What to do when your book gets a 1 star review

I got a one star review on Amazon yesterday for Part One of The Temp. It caught me off guard. I was at the osteopathic clinic where I work part-time and I'd been about to show a friendly patient my book cover. That's when I saw it. 

'A load of waffle' - the reviewer had written.

            

I felt suddenly embarrassed to show the lady the webpage.

Momentarily subdued, I blamed my cold. A one star review and a bad cold all on the same day. I felt like my face was melting and I'd just been punched.  

             

It's inevitable. I'd been expecting it. As soon as you put yourself out there, people are going to judge.

          The inner voices started up at once:

           

            But don't they realise how hard I've worked to get here?

            It's not personal Emily.

            It was a free sample! They should have given it another star for being free!

            It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.  

            But it does what it says on the tin.

            Some people are going to hate it.

            Can't I get a star for correct spelling?

            There's bound to be a typo in it somewhere.

            I spelt my name right!

            Benet? It really looks like there's a letter missing somewhere...

           

It's not a big deal really. It's only one little review on a very short section of my book. If I ever need an ego boost I've got a whole Happy Folder of Wattpad comments I've saved. They're there in case the doubts ambush me.   

            

I've got another trick too. I've just discovered it. What really makes a one star pale into insignificance is checking out the one star reviews of your favourite books.

Go on, do it.That's when it hits you how subjective it all is.

Stephen King's 11.22.63, a book I daydreamed about for days after I'd finished it, is 'contrived nonsense', my beloved Starter for Ten is 'pretentious juvenile tripe',  Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which reeled me into its dark clutches and hypnotised me, is 'a waste of time'. The Husband's Secret is 'rubbish', though personally I couldn't put it down. I could go on forever. 

Just for laughs I checked out reviews for some classics. Poor Charles Dickens gets a one star by someone who then comments, 'I can't comment yet because I haven't read it.' O-kay.     

There are books for every taste and as long as there are enough people who like reading mine I'll keep on writing! If you're a writer, I advise you to do the same!

           

Get your free download of Part One of The Temp. 

               

A Scaredy Cat's Book Review: The Uninvited

Between me and you, I really don't like writing book reviews. I used to have to do them in school and it put me off reading. The fact I'm writing about The Uninvited should be proof enough of its brilliance.

Up until now I didn't think books had the same power as films for planting zombies in your bathroom and ghosts under your kitchen sink. Beetlejuice, The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Skeleton Key, Julia's Eyes (Los Ojos de Julia) - the few scary films I've dared watch really got under my skin.

Some of them, such as Beetlejuice, have since morphed into comedies, which is a fat lot of help to my younger self who once cowered in bed, too frightened to go to the toilet.

It's often the music in films that manipulate our emotions. I remember abruptly turning the sound off while watching this horror film with some green lady in a bath. Suddenly it was just a silly green lady in the bath, not scary at all. Well my copy of The Uninvited arrived without a sound track and achieved what I thought only films were capable of.

Here's the blurb:

A seven-year-old girl puts a nail-gun to her grandmother's neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong.

When anthropologist Hesketh Lock travels to Taiwan to investigate sabotage in the timber industry, he has no reason to connect the events there with the incidents back home. Or with the increasingly odd behaviour of his beloved step-son. That is, until shocking events in Taiwan and a global epidemic of child violence forces him to reassess his life, his career and his role as a father. Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.

It's a chilling read with a character at its centre that you love for being so direct. Okay so he's direct because he has Aspergers and you wouldn't like his directness if you'd just slept with him, but he makes for a trusty narrator. As for creepy children and unexplained madness, it gets me trembling under my blanket every time.

The Uninvited is expertly paced and you feel compelled to keep reading because you need the answers as much as super rational Hesketh. Whatsmore it doesn't fall apart at the end like so many other 'nearly thrilling' books do.

I read The Uninvited at night in a very empty house, wind whistling outside and neighbours oddly quiet. After putting it down I considered sleeping with the lights on, and when I turned them off feeling foolish, I fully expected something to grab my ankle.

Your experience might be less scary if you read it in daylight and with someone at your side. Preferably not a child acting strangely or an adult who believes in evil spirits.  

***

For proper book reviews, visit Isabel Costello's On The Literary Sofa. I actually won this book through a competition she was running on Twitter so it's worth following her @IsabelCostello

For more about author Liz Jensen, visit her website and find her on on Twitter @LizJensenWriter 

A Review: Blogging for Creatives

A few weeks ago a jiffy bag with an interesting looking book came through my letter box.

I only wish it had arrived 4 years earlier when I, clueless but eager, began this blog.  

‘Blogging for Creatives’ written by Robin Houghton gathers together all the information you need to begin your blog.

It is intelligent and easy to read and best of all it features a diverse range of blogs (including mine!) which are bound to get your creative juices going.

I loved Advanced Style – the photographer, Ari Seth Cohen’s blog, which celebrates the style of older people he photographs on the streets of New York.  The photographs are beautiful and inspiring and might marginally calm your fears about getting old!

Another featured blog, A Perfect Gray, is an interior design blog and is written by a girl on a mission to find the perfect gray wall colour. 
That doesn’t get my pulse racing even though there must be at least 50 shades (teehee) but judging by her number of followers she is not alone in her mission!

Finding your niche is key and makes writing a blog much easier.

Now that I’ve stopped being a full-time Shop Girl I’ve definitely found it harder to update this blog every week.

‘Blogging for Creatives’ leads you through the basic process of setting up your blog from choosing a platform, layout, style and content.  

It also includes some of the slightly technical (but not too technical) things you should know.

One example would be: How to create a decent mailing list. 
I discovered ‘mail chimp’ just a day before I got the book after a lot of wasted time online. (While we’re on the topic, please join my mailing list! Top Right!)

It took me 4 years to create a professional mailing list mostly because it simply hadn’t occurred to me to do one before.

That’s the great thing about this book - it provides you with ideas, suggestions and plenty of useful nuggets that might not have dawned on you otherwise.

Of course you can google every possible component of a blog to know how it works and even with this guide book you are still bound to spend hours working things out online.

The book lists useful websites but if it illustrated every tiny step it would get a bit tedious. This means you still have to commit yourself to hours of exploration.

If you are beginning a blog or have one but feel it isn’t quite up to scratch, then I recommend you buy this book.

I know I’ll be flicking through it again for inspiration and tips I may have missed.

After all, a blog is organic and should be forever developing.    

Blog Workshop

If you need an extra push to begin your blog, I will be running a  
Live Beginners Blog Workshop on Saturday 18th August 
10am-12.30pm  
Fee: £35.00
@ 77 Tower Bridge Road, SE1 4TW
If you've ever fancied a sneak peak at our chandeliers then this is your chance as it will take place in the same shop building which inspired my book 'Shop Girl Diaries'.


E-mail me: emily@emilybenet.com for more details.