So to whom does this apply? Only currently selling authors? Or all authors? I do still get a good number of hits – and not all from spybots. Geez, this business is dodgy enough without feeling like I’m pissing off readers. I’d really like to know.

Okay, I confess, it annoyed me a little that my book got trashed in a public venue, without any sort of explanation. And it’s making me crazy, wondering what it is she thinks I got wrong – if I DID get it wrong. I try very hard not to get things wrong, but I’m sure it happens. Who among us knows everything?

I thought about posting and asking her to email and tell me her thoughts, but I didn’t, because I never post on that blog, and didn’t want to appear as the whiney author, crying because somebody dissed her book. If she’d said, Man, I really hated this book, it would make me feel bad, but I’d move on and not let it bug me. In this case, I just really want to know what it is I screwed up – if, indeed, I did.

Like I said – it’s a fine line.

Well, hard fact. While reviews are not for authors, they are *about* the books that authors write. Writers are going to be hurt by reviews that pan the books they sweated blood over. And when writers are hurt, they tend to talk about it. Even if the rest of the world thinks they should just bear the pain and shut up.

Actually, I do think authors should just bear the pain and shut up about it. But I get why they don’t. No, they shouldn’t blame the reviewer for having her opinion and sharing it. But they do. And they will. Until they’ve been around long enough to see the true futility of such behavior.

Oh, and re my dead MySpace. I’d like to take it down, but I have no idea how.

I don’t care that authors don’t like reviews, but we have said time and again that reviews aren’t for authors but for readers and thus the seeming non stop conversation about them at Romancing the Blog is becoming tiresome to me,

I don’t expect authors to be unaffected by reviews, because for whatever reason, many if not most authors can’t refrain from checking them out, and, after all, reviews are publicly circulated. I think where I get frustrated is in the way some author comments shift responsibility from the author herself (and her reaction) to the reviewer — like it’s the fault of reviewers that authors get their feelings hurt, when, as you say, reviews aren’t directed at authors, so whatever their reaction is to them is more about the sense of worth an *author* has around her work and herself. *Of course* feelings will be bruised; that’s only human. But when the reviewer seems to be held accountable for those feelings IMO a line has been crossed and the author has inserted herself into the reader – reader dialogue and actually interrupted the attention her book has the chance to garner through that discussion and dialogue among readers.

I don’t care that authors don’t like reviews, but we have said time and again that reviews aren’t for authors but for readers and thus the seeming non stop conversation about them at Romancing the Blog is becoming tiresome to me, maybe not to anyone else, but to me. I don’t even read the blog posts at RTB if the word “review� is used in the first paragraph or so.

You thinnk you’re tired now? Wait ten years. Particularly when that’s all that’s basically talking about on most sites. Which is probably not a fair comment but sometimes that’s what it seems like.