STATUS: Ack. Is it really almost 1:30 in the afternoon? Time to hit that TO DO list hard.
What’s playing on the iPod right now? LONESOME TOWN by Ricky Nelson
Or another title might be—don’t tweet in anger if you don’t like your book review.
I’m not sure how many of you have followed the Alice Hoffman Tweet debacle but here is briefly what happened. After a non-positive review in the Boston Globe by reviewer Roberta Silman, Author Alice Hoffman shot off 27 twitter tweets in response—one of the tweets included Silman’s email and telephone number and Hoffman urged her fans to respond to the review.
Uh, authors don’t do this. A reviewer is entitled to his or her opinion (hence, the point of reviews).
If you don’t like a review, you don’t like it. Move on. Trust me, mea culpas are not a position of strength. Regardless of whether you are justified or not, this does not put you, the author, in a positive light.
And, as Hoffman realized, you’re just going to end up having to issue an apology through your PR firm.
Now I think you can tweet about how sad you are about the bad review but why draw attention to it? Lots of readers pay very little attention to reviews. Recommends by friends are the largest seller of books. Your friend might not have remembered the Globe review but they might remember this tweet debacle.
So what will be accomplished? Is all publicity good publicity? Maybe this was a great promo stunt and readers will wonder whether they agree with the Globe reviewer and thus buy the book to read it?
What do you blog readers think?
My thought? I think people reading about this incident will just think Ms. Hoffman can’t handle criticism and maybe that old adage applies: if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Criticism and bad reviews are a risk in publishing.