If you enjoy watching celebrities read mean tweets on Jimmy Kimmel Live, you're going to love this video of authors reading mean book reviews. Compiled by The Year We Turned Forty authors Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, the video features 12 women writers sharing some of their worst Amazon and Goodreads reviews. At the very least, you'll be glad no one has ever said anything like this about your writing.
For some people, leaving a negative review on a book is a way of sticking it to the author. It says, Ha! Take that, Author Whose Book I Hated. That'll teach you to waste my time. Ha!
I can understand that this feels good to the reviewer, but it really doesn't make any sense.
See, bad writers don't waste our time with their books, unless they force us to read them, à la A Clockwork Orange — and then they've done something far, far worse. We almost always have the option of putting down the book, and doing something more pleasant and productive with our time instead.
Even if you DNF your way out of one of the worst books you've ever read, you can still leave a constructive review explaining why you didn't enjoy the book. You can even quietly remove it from your Goodreads shelf and decide not to review it at all. For 12 examples of what not to do when you've read a terrible book, check out Fenton, Steinke, and the rest of these authors reading their mean book reviews below.
Image: Liz Fenton/YouTube
