When I was working on the book, a friend of mine told me that I was “brave.” I was curious to know why he’d used that word… “Because you’re putting yourself out there,” he replied – “and that opens you up to criticism.”
I saw his point, but I wasn’t overly concerned. Before the book I’d been a long-term blogger (SEOno has been around since 2011), and I’d had a troll commenter or two on there before, so I’d already experienced that type of thing – if only a little.
The book came out, and early on it almost only got 5-star reviews. A friend of mine left a 4-star review (leaving me to wonder what I did to piss him off… 😂), but that was pretty much it in the early days.
As time went on, it got a couple of 4-stars and 3-stars as well – mostly over on Goodreads and Audible. But that’s fine. You can’t please everyone – my style of writing and/or the advice that it gives may not be to everyone’s taste. (I have been known to write some daft stuff to be fair.)
Then it got a 2-star. And then another. Two left on Amazon, one on Goodreads. No text left against any of them – just ratings. Which is a shame, as it would’ve been good to know what they didn’t like about it (heck, it could inspire a blog post or something). But whatever.
Then, after nearly two years and 50+ reviews, on 2nd March 2021 I noticed that on the day prior, it’d received a 1-star review on Amazon.
And WOW. What a review.
You’re gonna leave this site and read what it says on there anyway(!), so I might as well just copy/paste it in its entirety:
“This book was recommended to me by a friend but sadly, I found it utterly useless.
“Basically a laundry list of hackneyed sales and networking techniques that you could find out for free with a Google search, all written in a pseudo-friendly/straight-talking style that’s about as authentic as a nine pound note.
“If someone transcribed a bunch of Gary V videos but was able to surgically extract any personality or useful information, that’s this book.
“Anti-Sell sums it up.”
Ouch.
At first, I did that thing of just trying to laugh it off. Then I re-read it a couple of times, trying to process it.
I consider myself a sensitive person (I actually talk about it a bit in the book), so stuff like this tends to hit me hard.
I mean, some of the stuff in there is just gut-punchingly unpleasant. “Pseudo-friendly”? Really? Pseudo-friendly? And what type of pretentious wanker uses the word “pseudo” anyway?!
The irony is that just a couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed on a site called Billion Success, where one of the questions asked me for my favourite quote. I talked about one where you can’t please everyone (“heck, even the Beatles had haters,” I went on to say) – and if you solidly fixate on the unhappy minority, you risk alienating yourself from the happy majority.
But that’s what was happening here. One unhappy review. One. Just one! I’d had 50+ people who were really happy with the book, but just one who’d felt the polar opposite. Guess which one was taking up my brain-space… 😩
To make matters worse, generally speaking, if someone’s unhappy with you for whatever reason, you can usually try to make amends. And it’s temporary – if I were to make a mistake for a client for example, I can rectify it, and then that’s it. All sorted.
But this was a review. Online. On a public webpage! This ain’t going nowhere. It’s gonna stay on Amazon for a long, long time. From this point on, if anyone considers buying the book, they’re gonna see that review – and it’s going to weigh in to their decision on whether or not they go on to buy it.
Enh… The important point to remember is that I can’t do anything about it now. And the buyer is entitled to their opinion.
There’s a few things I did in the aftermath that helped me to see it in a different light though. I Googled some stuff. I made some comparisons. A few other things. I’ve decided to detail them below, just in case they help anyone else who’s in a similar boat – whether it’s a negative book review or nasty feedback from a client.
Here’s 10 9 thing I did to try and cope with it…
1. Remember: you can’t please everyone
This is the absolutely core thing to remember, as already touched upon above.
No matter what you do, it is impossible to please 100% of people.
Even if you have created something truly special and likeable for everyone, some people like to be contrarian as well. I went to school with a kid who disliked everything that everyone else liked; not because he actually necessarily disliked those things, but because he got off on being ‘different’ – and he loved the controversy that that caused.
So it’s important to remember that.
Easier said than done though, admittedly. So I did more stuff…
2. I Googled and read about what others have done
This helped me out a lot.
I Googled "authors 1-star reviews on amazon" and found a bunch of blog posts by fellow authors who’d blogged about how they felt in the same situation and/or gave their advice.
These posts helped especially:
- The one where I get my first ever 1-star review on Amazon by Jessica Redland,
- Why authors shouldn’t obsess over one-star reviews on Build Book Buzz,
- How Smart Writers Deal With One-Star Reviews (Hint: Not By Crying Yourself to Sleep) on The Write Life.
A few things came out of this…
Firstly, it helped me to realise that I wasn’t alone. This happens to a lot of people! They, too, felt compelled to blog about it. It’s not just me overreacting or being overly sensitive.
One of them also made a great point: that everyone from “classics like Austen and Dickens to multi-billion contemporary best-sellers like… Stephen King and Dan Brown has 1-star reviews.”
This got me thinking…
3. I looked at bad reviews for the stuff that I love
Next I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole – not just looking at the 1-star reviews of popular books/movies/TV shows, but my favourite books/movies/TV shows in particular…
My favourite ever business book is ReWork. I like it so much that I wrote a post detailing my favourite bits of advice from it. I genuinely can’t comprehend how anyone could have a bad word to say about it – and yet 2% of its Amazon reviews are 1-star, and in those reviews it’s described as “lackluster,” “intellectually lightweight,” and “useless.” Oof.
My favourite ever movie is a French movie called Tell No One, based on a novel by Harlan Coben (he has a few TV shows on Netflix, which are worth checking out if you like thrillers). One of the 1-star reviews on IMDb calls it “atrociously constructed… incompetently directed and horribly paced.” Yikes! (Or maybe I should say: aïe-aïe-aïe!)
My favourite ever TV show is the anime Attack on Titan. It is incredible. The show as a whole has an IMDb rating of 8.9 out of 10 – and as I type this, 3 of its episodes are in the Top 5 of IMDb’s list of highest ever rated TV episodes, with one of them beating Breaking Bad‘s most popular episode. And despite all that, one review says: “The characters are pretty forgettable and annoying, the animation is average at best, and the story is simply dumb.” Are you kidding me?! 😱
But this all goes to show that even your favourite things – things that you simply cannot comprehend anyone disliking – can be disliked by people. Even they couldn’t please everyone.
This process really helped to rationalise my 1-star review. To compare it somewhat, I actually know a few people who have told me that Anti-Sell is their favourite ever business book (which is something that I find truly humbling – as well as a little bit mind-blowing), so they might also be surprised to see someone who dislikes it so vehemently.
4. I asked for advice in a freelancers’ Twitter Q&A chat
A couple of days later, I jumped in #FreelanceChat, a weekly Twitter chat for freelancers. I try to jump in most weeks (and have been a guest host in the past), and this time it was the monthly ‘open mic’ chat. Instead of a set Q&A, it was an open forum, where anyone could ask questions and the other tweeters could answer them.
I took the opportunity to ask my fellow freelancers how they handle harsh feedback:
Ohh here’s a question… I got some really nasty, horrible feedback about something earlier this week – I consider myself quite a sensitive person so it’s hit me HARD. How do you all handle/cope with harsh feedback? #FreelanceChat
— Steve Morgan (@steviephil) March 4, 2021
Again, similar to #2 above, I saw that I wasn’t alone – other people shared their experiences and told me that they relate to what I’d said.
It’s classic advice that if you talk about something – rather than keeping things bottled up – then you’ll feel better for it; just the process of talking and opening up is cathartic. Any advice that then comes from that is an added bonus. I won’t lie: it felt great to talk about it – I felt great afterwards. It would’ve been such a missed opportunity if I’d kept my thoughts to myself and not pitched the question.
5. I held myself back from ranting about it
As incredibly tempting as it was, I stopped myself from ranting about it on Twitter – which was a very real temptation in the first 24-48 hours after first discovering the review.
(Side-note: I appreciate that this blog post is a form of “ranting about it” – however I think doing so in a blog post where I’m offering advice to others is a lot more tame than if I threw out a quick, short, passive-aggressive mini-rant tweet.)
My previous blog post talks about the importance trying to be less bitter – something that I’ve worked hard on these past few years. So it would’ve been hilariously contradictory if I’d followed it up by moaning loudly about the 1-star review… 😅
If you’re in this position, and you really want to vent, consider doing this: write the tweet and save it as a draft, but don’t send it. That way you’ve done the cathartic thing of writing it (getting it off your chest and out of your system) without actually making it public.
6. I thought: “maybe this is more about them, not just about me…”
The review is obviously about the book, and me as its author. But a few of the replies I had on my #FreelanceChat tweet said: what if the review says something about them (the reviewer) than me?
What if they were having a bad day when they wrote it?
What if they were hoping for more help than it offered?
What if it simply wasn’t what they were expecting?
These are all important points to remember when receiving feedback. Admittedly I think it applies more to clients than it would do to a book review – e.g. if you get some bad feedback from a client, perhaps they’re having an off-day or have just received some bad news, and they worded their email to you more harshly than they could’ve or should’ve done…
In the case of my 1-star reviewer, I was able to go onto their profile and see other reviews that they’d left. Sure, they’ve given some other stuff they’ve bought some praising feedback, but there’s also a good number of reviews that are 3-stars and lower in there – and the accompanying review text is also pretty scathing.
7. I thought: what if it’s fake?
Given that the review is anonymous (unless Mr & Mrs Customer were extremely forward-thinking when they named their kid Kindle?), this was a genuine consideration at first. There’s a (hopefully) small number of people who don’t like me in my personal life (shock horror, etc.) – what if it was one of them conducting elaborate revenge?! 🤨
Well… I don’t think that’s the case here. The other reviews that the reviewer has left all look pretty genuine. It’d be a different story if it was a brand new profile and this was its debut review though…
8. What if (ironically) it’s actually a good thing?
I do freelance SEO consulting in my day job, and I often help clients with their listings on Google Maps (known as Google My Business). It’s very easy for someone – anyone – to leave any kind of review against a business, and it doesn’t matter if they’ve actually been a customer or not.
And removing the reviews can be a PITA… Funnily enough just this morning, Google notified me that they’d removed a 1-star review against a client’s listing, the text of which simply said: “Never been there.” We reported it on 9th March 2020 and they removed it today… Almost an entire calendar year later. A year.
In an effort to proactively counteract this, I tell my clients to just try and get as many 5-star reviews from happy customers/clients as they can. That way, if someone does leave a 1-star review (genuine or otherwise), it’s only going to knock the average rating down a little. That 5.0 out of 5 will become a 4.8 instead of a 2.5, for example.
But I also tell clients this: a negative review or two can actually be a good thing! People are sceptical if a business has nothing but 5 out of 5 ratings – they’re going to think that they’re fake, or that the business just asks their family and friends to leave reviews. Therefore, ironically, a score of 4.9 or 4.8 might help you win more customers than a score of 5.0.
My average has dropped to a 4.6 (although strangely, if I take all the ratings and put them in a spreadsheet, the actual average is 4.78, so it should be a 4.8 – but whatever). Hopefully it’ll go back up to a 4.7-4.9, which I think is the sweet spot. But I don’t think I’d actually want to be as high as 5.0 again, as silly as it sounds…
9. I wrote this blog post!
Tweeting about it on #FreelanceChat was pretty cathartic – and so was writing this blog post! In a way, I’ve turned a negative experience into a positive one: by creating a blog post that offers advice to others who (like me) might react sensitively to harsh criticism. If it helps other people then that’ll make me feel great – and I wouldn’t have written it if I hadn’t had that review. So there’s that at least.
So as you can see, a lot of things helped me to process and rationalise the hard-hitting feedback.
…But if all else fails…
10. I summoned A̸̠̔ľ̴̬’̶̦̾E̵̘̋l̵̹͋s̴̱͌t̶̙̑n̴̡̚i̷̥̊, the almighty demon queen
And together we will crush Ȃ̸̧̘͔̈̋̚L̶̬̪͇̽̾͑L̷͖͖̝̗͎̈́̔̈́̐̀ who oppose us…
Hahaha oh my, how did that get in there? I’ll have to remember to delete that before I publish this.
