Thank You For Hating Her Book

We’ve heard clichés al our life. That does not mean, however, that we have to believe in everything they say, or do we? No news is good news; there is no thing as bad publicity, etc. The op-ed piece I read in the New York Times, Thank You For Hating My Book by Katha Pollitt, was a comical recap of how a new author got a bad book review-and how this helped her sell more books. She presents the idea that any type of publicity will let the people know that there is a new book out and this solely is a good help for her. What I liked the most about this piece, though, was it’s honesty and how it showed that even authors feel scared that people don’t accept their work. She wrote about how she would buy a book an hour, “I have free shipping and a lot of relatives,” on Amazon to her rating up, and while she did this her daughter kept telling her that what she was doing was cheating and did not count. Do all authors do something similar? Do they write good reviews for their books under a pen name? Do they criticize the competition with bad ones? I did not know. So I looked it up. Good old Google always comes in handy. I found several articles and posts that discussed how they had found that reviews and statistics on Amazon were many times caused or written by the author of the book. I did not find any “credible report” if we scale it with the UN terms, but for me that was enough. My suspicion (which had arisen only after reading this article) had been confirmed. My next step was obvious, I had to go to Amazon and see if I could find anything that looked like a fake review. That was harder than it sounded, with suspicion creeping through me every good review I read I viewed as a threat to the book’s actual “good.” My mind then raced on ahead of me: authors are scared when they publish. Knowing this made my day. I had always felt queasy about letting other people read the things I wrote (the blog is not easy for me, even if no one reads it) and I thought that it was a bubble of insecurity that I had within me. Now that I know that authors who “if you take out Dan Brown, I was practically a best seller,” also have a hard time seeing how others react to what they have written I feel much better. So I guess all I can say is…Thank you for hating her book.