How to Handle Negative Reviews as an Author

It usually arrives when you're doing something else. You open the app to check one small thing, and there it is: one star, and a sentence you will be able to recite word for word in three years.

If you publish long enough, you'll get some. Bestselling writers get them by the thousand. Knowing that helps for about four seconds.

So this post skips the "don't take it personally" advice, because you will, at least for an evening. It's about what to do in the hours after a bad review lands, what not to do, and how to tell the reviews worth learning from apart from the ones that only hurt.

Why one bad review outweighs twenty good ones

You can have forty generous reviews and the forty-first will be the one you think about in the shower. That lopsidedness is normal. Criticism tends to land harder and stay longer than praise, and it rarely arrives on its own.

Ishani Sen wrote about this better than most craft books manage, in an essay on BrightChapters called Grief Has Choreography. Her bad review came from work, not from a book, and it sent her straight back to a heartbreak from more than twenty years earlier. Working through why, she lands on this:

"The new pain isn't causing the old pain to resurface. It's unlocking it - because underneath, they're wired to the same feeling."

That's worth keeping in mind the next time a two-star review wrecks your evening. The reviewer read your book once and typed for three minutes. If it feels like a verdict on your whole life, part of that weight came from somewhere else, from every earlier time you felt not good enough. Knowing where the weight comes from doesn't make it vanish, but it does make the review itself look smaller.

Should authors respond to negative reviews?

No. Really. This is the closest thing the book world has to a firm rule. Goodreads puts it plainly in its author guidelines: "Don't engage with people who negatively rate or review your books." Their reason is that other readers see the reply and read it as hostile, however polite you were.

They're right, and it applies even to the friendly-sounding replies. "Thanks so much for reading! Sorry it wasn't for you" looks gracious to the author and a little like being watched to everyone else. Reviews are written for other readers. They're a conversation you weren't invited into, and once an author shows up, readers get quieter and more careful about what they post.

The same goes for the indirect versions: a post on your own account about "people who leave cruel reviews", a pointed screenshot, asking a friend to go and argue in the comments. Each one takes a review a few hundred people would have scrolled past and puts it in front of everyone who follows you.

If you believe a review breaks the platform's own rules, report it rather than responding. Each site sets those rules, so check them first. A spoiler, for instance, isn't automatically a violation. On Amazon there's a Report link under each review, and the KDP help page says the community team investigates, though it won't tell you the outcome. A review that's merely harsh, unfair or wrong about your intentions won't be removed, and it shouldn't be.

Read it once, then again tomorrow

The first read is mostly adrenaline, so you won't take much in. Close the tab. Do something with your hands. Read it again the next day, when you can see what it says instead of how it feels.

On the second read, most negative reviews fall into one of three piles.

The biggest pile is taste. The reviewer wanted a faster book, or a romance with more romance, or simply doesn't like present tense. Nothing to fix there. A cozy mystery reviewed by someone who wanted a thriller tells you the description may have pointed the wrong people at it, and that's about all.

The second pile is noise: a review about the delivery, the price, the cover, a quarrel with something you never wrote. Let it go.

The third pile is the useful one, and it's usually the smallest: a specific, checkable note about the writing. "I lost track of who was speaking in the dinner scene." "The middle hundred pages repeat the same argument three times." These can sting the most, because some part of you suspects they're right.

One reviewer is an opinion. Three is a pattern.

Don't rewrite anything because of a single review, even a smart one. A single reader is one person on one evening.

Watch for repetition instead. If three unconnected readers mention that the middle drags, or that a character's turn came out of nowhere, that's worth a serious look. Not proof that something's broken, but a strong hint, especially for the next book. Our post on habits that improve your writing has a few ways to work on whatever keeps coming up. Keep a plain note somewhere: the book, the comment, the date. After a dozen reviews you'll start to see which complaints repeat and which belong to one person.

The same goes for praise. If people keep quoting the same line or the same scene, that tells you what you do well, which is just as useful to know and much nicer to read.

Can negative book reviews increase sales?

Sometimes, and it's hard to believe at 11pm, but there's research behind it.

When researchers Jonah Berger, Alan Sorensen and Scott Rasmussen studied New York Times book reviews, a negative review cut sales for established authors by about 15%. For relatively unknown authors, a negative review increased sales by about 45%. The bad opinion faded from readers' memories, but the awareness that the book existed stuck. If almost nobody has heard of you, being noticed can matter more than being praised. That was one study of fiction reviewed by The New York Times, though, so treat it as an interesting finding, not a prediction for your book on Amazon or Goodreads.

Ratings work in a similar way. Northwestern's Spiegel Research Center found that shoppers' likelihood of buying peaks at average ratings between 4.0 and 4.7 and drops as ratings approach a perfect five, which starts to look too good to be true. Their research was on products in general, not books in particular, but the instinct carries over. A book with only five-star reviews from people who sound like the author's cousins doesn't reassure anyone. A few honest three-star reviews make the good ones believable.

None of that means you should want bad reviews, and it doesn't make a cruel one pleasant. It does suggest a single bad review is probably doing less damage than it feels like it is.

Where to put the feeling

It has to go somewhere, and a public reply is the worst place for it.

Tell a writer friend. They'll have a story about their own worst review, which helps more than reassurance does. Or write it down. Putting a feeling into words tends to take some of the heat out of it (psychologists call it affect labelling), and a private page is the safest place to be as petty as you need to be for ten minutes. If you'd rather talk it out than type, BrightChapters' Private Journal lets you do that by voice.

Then go back to the next thing you're writing. Getting back into the next draft does more for your confidence than winning an argument with a stranger ever could.

Comments are a different conversation

Everything above is about reviews: ratings and write-ups on retail and catalogue sites, written for other readers. Comments are different. On BrightChapters, stories don't carry star ratings. Readers comment, recommend and tip the writer, and a comment left on your chapter is addressed to you.

Reply to those, including the critical ones. "Good catch, I'll fix that" or "That twist is meant to land later, hang on" is an ordinary exchange between a writer and a reader who cares enough to say something. Serialized writing gives you the chance to hear what readers think while the book is still changing, and that's worth having even when a comment stings a bit.

Thank people for honest notes. Ignore anyone who's only there to be unkind. And if you're ready to put something out and see what readers make of it, you can start writing on BrightChapters for free.

Ready to put this into practice?

BrightChapters' Write page is free to use, with no account needed to start a draft.