My Very First 1-Star Review!

From my August Newsletter Update:

 It had to happen sooner or later, right? Someone hated one of my books enough to share it with the world.

I'm kind of surprised it didn't happen sooner. I've been very fortunate in my short writing career to have received mostly positive reviews of my work and constructive criticism from my peers. But I'd been warned by other authors this was coming. A few of them have encouraged me to look on it as a rite of passage--something every "successful" author has to go through.

I mentioned in my last newsletter how the success of Half Human has stimulated interest in my earlier writing. Well, late last month, I noticed a fresh review had appeared on my Amazon product page for the first book I ever published, The Draculata Nest. (See the My Books tab to check it out.) "Cool," I thought--until I read the following ...

JustAnotherOpinion: 1.0 out of 5 stars A Kindle Unlimited Review

Ok, I'm not a touchy feely kind of guy, I know myself and am happy. 24 years in the service has left me with a positive can do attitude.

The MC in this book is a whinny, sniveling loser. If others like reading about this kind of person then good for them. I DO NOT!

Hated the MC! Book NOT Recommended!

Wow. That's kind of a tough pill to swallow. My first reaction to this was, "Hey, of course he's a whiny loser. That's what people love about him! If you don't like reading about touchy feely people, don't!"

My second reaction was, "Okay, what can I learn from this?" (Pretty mature of me, huh? Well, it's the advice I keep getting from my mentors.)

After I thought about it a bit, I started to feel for the reader.  JustAnotherOpinion shouldn't have read the book. He should have known he would be disappointed from the start. So, why did he?

Did he read it on the recommendation of a friend? Not likely--unless he was being punked. The most probable scenario is he was mis-lead by an advertisement and ... uh, oh.

Yikes! This was my fault. I do all my own ads. If I targeted someone who was obviously not in my target audience with a clever ad, I brought this on myself. I started digging and--sure enough--I found ads targeting the Military Fantasy genre!

What was I thinking? (Well, okay, there is a war going on between werewolves and vampires throughout the series, but ...) I promptly--or, as promptly as Amazon KDP Support will allow--removed the entire series from the Military Fantasy category.

See? You can learn from your mistakes. Except--holy cow--it looks like I did the same thing with the Spaceship Huey Adventures series! Guess I better go fix that, too.
 

 

 

 

 

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