As a bit of fun, I thought I’d put together a list of responses that negative reviews sometimes generate (I have seen, or heard about, variations on all of these). Eyes down for the full house…
| It’s just your opinion. | You are jealous of the author. | What are your qualifications? | You are overthinking. | You don’t understand the genre. |
| You don’t appreciate how much time and effort the author put in. | You make unreasonable demands of the book. | How many novels have you written? | I don’t care about good writing; I just want to be entertained. | You want to appear smarter than you are. |
| You don’t know good books. | You have a vendetta. | Who reviews the reviewers? | You are just trying to prove that you are cleverer than the author. | You are being deliberately contrarian to satisfy your ego. |
| You should be grateful to the author for having written the book. | You really need to have read the other books in the series. | Look at all these 5* reviews of the book! | If you had read the book properly, you would see that… | You shouldn’t be critical. |
7th April 2011 at 10:25 am
Great – very funny.
7th April 2011 at 2:54 pm
Brilliant.
7th April 2011 at 3:53 pm
I’ve often thought of putting something like this together – well done!
7th April 2011 at 6:12 pm
Very funny! I have read another one: you didn’t read the right version!
7th April 2011 at 8:36 pm
This is pretty wonderful. I think my favorite is “You should be grateful to the author for having written the book.”
7th April 2011 at 8:37 pm
Funny. I’m sure any book blogger could come up with a few more 🙂
8th April 2011 at 10:58 am
Thanks, all — I’m glad you liked it.
MumuGB: Heh, I think I know which review you mean there…
Alley: That one is probably also my favourite.
17th April 2011 at 4:26 pm
This is amazing. 🙂
I’ve had “Look at all these 5* reviews of the book!” and “You don’t understand the genre.” — sadly I’m nowhere close to a Bingo!
11th December 2011 at 6:34 pm
I’ve had most of these. The ones you don’t mention are, “you’re biased in favour of subgenre X”, “you’re not one of the most important reviewers anyway”, and my all-time favourite, “you’re an idiot”.