Career Suicide and Reviews

My friend shared this link with me, and I think I should share it with all of you.

It's sad to see anyone's career destroyed, and more so when it's destroyed by the person him/herself.
This author received a two-star review, and kicked up a big fuss about it.
Sure, a bad review leaves a bad taste in your mouth, but you have to be professional about it. Learn from your mistakes (be it grammatical, spelling or even a bad storyline) and try your best to fix it in your next piece.

Click here for the review.

To be honest, I thought the storyline was alright, but the comments are really interesting.
I hope the author doesn't do anything stupid though.

I saw this and laughed for about the first twenty or so replies, but after that, I sort of got just as annoyed with everyone else as I was with the author.

Yes, the author made a big mistake in her reaction to the review and replies afterward. She really, really did probably just affect her career negatively, if not destroyed it, for the rest of her life. But for real, people, lay off a bit. What needed to be said was said. No need to dig the hole any deeper for her than it already was.

rubberduck wrote:I hope the author doesn't do anything stupid though.

Slightly late...

And yeah, I saw that yesterday and I was crossing my fingers for a third "F off!" before the end of the comments section so I could devolve into a giggly blob of happy again. Oh well.

The storyline is laughable. It's nothing new, and the author certainly didn't seem inject any new life into the tired story. Her grammar (and consequently, her prose) is deplorable, and that reviewer was sugarcoating things, I believe.

What's amusing about that thread is how quick everyone was to condemn her when dozens of other writers are doing the same thing every day. Every writing site has them, and there's no reason to believe the publishing industry would be free of them. But everyone loves to jump on a bandwagon, no?

This, to me, is a good reminder that just because someone can write a book does not mean they are a) intelligent or b) of sound judgement.

It sounds like that author needed to be involved in something like YWS. We're lucky that we all know how it feels to get good reviews, and bad reviews so we don't pull any sort of crazy reaction if we ever happen to get published and receive a bad review.