I’ve noticed a few other authors posting links to bad reviews of their novels on their websites. By bad reviews, I don’t mean poorly written or incomprehensible reviews — I mean reviews that tear your book a new asshole. I mean reviews that compare your book unfavorably to various types of animal dung. There’s one site I visited recently where the author had three columns displaying the “good,” the “bad,” and the “ugly” reviews of his work.
I always thought this behavior was kind of peculiar. We’re all aware that no single book will please everybody. I’ve eagerly pressed copies of Dune and Neuromancer into the hands of intelligent, well-read, open-minded people who later told me these were lousy books. So obviously, even if your novel emits white light and a heavenly choir chants every time you crack it open, there are going to be people who think it sucks big time. Why emphasize the negative?
I think I’ve discovered now why authors do that.
Imagine you’re sitting in the Coliseum in ancient Rome and two gladiators come out of the pen. One of them’s slick and unblemished with hardly a mark on him. The other guy’s got scars all over his arms and he’s missing a few teeth. Which one are you gonna bet on? I’m betting on the guy with the scars. Why? Because a scar is evidence of a tough fight that you came out of alive. It’s a mark of experience. And when we see the clean and unmarked gladiator, we just don’t believe that this guy has gone through fight after fight without making a single mistake. We figure that he’s just too young and green to have earned his scars yet.
It’s the same thing with being a novelist. If you haven’t had people dislike your novel, either a) you’ve accomplished something that nobody on this Earth has yet accomplished, or b) not enough people have read your book yet.
Lately I’ve been seeing some negative reviews of Infoquake cropping up on the web, and I’m in the mood to show them off like a gladiator shows off his scars. There was a rush of great reviews for the book when it first came out, and I’ve been wondering how much those reviews colored other people’s readings. I wonder how many people picked up Infoquake because they had heard good things about it, and were tremendously disappointed, but just didn’t feel like bucking the trend.
So I’m going to list here some of the bad reactions I’ve read over the web and some of the bad comments I’ve heard about the novel. (Of course, I encourage you to sample some of the reviews from the praise page to balance out the criticism.)
- Evan of Association-List (scroll to the bottom of the page) — “The writing is pedestrian, the ideas are interesting, the history seems unlikely, and the structure is awkward. The characters are OK. Two out of five isn’t really all that great.”
- Emerald City (scroll to the bottom of the page) — “I’ve seen too many devious and dishonest businessmen in real life and Edelman’s Natch seemed like a rank amateur to me.”
- Dmorr — “It’s a first effort, and it shows with uneven writing and weak characterization — many of the characters, including the main one, seem almost more like caricatures.”
- T. Hooper, an Amazon reviewer — “(2 stars out of 5) Infoquake lacks strong action scenes, takes far too long to get going, and leaves the reader with a cliffhanger, waiting for the rest of the Jump 225 trilogy.”
- St. Christopher on Wotmania — “Prose? What Prose? Really, I do not like Edelmans, matter of fact, style, I’ve read magazine articles with as much spirit…”
- Alain, a reviewer on BN.com — “(2 stars out of 5) If the story was as interesting as the technology, it would deserve three or four stars but most of the pages are taken up by three people talking about how to build and sell computer software (ho hum).”
- Pantacosm — Some very interesting comments about the lack of violence in the novel and two-dimensional characters, and a very interesting idea about mob intimidation that I wish I’d thought of while writing the book. (Despite the negative comments, the guy strangely gave it 7.5 stars out of 10.)
- Brian, a reviewer on BN.com — “(2 stars out of 5) Few of the concepts presented seemed very original and there was a lot of jargon and irrelevant history along the way.”
- A commenter on Rob’s Blog o’ Stuff — “It read like a rehash of early 90’s cyberpunk updated with new buzzwords, and left the story hanging at the end.”
- Towers of Text blog — “The book is just an sf-ized tale of the dotcom boom… the ideas aren’t that innovative and original, especially if you went through the real world tech industry disaster yourself.”
- Added 3/24/07: Rat’s Reading — “If you like to see all the office politics behind the creation of a Powerpoint presentation, then this book is for you!”
- Added 4/2/07: Big Dumb Object — “The story and characters just didn’t excite me. Much of the novel felt like set up, with the climaxes lacking emphasis, and the ending fulfilling all my fears about the ‘part one of a trilogy’ label.”
While I’m at it, I dug up some of the rejection letters I received, which I will excerpt here:
- A publisher — “I felt some of the plot details were a bit too technical and inaccessible.”
- Another publisher — “There is an enormous amount of interior dialog — one of the fastest ways to lose the interest of a reader. The prose feels overwritten and melodramatic.”
- A potential blurber — “Despite the unbelieveable bits that kept jarring me out of the story (like, there’s no way anyone could ‘run halfway across London’, let alone without noticing one is doing it or carrying a pillow), I kept reading because I liked and was interested in Jara and Horvil, but I found Natch both improbable and repulsive, and when the book turned out to be about him, I gave up on it.”
- Another potential blurber — “The book’s just not ready for prime time.”
So what does an author learn from the negative reviews? Here’s what I’ve taken out of them:
- Don’t take it personally. None of these people had any clue who I was when they made these comments, so they certainly weren’t motivated by any flaws in my character or personal dislike for me. I actually shared some drinks and laughs with Cheryl Morgan of Emerald City at last year’s WorldCon, and she disliked the book so much she couldn’t finish it. But I enjoyed meeting her tremendously, and her opinion of the book never came up.
- Some people won’t like your book no matter what you do. The subject matter or angle you’re pursuing just might not be of interest to all readers. I can’t imagine that too many hardcore atheists would enjoy C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, for instance, and likewise there are just people who wouldn’t find a novel about futuristic sales and marketing to be interesting no matter what.
- You might need to brush up on a few things. I continue to receive the complaint, even from those who liked Infoquake, that the secondary characters are a little two-dimensional. They certainly didn’t feel that way to me, but then again I’ve got a different perspective than the reader does. So I’ve concluded that these people might have made a good point here, and taken pains in the sequel to try to give the secondary characters more depth.
- There’s nothing you can do about it now. Perhaps when Sam Raimi does the film adaptation and my publisher puts up a 10th Anniversary Omnibus Edition of the Jump 225 Trilogy, then I’ll be able to fix some of the niggling issues. Otherwise, it’s just too late.
- You may have to agree to disagree. There may be elements to my book that 90% of the world will take objection to, and that’s just too bad. I like what I like, and I wrote what I wrote, so too bad.
The one thing I’m waiting for is just a big ol’ kiss-off hatebomb of a review. Certainly there has to be someone out there that picked up Infoquake and was just repulsed by every page, but kept reading for the grisly fascination. Or maybe there’s someone who found it politically reprehensible or too smarmy or just dull beyond belief. If anyone finds a review like that — or knows someone who feels that way and wants to write a review like that — let me know and I’ll post it on my blog. Seriously, I’d be very curious to see it.