One star review makes my day
AFTER AF 18 months of tapping and an toiling away, I finally pushed pu my new literary baby into in the big wide world.
And the very first review on Amazon? One star. (Amazon is being ge generous here, because you ca can’t click zero stars.)
Yet I actually punched the ai air when I saw it . . . true di dinks!
I took it as a good omen, given my last book’s first review was also one star.
(An employee from my old publisher thought he’d try to generate some buzz, so he wrote my very first review — “great read!” — but then ballsed it up by clicking one star instead of five … and it’s still there today.) What am I getting at? We’re living in a hyperconnected, hyper-critical digital age, and you can’t control what people say about you.
Case in point, this week a bloke wrote that he’d seen through my covert operation of writing a book for kids and had unpicked the darker side of what I’m plotting: “He’s just hating on Commbank because they are in the same space he wants to be in . . . schools.” Boom! So, apparently my covert plan is to get into schools and sign up kids to . . . jam jars?
And I’m really trying to flog their parents a book . . . that they can borrow from their school library?
(I have donated 10,000 books — one to every school in the country, so parents didn’t have to go out and buy it). Bottom line? Make peace with the fact that if you’re doing brave things (working hard, starting something, backing yourself), you’re going to make some people uncomfortable. And when it comes, don’t be surprised by criticism. Embrace it. It’s a sign that you’re treading your own path.