Many
publishers and authors are under the impression they must get a lot of book
reviews especially from readers on Amazon.
Imagine back a generation ago, before there was Amazon or a
presumed formula for success involving a quantity of user reviews, when authors
relied on the reviews published in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals
by paid, professional book critics, where the evaluative words of a handful of
people could make or break one’s writing career and dictate one’s commercial
viability. Then, think about how those
reviews shaped the way a writer and his or her work was to be viewed by the
masses. What a book reviewer clanked out carried a lot of weight.
Believe
it or not, many great writers received ugly rejection letters from book
publishers, nasty critiques from fellow writers, and terrible reviews from the
press. Not only managed to survive such attacks, but thrived. To see evidence of this look no further than
the 1998 publication of Pushcart’s
Complete Rotten Reviews &
Rejections, edited by Bill Henderson and Andre Bernard.
Up and coming writers may take solace in knowing trained professionals failed to recognize the genius in great works such as Alice in Wonderland, Lolita, Moby-Dick, and Lords of the Flies.
Up and coming writers may take solace in knowing trained professionals failed to recognize the genius in great works such as Alice in Wonderland, Lolita, Moby-Dick, and Lords of the Flies.
This
book, dedicated to showing that not everyone agrees on what constitutes a great
or even a good book, should inspire all writers to persevere in the face of
rejection. If Melville, Heller, Austen
and others weathered negative responses, so can you!
“Rotten Reviews is for all writers who
spent years if not a lifetime, writing a book and then had it dismissed by a
rotten review,” notes Henderson. “Rotten
reviews have happened to some of the best books and authors.”
Some
of the best known books have received harsh criticism, including these:
Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
“A
flamboyant failure”
--San Francisco Chronicle
“A
gadfly with delusions of grandeur.”
-- Time
“Fear
of Flying” by Erica Jong
“This
crappy novel…”
--New Statesman
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
“Completely
unpleasant.”
--The New Yorker
Naked Lunch by William
Burroughs
“The
merest trash, not worth a second look.”
--The New Republic
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
“This
isn’t writing. It’s research.”
--The New Republic
The Assistant by Bernard
Malamud
“This
is on the whole too grim a picture to have wide appeal.”
--Kirkus Reviews
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
“It
gasps for want of craft and sensibility…The book is an emotional hodge podge;
no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter.”
--New York Times Book Review
The
list goes on and on. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary proved not to be immune
from wretched criticisms as well.
On
the subject of reviews, several writers were quoted. Two stuck out:
“In
the first place I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own
books, and I do not. If one is not
careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or
themselves.”
--Louis
L’Amour
“It
is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as
praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it struck at one end of the room, it will
soon fall to the ground. To keep it up,
it must be struck at both ends.”
--Samuel
Johnson
A sample of rejection letters includes these gems:
Catch – 22 Joseph Heller 1961
“I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. It is about a group of American Army officers. This, as you may imagine, constitutes a continual and unmitigated bore.”
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold John Le Carré 1963
“You’re welcome to le Carré – he hasn’t got any future.”
Valley of the Dolls Jacqueline Susann 1966
“…she is a painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer whose every sentence, paragraph and scene cries for the hand of a pro.”
The Time Machine H.G. Wells 1895
“It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.”
Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand 1957
“…the book is much too long. There are too many long speeches…I regret to say that the book is unsaleable and unpublishable.”
The Fountainhead Ayn Rand 1943
“It is badly written and the hero is unsympathetic.”
Animal Farm George Orwell 1945
“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.”
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955
“It will not sell and it will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation…It is a totally perverse performance all around.”
Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1951
“We regret to say that our united opinion is entirely against the book as we do not think it would be at all suitable for the Juvenile Market in [England.} It is very long, rather old-fashioned, and in our opinion not deserving of the reputation which it seems to enjoy.”
The Assistant Bernard Malmud 1957
“…superficial and unconvincing…I do not see this book as a very well told story on any level. I do not think it would have either a good critical reception or substantial sales. Cumulatively depressing.”
Ironweed William Kennedy 1983
“There is much about the novel that is very good and much that I did not like. When I throw in the balance the book’s unrelenting lack of commerciality, I am afraid I just have to pass.”
Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954
“It does not seem to us that you have been wholly successful in working out an admittedly promising idea.”
The Diary of Anne Frank Anne Frank 1952
“The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.”
Brandt, in his introduction, questions why one chooses to be a book reviewer. He notes: “Reviewing will never make one
rich. The enemies one makes writing
reviews will almost inevitably seek revenge if one should be so foolish as to
publish one’s own books.”
He
knows reviewers feel power in what they do.
Readers delight in seeing blood every now and then. The public demands a good beat down every so
often. Reviewers may be underpaid,
despised, feared, and at times right on the money – but they have pride and
courage exceeded by few. It may give one
a sense of power to pass judgment on others, to be clever at the expense of
someone who pours their heart out. And it’s a satisfying feeling to read a
book that details how so many in the know could be so, so wrong at times.
One
of the most interesting things in Brandt’s book was about how reviews used to
be bought and paid for by book publishers.
He writes:
“When
the reviewing of books first became common practice in the United States, in
the 1840s, it was quite rare to find a rotten review of any book, however
egregious a product it may have been. We
must not assume, however, that this was some golden age of concord between
authors and reviewers. The concord was
entirely between publishers and newspapers, the former paying the latter, by
one quiet means or another for favorable reviews…reviewers were discovered to
be salaried employees of the publishers whose books they were reviewing. Some publishers had been helpfully sending to
newspapers along with their books unsigned reviews that they themselves had
written, with the helpful hint that the papers were free to use these reviews
however they wished. It was all terribly
scandalous and it had to stop.”
have you received a reject letter or a bad review? consider it an honor. You are in good company.
have you received a reject letter or a bad review? consider it an honor. You are in good company.
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