Yes, you all have my full permission to hate on my work

[rachelmanija]

I'm sure you all figured this out by now, but if you write a negative review of something I wrote, I will not descend upon your blog to insult you, sic my friends on you, vow to never work with you in the future, attempt to destroy your career, or otherwise try to penalize you.

I may be privately annoyed, but I will probably get over it. I may or may not even be hurt. I have written quite a bit, some of it work-for-hire which was doomed to badness from the get-go as I had to work off an incoherent original concept someone else came up with, some of it later rewritten by others, some of simply not that good, and all of which, I realize, may not be to everyone's taste. I once came across a review (of a doomed bit of work-for-hire) which said something like, The characters are barely even one-dimensional, and had to admit to myself that the critique was perfectly true.

So review honestly, should you feel like reviewing.

Context here. I would read the comments in addition to Janni's thoughtful post, as the comments go a long way toward explaining why people feel genuinely intimidated.

I've already written a post about why negative reviews are not unprofessional, evil, or mean, so I won't revisit that here. My opinions as stated there still stand. The last italicized argument, Since authors are all in the same field, it is unprofessional for a published author to write a negative review of another author’s work, is probably the most relevant to the current discussion.

Comments

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Thiiiis.