How to Cope with Reviews as a Highly Anxious Person

the good, the bad, the unrepentantly stupid

I got a good review today and it was nice and it felt nice. Booklist called my upcoming romance novel, These Violet Delights, “a romantic masterpiece.” Holy shit!!! I’m flying!

I’ve been doing this for over fifteen years, I’m coming up on thirty traditionally published books, and that means loads and loads of reviews. I’m also not a confident person. I think I was maybe, once, but now I think my unwillingness to give up in the face of criticism or odds gets mistaken for confidence. In actuality, I’m just a little guy.

portrait of the artist

See? Small and usually very tired. But my books get released to a wide audience (woo!) so I am not treated like a little guy (boooo) and that’s fine. That’s how it should be! My art is for public consumption, and that means public opinions. Reviews used to really get under my skin. I think the first write up Kirkus ever gave me is burned into my soul forever and ever like a demonic brand. I’ve forgotten the mean things they’ve said about other works of mine, but that first one stuck. You can imagine what that was like for a recovering people pleaser. Hoo, boy. If an archeologist ever digs up my casket and cracks it open—they won’t, I’m going to be water cremated, check mate, grave robbers! —my corpse will probably rise up and whisper, “I’m sorry, I’ll do better next time.”

But for my own self-preservation, I had to get better about receiving reviews. The first professional bad one felt like being shot with guns, the first positive one was like swimming with sea otters through a castle moat. Over time, the sting dulls. I promise, it does. But you can expedite that process and get over it faster than I did. Ideally, you’d like to narrow the gulf between firing squad and otters, and you can.

What amazes me is how one outlet will love my book, and another reviewer will think it’s shit from a butt. When this happens enough times, you become attuned to the absurdity of weighting either side too intensely. It’s never advisable to believe your own hype, but it’s equally silly to accept that you’re the worst writer on Earth. I let myself feel the joy of a good review, but only to an extent. If it pushes me into a great writing day and a positive mood, if it helps sell books, if it makes my publisher happy, that’s all good stuff. I’m going to still read the negatives, too, but I’m going to test the feedback with the following criteria:

Is this critique given in good faith? ie: is this actually feedback or is it someone determined to be cruel or taking out their bad day on me. Is this a review or snark?

Did this person understand the point of the book?

Does this reviewer seem like the intended audience?

Is there any criticism here that resonates with me or feels true?

Is it something I can address in my next work/is it something I want to address in my next work?

It’s crucial to remember that the person writing up your book has no personal feelings about you, they don’t know you, and they are probably reviewing like 80 books a month. When you can take the emotion out of the process and study the review from a distance, with the preceding questions in mind, you can usually either mine something useful to carry forward as you embark on future art, or you can put the questions and bad feelings to bed. I think the most crucial one above is: did this person really get what I was trying to say? That one is especially important if, in other reviews, you get the sense that readers are picking up what you’re putting down.

This leads me to my next point: some people fundamentally are not going to understand you, like you, or vibe with your art. If a piece of work is for everyone, it’s for no one. You should 100% have an intended audience in mind and you should be creating your art like a heat seeking missile for those folks. Every book I write is a dove I’m sending out for a specific group, and it’s my job to make sure they can feel it when they dive into the first chapter, or even just the flap copy.

If none of that helps, it’s time to drag out the motherfucking brain bazookas and nuke the shit feelings from orbit. It’s time to play a game called: All My Favs Have Haters.

I’ve given this advice many times, but that’s because it genuinely works. The way to play All My Favs Have Haters is to pick a book that changed your life, one that you think is pretty much perfect. Profound. Beautiful. Go to Satan’s actual playground, Goodreads, and look up that book, then sort by 1 Star Reviews and let the opinions roll in. Let’s do one together. Possession, by A.S. Byatt, is one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s a tremendous inspiration for me and I reread it once a year. Let’s see what some readers think of it, shall we?

“I have nothing particularly profound or interesting to say about this book other than I did not enjoy it.”

“To be quite honest with you, before I started speed-reading this, while I was genuinely trying to read it straight, a great deal of it was being interpreted by my brain as absolute gibberish.”

“This book is everything that a Booker prize winner should be, by which I mean it’s pretentious and impenetrable.”

Okay, that last one is kind of a sick burn, respect. I disagree with all of these readers, and they are also right. Possession is a sprawling, unwieldy, dense commitment, a literary doorstop, but one I find rewarding. You can do this with books like Frankenstein (“an annoying scientist and an ugly tall man fight over who is more depressed”) and Sula (“Maybe I’m just ignorant, but I had no idea what this book was about.” Spoiler alert…).

It will astonish you what people think!

So now imagine you are not Tony Morrison or Mary Shelley and consider what the odds are of writing an unambiguously well-reviewed book. The odds are zero. And instead of crashing out over it, you can run the review through that criteria up there and realize that certain people were never going to like your work even if it came with a voucher for a free swim with the sea otters. They may have some useful observations, and they may not. There’s nothing wrong about wanting to improve your work, but you owe it to yourself to determine whether you genuinely failed the reader, or if you were never fated to understand each other in the first place.

THESE VIOLET DELIGHTS is out Nov 4! It’s about two neurodivergent nerds in Regency England falling in love over their shared love of painting. And, uh, I’m also doing a Star Wars book, whoa! More on that in the months to come.