*headdesk*.

[megwrites]

Unprofessional author is unprofessional. Or: there is a damn good reason that you don't respond to reviews and this is fucking well IT.

This is now the second professionally published author who has come to my journal and displayed their fail (the first being Lois McMaster Bujold who MammothFailed epically). Do I have a beacon out that says, "Welcome to the Fail Lounge. Feel free to take your pants off!"?

Let me just enumerate, for any one listening, the biggest reason that it is not a good idea to respond to reviews: you're not going to change their minds. Ms. Stein certainly did nothing to make me feel differently about her book.

Have you ever heard of an author going to a reviewer, arguing, and honestly changing someone's opinion? Has it ever helped that author look like a better person, improved their sales?

If it has, please throw me a link. Because all I can think of are the many authors (*coughcough* Alice Hoffman *coughcough*) who have done it to their detriment.

Comments

[cericonversion.livejournal.com]

In the roleplaying game world, Rich Dansky's calm, kind, tremendously witty responses to people slagging off the concept of Charnel Houses of Europe, the Wraith supplement about the legacy of the Holocaust, impressed me a lot and made a White Wolf fan out of me.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with roleplaying games, White Wolf, or Rich Dansky to know how to respond to this or to know if it's analogous.

I know nearly nothing on the subject. Sorry.

[cericonversion.livejournal.com]

It's related. Early on, White Wolf had a history of aiming for ambitious artistic statements and, um, not always having the intellectual capital to back them up. Wraith, a game about playing ghosts, actually had a stat called Angst, and another called Pathos. A few years later, an influx of new creators led to the building of much-needed foundations.

Rich Dansky actually is a scholar and a gentleman. :) He's also Jewish, and one of his sisters works at the Holocaust Museum. From the moment he took over as line developer on Wraith, he'd wanted to do a book about the modern-day legacy of the Holocaust for the realm of ghosts, and a few years in, did. The announcement drew a lot of flak from people bent on tarring him and the project with everything imaginable and some not. Someone reported him to the Anti-Defamation League, who gave him a puzzled call, interviewed him, and ended up supporting the project.

At first I found a bunch of the criticisms quite plausible. It wasn't long before that White Wolf had done some just atrocious handling of other real-world issues. But the quality of Rich's response persuaded me to give it a real chance, and out of it came a lasting friendship as well as a well-earned sale. He made a bunch of other converts during that flamefest, too.

But it really is the exception to a sound principle.