Over on the KDP community there is a thread where a writer was attacked not for anything in his book but because of a website he operates.

It is understood that a writer should never respond to a bad review either on amazon or anywhere else the reviewer might be trolling the writer.

As a side note it is wise not to be critical of amazon because they have employees who do have the power to kill your sales.  That is true for other platforms where you can self-publish your books as well.  But at times it is virtually impossible not to be critical of whatever platform.   Many of us have unwisely been overly critical in times of frustration.

Self-publishing in itself can be frustrating.  It is work. And after all that work, when someone is attacked, often they can feel their heart drop just a little bit.  Then they get angry.  It is understandable.  And the natural thing to want to do is scream back at the person who has hurt you.  But it is pointless.

Some people say you can learn from the reviews.  But you really can’t.  You should always work to improve your writing and most of us have a lot of room for improvement but the reviews aren’t really very helpful.  Pretty much the only thing bad reviews accomplish is to make you sad, hurt your confidence, and possibly make you angry.  It is generally best not to read reviews.

Now what I am about to say is really counter to the amazon ecosystem.  It is also best if readers ignore subjective reviews and generally they do.  The good reviews are often fake and the bad reviews are often  troll fodder.  Cover, blurb, and the part of the book you are allowed to read is the best way to judge whether you want to buy and read a book or not.  You know what you like in a book.  And what the reviewer thinks is written by someone who is trying to feel self-important for a second.   That is fine.  No problem with that.  That might can be said for most of us who are writing,  but the point is that often the validity of any review for anything subjective–such as writing–is questionable.  (Reviewing a book is not like reviewing a product that doesn’t work.) After you read the book you might agree with reviewers.  Or you might disagree with them.  Regardless, hopefully you have been entertained.

But if you allow a bad review to prevent you from buying a book you might have otherwise liked is to deny yourself that entertainment.

At one point in my bio, I intentionally discouraged people from leaving reviews.  Amazon thinks they are a key part of their system but they really aren’t–especially for books and movies and music where entertainment value is highly subjective to individual preference.  Given those subjective preferences,  often the reviews become an embarrassment for the person leaving the review, which is why a lot of real people don’t leave reviews.

Now I wasn’t always of that mind.  As someone who promoted products I thought those reviews were helpful in what to promote.  Then for a period I used a feed that put reviews on my site.  And I got an email from a real nice lady who asked me to pull her review from my website.  She had written the review when she was in college and she had become a teacher and some of her students had found the review and were teasing her because of it.  I pulled the feed from that product to make sure her review did not somehow pop back up on my website.

Writers know that responding to reviews is a bad idea.  Generally it makes them look bad.  The truth is, the reviewer often also looks bad. Getting drunk and writing a bunch of stupid reviews on amazon is a bad idea.  Especially if the review is going to show up where a person’s students / coworkers / whoever might can figure out it is them. 🙂

Now my saying that is probably going to make some writers angry at me.  Unlike me, they feel those reviews are important.  And the truth is reviews do impact how a book may or may not show up in some list.   That is why some writers beg for reviews.  Unlike them though, I figure any sales I make is going to be from the traffic I drive.  Amazon is not going to give me any breaks.  My books are long buried in their system.

And no Amazon employee, I am not being critical, it just is what it is.

But when I do manage to drive traffic I would rather the book show no reviews than to show a bunch of BS reviews.  I am happy my books are lacking in reviews.  It would be cool if  that one review would vanish so there would be no reviews to be seen.   But then again, I don’t really care.