Authors Behaving Badly: When
Authors React Badly to Negative Reviews and Criticism!
Or: How NOT to Handle Bad Reviews!
When an author puts a book out into the world they must know it's not going to get completely positive feedback. All books, throughout history, from Hamlet to The Da Vinci Code, have people who love them and people who hate them. And most authors handle the negative reviews pretty well (even if they're crying inside).
However, some authors decide that they want to fight their critics. Some get personal. Some get downright nasty. Did someone say car crash?I was originally going to post one article on this but so many authors have behaved badly that I thought I would make it a weekly feature! I bringz you all the drama every Thursday from authors who have been a little naughty.
6. Jamie McGuire's Dignity is a Beautiful Disaster
Who Is She: Jamie McGuire, Self-Published Author.
What She Responded Badly To: a review of her novel 'Beautiful Disaster' published on Amazon by Wendy Knight
What Made the Fur Fly: Well, it starts as a disagreement about genre. Here is the review that begins the chain of crazy:
- McGuire decided the best way to handle this negative review was to ignore it and move on with her life. LOL, nah she went all snarky in the comment section regarding the genre of her novel. She doesn't mind a bad review. She is a laid back woman. Nooo what she is angry about is the mis-classification of her novel as YA rather than Contemporary Romance. Surrre she is. Here is the conversation between author and reviewer in all its glory:
- I just want to interject here to comment on how irritating it is when an author disregards a reviewers opinion by saying 'YOU READ IT WRONG'. You didn't. You read what was in front of you and interpreted it. Once an author has published a book they cannot determine how people read it. There is a whole field of literary criticism devoted to this subject so maybe McGuire needs to do some revision. Let us continue:
- So that was that. However, it seems strange that an author who is so against their novel being put into a certain category would ask people to vote for it in that very category in a competition on Goodreads:
- Jane from Dear Author calls her out on it and Jamie again strikes back:
- There are more comments between these two, but they are mainly related to past bad blood between them and are really more of the same so I couldn't be bothered screencapping it all. However this comment from Jamie stood out to me:
I hate it when authors accuse bloggers of being unprofessional. Bloggers aren't professionals are they?! Authors are professionals. Why do authors not know that!? Jame McGuire is a smelly douchebag. Still not unprofessional.
Apparently, McGuire also took all of this the social networking sites and posted about other reviews and reviewers on her blog. And APPARENTLY things got even uglier, but I cannot find hide nor hare of these posts anywhere on the interwebz so I suppose they were deleted. Unless someone can dig them up for me or point me in their direction we will never get to see them. We must bear it.
I think Jamie McGuire has an attitude problem. Let me know if you agree.
Previous Authors Behaving Badly:
1. Jacqueline Howett 2. Leigh Fallon 3. Keira Cass 4. Eoin Macken 5. M.R Mathias 6. Melissa Douthit
