nah critical acclaim is easy peasy - a critic once wrote on one of my stories "this is outstanding work" (okay so she was my primary school teacher and i was 6 at the time , but its definitely acclaim, I got 10 house points and a gold star )
I find myself wondering if you're distinguishing, here, between (1) critics and (2) your friends and relatives.
No, but it's just that the passion goes into the writing, not in reading the reviews. The fact that my book sold well is indication enough that people liked it enough to cough up money for it and felt that what I had to say was worth paying for. I've had a review or two where I've wondered what head-space the reviewer is coming from. I get that. I would have liked to please everybody, but not at the expense of tailoring my stuff just to please them. I've pleased myself, and I've hoped to please my readers. That's all I need. Plus the money, of course.
I'm surprised at how little store most people put in getting good reviews. I can't be the only one that wouldn't buy a book with mostly bad reviews, even if it sounded compelling? I mean I always expect a couple of 1*s, but if there are mostly 1-3*s... nope, I'm going to keep browsing. There MUST be a correlation between good reviews and sales.
I must admit, although I'd like to be successful in what I do, maybe make earn a living through it. It all comes down to reviews regardless, its the first thing i look at when purchasing a book (I hate people who post spoilers without letting us know). I browse the store a lot. If I like the description of the story, I'll read reviews before trying a sample. I will never purchase a book with negative reviews unless i know the author, praying i can give him a good review. With my current story, I'm hoping to bring something different, a few twists and not just your regular zombie. After completing my first draft, i have a lot of work to do. Its shallow in some places, characters need a tad more building. SCENES I hate describing them. I want the reader to feel every emotion and picture what i believe to be a post apocalyptic cornwall. If its goes to publish (self or otherwise) I want those positive reviews.
as I said above it depends on what you mean by reviews - i care about getting good reviews from readers (on amazon and so forth) to influence buyers decision to buy, I don't care at all about what litterarry critics, from the papers and so on(what in the UK we call ' the islington set') say , because they are mostly pretentious, goateed , chin stroking, wank puffins who wouldnt know a good book if it kicked them up the arse , and outside of their latteratti world no one else cares what they think either this is why best selling is not synonymous with 'award winning'
Yeah, I'm talking about buyer reviews. I don't read reviews in newspapers or websites etc, just on Amazon or wherever I'm buying from. I don't care what ONE person thinks anyway, I look at the overall picture of reviews.
No it is not! Think of all the writers, all those who have ever written a book..how many become critically acclaimed? It sounds like a lot when you see Times Top Ten Critically Acclaimed Books of 2016 but we also forget how many books were published that year.
And who says bestselling writers aren't passionate about what they do? I'd say it's a must for both commercial success and good reviews that you are passionate about what you write. I'd say commercial success as well. And yes, I love writing and my stories.
Mind you though, I wouldn't have thought you'd achieve commercial success if you only received bad reviews? There must be like, 100,000 good reviews compared to the 10,000 bad ones. And in that case, that's all right I dunno, by definition, if you had commercial success, you've simply got to have good reviews, right!? Like, think Twilight or 50 Shades and the sheer amount of people who trash them - but I doubt movie studios would be buying the rights to make movies out of them if there wasn't at least twice that amount of people who loved them. So, considering all that, I'd go for commercial success, 'cause it actually means I get both I think the OP trolled his own question hehe
Again, depends how you define "reviews". If we're talking about professional reviewers, I think it's totally possible to have uniformly negative reviews and still have commercial success. I agree with you if we're talking about reader reviews, though.
I was only thinking about reader reviews. At the end of the day, how often do people really read professional reviews? I don't even know of any reviewers by name, nor where to find them to read their reviews. How much do professional reviews really affect you/your book/future book deals anyway? In the end, publishers and book stores are trying to sell to the general public, not professional reviewers. And frankly, if I had positive reader reviews on the whole and/or commercial success, but uniformly negative reviews by professional reviewers - then well... who the hell cares!? I'm successful, making money from my books, and more than a handful of people enjoy them! that's good enough for me!
Neither, I write because I love writing. Commercial success and good reviews are merely a nice bonus.
I'm mostly mucking about so for me the most exciting thing is someone actually reading anything I've written (and proving they did by making specific comments, even if it's "this phrase here is fucking awful, and you have a typo in the next to last paragraph"). If I were ever to publish, I think the most exciting thing would be if someone read it and got in touch to say, "Ooh, I totally get what you mean. I think that too!" (And then politely went away and never contacted me again because... how exactly did they get my email?) I think, if it were a case either of some Important Arbiter of Taste writing in a Respected Publication that I'd written a work of exceptional merit *or* selling enough copies to buy my mum a house, I'd take the bloody money.
"Publicity, admiration, adulation, or simply being fashionable are all worthless and are extremely harmful if one is susceptible to them." papa Hemmingstein
Are you afraid of success? I know it might sound like a stupid question, but I think the idea of success can be just as scary as the idea of failure. In the beginning of The Alchemist there is a section about the five reasons we don't reach our dreams/goals/purpose. It talks about the fear of success and how a lot of people self sabotage. It's a beautiful passage that I used to reread quite often, but I no longer have a copy of the book. I've just been feeling like a true imposter lately. I've withdrawn some short story submissions because I was nervous that one place with a 0% acceptance rate was going to take my story before another place with a 0% acceptance rate. Those stats come from duotrope (obviously no place really has a 0% acceptance rate). But I should have just left it alone because the places I withdrew from are cool publications I've tried to get in before, but I felt a strong need to let The New Yorker and The Paris Review reject me first. I actually have some sort of weird urge to withdraw a few submissions. I want to redo everything. I want to start over. I've been reading and editing the first hundred pages of my novel rather than continuing with the story. I think the editing is progress, but every time I think about moving forward I get real nervous. The better I make the pages I have, the more nervous I get about writing more and messing it up. To avoid ruining my novel, I've started writing science fiction. But I'm a literary writer. And I have written probably over 100 short stories, but I only submit less than a dozen of them. I thought I had some success. Well, I did have some, but it didn't really change much. It was exciting and all. It happened a few times all around the same time. And then nothing. And then nothing really came of it. And, although those editors I worked with told me I can send them more stuff, I feel like I'm going to make a fool of myself. Have you ever felt a bit frozen? Scared of both success and failure at the same time? Has anyone else read the passage in The Alchemist I'm talking about? Can you relate to it? Have you done things to sabotage your writing dreams? Link to reasons we f*ck up what we really want: https://peteandjordan.com/the-alchemist-pursuing-your-personal-legend/
I don't think that's very true, @John Calligan. You're totally there. Lucky if your not messing everything up for yourself like I seem to be. This is a horrible mindset to be in.
Well, writing to your own taste (instead of to some targeted market) is sort of a sabotage. My last novel has a prologue, a character waking up, the guy doesn’t get the girl, with actually good people for characters, and I wrote it knowing none of that shit is popular right now.
I'm pushing ahead with my novel as if it's going to be successful. But what if it has enough success that I have to be on Facebook? What if I'm asked to do a public reading or a radio interview, even if it's just here in my small town? What if I'm asked to travel somewhere? I'm not a people person so that's a little scary, but I have invested enough time in this novel (and other people's too) that I won't sabotage my chances. What if nobody wants it? That's the less scary part. I'll just put it aside and work on something else.
I'm really happy with the level of success I've had, but I do feel somewhat reticent if I allow myself to dream about major success that could bring a lot of attention to me as an author. The main reason is because as I've mentioned before, my writing is something that's only known to a handful of friends and family, and I'm very invested in controlling who knows what I write and who doesn't. Mostly this is because I write sexually explicit books and I really don't need everyone in my life knowing how freaky/kinky things are in my brain. I also don't really want to deal with people who think it's weird or gross that a straight woman is super interested in writing about men falling in love with and banging each other. Right around the time my first novel came out, I did an interview with the Ask A Manager blog where I talked about my former career as a professional belly dancer and also my new side job as an author of m/m romance. I really wanted the PR for my book, but I was sweating bullets the day it came out that I'd given enough personal information in the interview that someone would put two and two together. I did receive a couple of Facebook PMs from some dance acquaintances who asked if the interviewee was me; I told them it was but to please keep it quiet as I was trying to keep my writing on the down low. No one in the blog's comments figured it out, though it was surprising that a few of them knew of me from my fanfic days. I mean, if I were to have enough success that I never had to worry about having a day job again, or that people would be so impressed with my millions of dollars they'd probably be able to look past the subject matter of my books, I'd probably say to hell with it and be 100% open. But I am afraid of a lesser level of success that would make it difficult to keep my writing life separate from my Real Life, like invitations to romance conventions or other in-person promotional activities where I'd lose any plausible deniability.
Yes I used to in my early twenties, that why you have to accept them both before you can do achieve anything noteworthy in life. Took me 15 years to realize that. Success and failure are forever in a delicate balance, just like all the dual natures throughout existence. So personally, I'll take my hundred losses. Give me one win, and I will make it the biggest win ever. That's pretty much been my philosophy for the past year... and I've noticed a difference in how I approach everything in life.
I can only make creative art if I don't plan to have it published. Only then can I be true to myself without overthinking about what others will think. Having motivation makes my mind blank, by only thinking about the pressure. Being anonymous here helps a bit, but having something published in my real name becomes an even higher wall to climb.
