You can choose to get bitter and downright nasty, as Alice Hoffman recently did. She got so incensed about a mildly critical review that she fired off no fewer than 27 nasty tweets, including one that revealed the reviewer's address and phone number so that Hoffman's fans could protest directly. Um yeah. If you believe that no publicity is bad publicity, that was quite the stunt. Publicity it got her. Respect, not so much.
Or you could, like Brad Meltzer, make lemonade. His soon-to-be-released novel, The Book of Lies, got panned by a number of influential critics. And this was his hilarious response.
I don't know about you, but I know which book I am more tempted to read.
2 hours ago
10 comments:
I've been MIA so I just heard about the other author's debacle about ten minutes ago. That's just embarrassing.
This video, however, is AWESOME! I feel so bad for him, but clearly he knows how to work it.
Well, Meltzer is not a debut author, which helps. But neither is Hoffman. She has since apologized and shut down her Twitter page, but still. Moral of the story: never shoot off your mouth when you're angry. And personal insults are never called for.
That video is hilarious! Thanks for posting it.
Glad you enjoyed it, Andrew.
Janet, wow, what an excellent way to make your point. There are "ways" and there are "ways" to respond to criticism.
The video alone was worth the price of admission (;-) but I'm with you. If forced to choose between the two books, I know I'd read Meltzer's.
Becky
Thanks Becky. The point kind of made itself. I heard of both these cases within a couple of days of each other, and it wasn't hard to connect the dots. When God hands you a blog post... ;o)
It's always sad to see the bitter "human" side to authors we love...sadly even profuse apologies cannot make up for bad first impressions!
No kidding. She did apologize too, but I don't think profusely.
Oh no way, that is totally hilarious. I am laughing until tears are running down my face here Janet! I've never read Meltzer's work, nor reviewed it, but it's too funny.
I must confess, I haven't either. One of these days.
I do remember when he was taking a readers' poll on MySpace to help him choose the title for this book, so I was aware of it ahead of time. I voted for the winning title.
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