A very, very good blog post by author Charlie Stross, one of my favourite writers, on how to deal with online reviews.
Reviews by regular readers, as opposed to professional critics, are like the publishers’ proverbial slushpile: a seething, shouting mass of logorrhea in which a few gems may be submerged, if you can bear to hold your nose for long enough to find them.
But for an author to make a habit of ignoring feedback is pretty much the first step on a slippery slope down into a mire of self-indulgent solipsistic craziness.
Further down, he makes a very good point. Not only are unrelentingly negative reviews not worth reading, but neither are the uncritically positive.
Similarly: if you write and publish novels on a regular basis, you will acquire a core of fans, and they will do their five star cheerleader thing in the Amazon fora and reviews every time you emit a new fart, whether fragrant or otherwise. You should strive to ignore these reviews. No, seriously. While it’s probably okay to indulge yourself and roll around in them if you’re feeling down, you should not take them seriously
While he’s naturally talking about book reviews, I think the same principles apply for criticism of any kind of creative endeavour, including music reviews of the sort that appear on this site. I would like to hope that the majority of the reviews I write fall into the “perceptive 60%” he talks about.
It is overwhelmingly difficult to find good criticism of any stripe, be it positive or negative. My feeling is that an author should strive to cultivate a connection with a couple of people they know well, whose opinions they trust and which are provided with a good deal of work to back it up, and to remain perennially critical of their own achievements, in the sense of there always being room to improve. By all means, do not build your own echo chamber.
This I find is one of the hazards of being self-published — it’s too easy to create a cheerleading clique that believes you can do no wrong, and which offers you no substantive feedback about anything you do.
Been talking about this with a musician friend of mine – we both agreed that mixed reviews are far better than no reviews.
And it does make a difference who a review is from. I’ve recently seen a very positive review from someone that had previously been very critical of the band. That’s worth a lot more than the words of one of the cheerleaders who’s positive about everything they do.