Lou: This is episode 54 of Write While True. Write While True is an infinite loop, and that’s because we think of writing as an infinite game. A game we’re playing for fun and to get better at, like a game of catch.
So in each episode, we’ll tell you something we learned about writing, and then we’ll throw you the ball with a writing challenge or a prompt.
I’m Lou Franco.
Brian: And I’m Brian Hall. And today we’re talking about negative feedback.
Lou: Oh boy.
Brian: Yeah, yeah. No, this one’s gonna hurt. When you write something and you share it, and then somebody tells you that it’s absolute trash in some manner or another, and there’s really no avoiding it.
And so I think the first question to ask is, well, should you even care? Should you even listen?
And I’ve got a really strong opinion on this, with a lot of data to back it up for whatever it’s worth. And the answer is no. No. You should not care.
And my reasoning there is I went through for quite a while and I collected negative feedback from the greatest artists, musicians, writers, even scientists in the history of humankind.
And without exception, every one of them faced up against some sort of absurd negative feedback, you name it.
Jimi Hendrix, first album, Rolling Stone trashed it.
Mozart was told that his compositions had too many notes by some king or somebody or else or whatever.
The point being, it’s not a reflection of the quality of your work. Somebody’s always gonna have something negative to say about anything that anyone produces. So just in terms of quality of data, it’s not really valuable data.
If you know it’s coming and nothing can really prevent it, that all makes sense rationally. And at the same time, good luck putting that into practice. Good luck not being stung when someone has a critique of something you’ve written.
We’re gonna get a little vulnerable and show some of our own negative reviews today. And I promise you, despite that firm grounding in logical reasons not to care, it still hurts, at least for me.
Lou: Yeah.
Brian: There’s, there’s upsides too, though, I guess, Lou, you’ve experienced the positive side. What’s the expression, all, all bad publicity is still publicity, something like that, right?
Lou: Yeah.
Brian: Talk about that.
Lou: A couple of weeks before my launch, I decided to do a Show HN post on Hacker News, so Show Hacker News post.
And so what I did was I made like the first half of the book available for free. And I set the pre launch price to a dollar or something. And then I posted to show HN and in show HN, you can, you can be self promotional, but you have to, it has to be something free or something, you know, something that people can look at, not sell a book.
So first half free, that’s, you know, a good amount. And then the low price offering.
And honestly, I didn’t expect much to happen because like I post to HN, you know, once in a while and barely get anything. And I did do that and nothing happened.
It didn’t get any upvotes and didn’t get any discussion or whatever.
And then the next day, I kind of go into my Amazon dashboard, KDP dashboard. And I see like, I don’t know, some ridiculous, ridiculous for me, number of sales, even though I hadn’t really done any promotion.
And I was like, what is going on?
And then I went into like a discord that I’m a part of, and people were like, hey, Lou, is this you? And my show HN was now at the very top, even though I thought it had its chance and whatever. There’s this thing called the second chance pool where things get a second chance. And it had gotten a ton of upvotes and comments.
So I go to read the comments.
Brian: Okay. I feel secondhand anxiety.
Lou: Yeah. In the comments. It was not good.
Again, there were a lot of upvotes and I had seen there were a lot of sales. I was kind of in a, in a upbeat mood, but, uh, I was accused of using AI. I was accused of, you know, not knowing what I was talking about, yada, yada.
And, um, honestly, I’m going to say this. I do really believe this.
If I had gotten any kind of traction on HN without a ton of negative comments, I would almost feel like I hadn’t really gotten the, the true HN experience.
Brian: For sure.
Lou: But then I also noticed that there were people chiming in with the opposite reaction. And I went through and tried to engage in a very positive way, every single comment, positive or negative. And I tried to have a little bit of a conversation about what they were seeing and what, and what they had said.
And I also kept on saying, like, the whole reason I made it free is because I don’t want your money unless you know you’ll like the book. And it’s like, you know, the second half is a lot like, you know, it’s the, it’s the ending of the first half.
If you don’t like the first half, don’t buy it. That’s exactly what I wanted to happen.
And, you know, a lot of people, you know, maybe there were 10 bad comments. There were hundreds of sales. Like, so it’s like on the order of like, you know, 10 to one positive experience.
They just didn’t write comments, but they read the first, whatever couple few chapters and decided to buy the book. So I really couldn’t be mad about it. Like, but it, it’s still stung.
I mean, being accused of using AI after I’ve been writing for 20 years, you know, way before AI and these podcasts are, I don’t know, I think clearly not AI. And, you know, um, you might not like my writing, but I wrote it.
Brian: This is a really good point that you talk about the asymmetry between apparently hundreds of people saw it, took a look, liked it, went and bought it, presumably enjoyed it quietly.
Lou: Yeah.
Brian: And then the handful of people who have negative things to say are just so much noisier and you almost can’t look away. You can’t not hear it and it can’t not affect you, unfortunately, but it is inevitable unless you just share nothing ever.
You’re going to get this.
Lou: Yeah.
Brian: All right. Congratulations on, it sounds like you dealt with it pretty healthily. You seem like you came out of it.
Lou: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to be, honestly, it’s hard to be mad about it. It’s like whatever, what they’re saying, many of the things they said they didn’t like, apart from the AI comments are, are actually facts about the book that they don’t like.
And it’s a fact that they don’t like it.
And if you are a person who reads that comment and agrees that you don’t like that kind of thing, that comment was useful to you because you probably won’t like the book. And honestly, I don’t want you to read it then.
I don’t want you. I don’t want your money. I don’t want you to read. And I definitely don’t want you to put your negative review on Amazon. So it’s actually kind of helpful.
It gets me more towards my audience, which is people who would like the way I write and what I have to say.
Brian: Let’s continue the pile on. Let’s just heap on more pain here. We’ve both come prepared with a unfavorable review from our books on Amazon.
And I just want to read the title to one that you got, which this was a three star review.
So they must’ve found something.
Lou: Yeah. That’s the lowest one I have right now.
Brian: So congrats. I got you beat that.
Lou: But it’s a pretty bad review. I’m grateful for the three stars. I mean, you didn’t, didn’t like it.
Brian: Well, you got the three stars because you had quote, good ideas.
Lou: Right.
Brian: But verbiragic.
Lou: Yeah. Which is funny. When I read that, I thought it was verbo-rage-ic. Like as if they were really mad and upset. And then I, I found out that that’s a Portuguese word.
And, and since this review is from Brazil, uh, uh, it made sense, but, uh, they go on
and to say in the, in the review, yes, it has good ideas, but it’s, it’s overly long.
It’s wordy. It’s verbose. And you know, fair, like it’s probably fair.
I’m glad that they found good ideas and that they liked, they liked some of the content. I guess that’s how it got to three stars.
But again, if you’re going to be the kind of person who really, really doesn’t want to
hear stories or, um, doesn’t want to hear, I do have a fair amount of repetition to, to
get a point home in different ways from different angles.
So if you’re going to be the kind of person who like, you really want the summary or like the CliffsNotes, you probably won’t like my book. I’m intending for it to be for someone who wants to relax and hear stories from inside of Atlassian or Trello or any other places I might’ve worked and like get some of the background for what, why I feel the way I do.
And if you just want me to give you the five bullet points of tech debt, I don’t know, sign up for my email, you’ll get it from there.
Brian: You have a great attitude. Um, and so now it’s my turn in the hot seat. I have a one star review.
Lou: Yeah.
Brian: Only one one star review, but, but would you do the honors of reading this one star review of my book, which is called “Your Website Sucks: Here’s how to fix it”
Lou: Right.So the, the person’s name is LetMeTellYou, which is kind of funny. The person who made mine is use their real name. Full name.
So, uh, but LetMeTellYou is their name and they, they decided to make a play on your
book title. Their title of the review is “this book sucks”.
So, and, uh, and then they go on to say, it’s pretty clear that this is a sparsely covered
ebook made into an actual book. Oh, wow.
That’s that’s, uh, do you want me to read the rest, Brian?
Brian: Yeah. Lay it on.
Lou: Okay.
It reads like a kid’s book with how little words there are. I’ll save you money. Basically make sure everything on your site works. SEO is good. Copy is good. Marketing is good. And website looks updated to your target market.
Not at all worth $23 five, maybe.
I mean, that’s, that’s rough. That’s rough. I, and also I don’t think fair. I’ve read your book and it, it is. I mean, it’s your, your audience is supposed to be the people who need the basics of making a website. So it goes through it methodically. I mean, I don’t know.
Fewer words. Oh boy. Like that’s the opposite of mine. Like, don’t you, don’t you want the information with fewer words?
Brian: I guess because I, it’s hard work to put something in plain language, to take a technical topic and summarize it for a non-technical audience, express it simply. I worked hard and I think I did pretty well with that, but this reviewer, I guess, would have liked more words, presumably.
So it’s, but this is the spiral, right? What, like, what am I even doing here? Reading this review and trying to argue in my head.
What happens when you write something and you share it is kind of the lesson here. What can you do?
Lou: Yeah. I agree. It’s like, again, it, it also might be helpful. I mean, if you generally have, it does matter if you only get one star reviews. It probably does matter. Like if you have a hundred one star reviews, like, I mean, wow, congratulations, honestly. But, um, it probably will matter.
But if you overall like, uh, have a high enough rating and there are people who like your book and if your book, you know, we’re kind of presuming the book is your book in the, in this, in the, in what we’re saying. Like the book is good and worth reading to someone, but the bad review is going to weed out more bad reviews.
Cause if people, if someone is like the kind of person, like where they read that and resonates with them, they won’t buy it. And that’s probably what you want. Cause the money isn’t worth another, honestly, the money is not worth another bad review. Uh, because then it’s just gonna, it’s gonna snowball later.
And if you, if it starts getting down, you know, if you, if you, if you started getting
below three stars, like I think it would tank you. Uh, so, uh, it’s not, uh, it’s not worth it for you to sell the book on false pretenses to people who would not like it.
I think you really don’t want that.
Brian: I’ll say it again. You, you really do have a great attitude about this. You’re right. The negative review that signposts facts about the book that some people will not appreciate and tells them not to buy it. You’re right. It’s doing you a service.
So a negative review is free publicity.
A negative review is helping weed out people who shouldn’t be reading in the first place. A negative review is inevitable anyway.
And the last thing I’ll say about it too. Yeah. Is the thing that helps doesn’t completely take away the sting, but softens the blow is if you’ve done some sort of beta reading, or if you’ve gotten positive feedback on the book and you know that there are people who’ve read it and found it to be really useful. It doesn’t sting quite so much when you see these. You can think of it more as, well, it wasn’t for them. And no book can be for everyone.
Lou: Right.
Brian: So whatever. And maybe on that note, the takeaway from this very painful episode of Write While True, I’m going to propose that the thing you ought to do if you’re a normal human with feelings and you’re sensitive to criticism like this is to inoculate yourself just a little bit.
Pick a book that you think is just great. All time favorite books. It doesn’t have to be a technical book.
It could be literature, whatever it is.
Go look at this book on Amazon.com and read some of the one star reviews and just really spend some time with the reality that it doesn’t matter how good the book is. Someone out there is going to trash it.
Lou: Yeah. No, that’s a really, really great advice, Brian. I knew that you were going to say that because we had talked about this before. So I actually did do that for a book that I really love. And I was like, I was, I could not, well, I’m going to say this.
I could not feel more opposite to those reviews, but also having read them. They also, some of those people listed books they liked instead of this book. And those are books I didn’t like.
So, and so that tells you, like, I would probably, I wouldn’t have maybe given a one star, but I would have given a bad review to some of the books that they loved and recommended.
And they’re giving a bad review to a book I loved and recommended.
And, and we probably, I would just bet that me and these people are very similar otherwise. Like we’re all software developers, maybe senior software developers.
These are books in that, you know, like in that for that audience.
But like, even so we just had a different way of thinking about the world and it didn’t, the book just didn’t resonate with us. Um, one, one way, one, the other.
And so it, it, it really goes to, and these are books that are like, you know, I’m going to call them seminal work type books, like books that like have big reputation. People really like, um, the authors are really well known, you know, speak at conferences all the times, you know, on podcasts all the time.
And generally, you know, uh, you know, uh, I’m sure their books are very successful. Both books are very successful.
And, uh, you know, it just goes to show you that there, you know, it’s no, nothing’s for everybody.
Brian: Yeah, exactly. Good place to leave it.
Lou: So that was episode 54 of Write While True a podcast where we love infinite loops, as long as they’re fun.