PhotobucketSo, I am two months out from the release of my second novel, and I am officially starting to come unraveled. I realized this early one Friday morning when I was frantically searching every back corner of the web in hopes of tracking down my Publishers Weekly review a day or so early, so I could be put out of my misery before the weekend arrived. I was granted relief that afternoon: voila – there it was – and a rave too – on PW’s website, a full day before my publicist and agent promised it would be available! I exhaled. And loudly. But then my mind started churning toward the next reviews: GoodReads.com, Kirkus, Booklist, Amazon…the list is never-ending. My google alerts are never-ending. How am I expected to find mental peace when I know that people are out there, judging my work, judging my skill, judging ME for what I put in my book.

Well…the answer is, I’m not sure. With my first book – and some hindsight – I’m very well steeled toward not caring what the reviews and reviewers say. If someone puts up a negative review on Amazon, I find it very easy (too easy?) to ignore it almost entirely. And I suppose that, with time, I’ll feel the same way about this one: don’t like the book? Oh well. No big deal. But right now, I’m in that bubble where I’ve heard from enough people to give me positive reinforcement, but not enough that I don’t worry that the other shoe will drop. Does every writer go through this? Sure that his or her book is the bee’s knees, only to be punctured when he or she discovers that the rest of the world might not or doesn’t agree? I don’t know. I DO know that however the reviews come in, I’ll be fine (eventually!), but that doesn’t stop me from hoping that they’re positive nevertheless.

I suppose that this has been made harder for authors since the rise of the internet. Anyone can post nearly anything about you or your book, and bam, Google alerts lands it in your in-box. In the pre-internet era, I imagine that authors had a much more difficult time both getting and reading their reviews, which, I suppose, has both positive and negative connotations. What would it be like to put out a book and not receive any feedback? It is akin to a tree falling in the woods that no one hears? Has the tree still fallen? So, I guess I shouldn’t mind this anxious period: at least I know that people are out there reading the book and absorbing it.

Finally, who is to say that reviews matter? Certainly, within the industry, they resonate to a degree: after the PW review came out, I received quite a few emails from industry folks to congratulate me. And further, I’ve been told that positive trade reviews can help bolster bookseller support. But do they matter to the reading public at large? I, for one, read Entertainment Weekly’s reviews, as well as People magazine’s (yes, really, I do), but word of mouth is often what hooks me, and really, I couldn’t tell you where I hear about most of the books that I buy, only that I’ve heard of them. I think that Amazon reviews matter, sure, but these days, doesn’t everyone recognize that a lot of these are skewed by friends of the author? So where does that leave us? I’m not sure. Only that, despite my best efforts, I’ll still probably sweat my various reviews until I’ve made my peace with this book, set it aside and start a new one, at which point, I’ll forget entirely about these raves (and probably a few rants) and start worrying about the reviews for the next one.

But authors out there: do you sweat the reviews? Do you think that reviews matter?

Allison Winn Scotch
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