasionally, we get those less than stellar reviews. We receive reviews that we try to look away from, but in the end, can’t, because that’s the nature of the business. We can’t accept the fact that some people just don’t like our stories, either because they aren’t into our book's particular genre, or that there was a scene in a book that wasn’t entirely up to their standards, or whatever reason they gave us that rating. And when we receive that first bad review, sometimes we tend to get a bit overprotective of our works. 

It isn’t bad to get defensive, but when it gets to the point where we end up damaging our reputations, the entire situation becomes more than problematic. This happened in the case of one indie publisher, Decadent Publishing. Said publisher had received a negative review regarding a book they’d recently published. When they received that review, they threatened to reveal the book reviewer’s personal information, such as their name. Yet another case happened with a self-published author who was miffed when a reviewer gave her two stars on her self-published book. Even so, these outbursts can become just plain humiliating. Such was the case in the UK news outlet, The Guardian, when a literary editor and a correspondent got into a heated argument on whose writing is better. The whole debacle made for an almost cringeworthy scene that. Novelist Anne Rice has said that there are specific communities on Amazon dedicated to bullying authors by giving their books one star reviews, while one author decided to prosecute a reviewer who wrote a string of negative reviews on his book. 

Despite the fact that many authors want these 4-5 star reviews, book reviewers are still bound by the fact that they have to review the book honestly. After all, many authors want reviewers to review their books honestly, so that’s what they do. After all, we can’t expect five star reviews on all our works. 

So, when you receive a bad review for your book, don’t take it personally. Just take a deep breath, and walk away for a while. Don’t let that bad review determine the entire course of your writing journey. Instead, think of that review as a learning process, to remind yourself that you aren’t writing to make friends, or to make money, or to even compare yourself to other literary greats. Rather, write because you love the craft. Because when you’re a writer, it means you're stubborn. And you don’t write for anyone else but yourself.