I witnessed a pouty meltdown by an author the other day on Facebook. Someone bashed her book. And instead of walking away, being quiet, or ignoring the remark, she took the challenge and replied to the person, then she went to her peeps on FB and replayed the situation, ripe with vitriol and frustration.
“People don’t care about my sweat and blood,” she said.
“Oh, geez,” was about all I could think as I watched her slit her own throat in front of hundreds of friends.
Readers do not care about the sweat and blood….and they shouldn’t.
Think about the purchases in your life. Do you stop and wonder how many hours, days, week, or months it took to design and make it? I doubt it. You just want the end result, and even then, want it to matter in your world. How it came to be doesn’t matter. How it makes your life better does.
Same goes for books, and the stories they contain. The reader wants a good experience and hopes to find a new favorite author. That’s all they want. Sometimes they don’t like the story and other times they do. You rolled the dice by putting your story out there for such judgement.
So, your job isn’t to make people care about how hard you work. Quite the contrary. They want to feel you are gifted. The story should read easy and admirably smooth, like it was super easy to be written, or that the author has tons of natural talent. That sensation puts the author on a pedestal, so to speak. The author is doing something seamlessly that the reader cannot.
Your job is to write a good book. If you don’t win some readers, so be it. There are so many others to win over out there in the reader sea. They don’t have to understand the sweat and blood. Frankly, hours invested in something isn’t the measure of how good it is. How it improves someone’s quality of life is.
So true! I learned to “lose with grace” hard and thankfully not with my writing. It was through martial arts. The principle applies. What I write isn’t for everyone and while I’m sorry someone didn’t like my writing, my emotions and energy are better spent elsewhere.
This might sound harsh, but I have a very small group of trusted writers and beta readers that I trust, so when they say “I don’t like this” I care enough to explore why-does it disrupt the flow? Is the character action too far out of character? Is it not clear? But with general readers, it’s a chance I take and I can’t waste time arguing about it or whining about it.