This is one of the biggest fears of anyone who writes and one of the most powerful reasons many people write and never publish: The negative feedback, the monster under the bed.
I received one, the first one also, and the only one for a while, on my first published book at Amazon. It broke my heart, but you know what? I survived it.
In a sense the reviewer was absolutely right in all he said about my book “Great Sex is Reason Enough”. He argues that it is a book about paragraph-length thoughts and they are disconnected. That describes the book perfectly. The book is a collection of ideas, all turning around sex, the importance of it in a relationship, and being brave to really assess if a relationship is bound to continue succeeding with or without good sex.
The connection of what I have written is mostly “between the lines” and not spelled out. I think people who have been in a relationship where an unsatisfactory sexual life is present will understand it better. My reviewer may have been one very happy man, or so unhappy he is unable to connect the dots, I couldn’t say for sure.
He also wrote that my reasoning is flawed. I think and write that having happy thoughts through the day would help a person having a happier sexual life. He advocates something to the effect of “try saying to a mother who has lost her child to cancer to think happy thoughts”.
My question when I read this was: “why would a mother who has lost a child be reading a book called Great Sex is Reason Enough?” I would think she would be reading about the grieving process, not about sex. On the other hand, if after losing a child – not immediately of course, but months or years later – a person doesn’t start to think about sex, or about her or his partner, or even about happy thoughts, the relationship will probably die with the child, a reality as cruel as the death of the baby itself, but real none the less.
In any way I realised that yes, I received a one-star review, and my conclusion was “the book was not for him”. I have also understood that I would have written the book anyway, and published it exactly as it is, and loved it with the proud heart of an Author, no matter what.
It is not for everyone, it is not a well behaved book, it has strange notions and feeble connections, but I bet there are people out there who will love it, who will learn from it and who will share my enthusiasm. Even if they never put a review there, I believe in my Art.
Read the book and put your review, let me know what you think!
2o Orble Likes
Aphrodite-Reads 