Should You Respond to a Negative Review

Today is a Hit Splits episode for Author Audience.

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message, create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Welcome to this edition of Hit Splits. I wanted to talk about a subject that a lot of authors face. Should you respond to a negative review? This can get kind of tricky sometimes because so many times when I get a negative review, my initial response is to want to defend myself. You can actually listen to yesterday's episode, Hit Splits one, where I talk about my recent response to a one star review I got. My first response was panic. And then later I was planning my attack, planning how I would defend myself, and I could totally reply to that reviewer with a logical reply of why my book was not the right fit for them. But did I respond? No. I don't recommend responding to negative reviews 90% of the time. The reason I don't normally recommend responding to a review is, number one, it can make you look like you're insecure or defensive, or it can just simply put you in a bad light as an author. And you don't need that. You don't need to put yourself in that position. The other reason is many times people who post a negative review have strong emotions behind that review. And to try to argue or have a discussion, discussion with somebody that is very emotional doesn't usually get you anywhere. The emotions tend to override anything else. And so it just becomes a losing battle. In fact, I remember one of my very first one star reviews. It was on my book, the Gratitude Journal. And it was a personal attack. It was a personal attack against me and my integrity. It was not even about the book. I was devastated and I didn't know how to respond to that. In that particular case, I did feel that it was best for me to reply and it was interesting because a bunch of my followers and supporters ended up chiming in as well. And that person just kept coming back and back and back and it eventually made them look bad and they ended up deleting their review.

However, I don't recommend for the most part replying because it's really a losing battle. You're not going to change their mind. It's their opinion. They have the right to their opinion. And as long as it's about your book and their opinion, I would just leave it alone.

However, there are a few things you can do in response to a negative review. You can choose to mark that review as not helpful. So there's two little buttons under review that says, is this review helpful? Yes or no. You could even ask people to look at the review and if they find that review is not helpful, to post that as well. Now, you don't want to game the system, you don't want to do this unethically, but that is something that you can do and it will push the review down. And in the list of reviews, the other thing you can do is you can try to proactively get more positive reviews. That will also push it down the list. On the right hand column, on the left hand column, it will show the reviews that are most helpful. On the right hand column, Amazon will show the reviews that are newest. And so that one star review that I got this week is right up at the top. Well, I was proactive and decided to ask a few people that I knew also bought my book during the promotion to post their review if they found the book helpful. And I already had one person post a review and so that one star review isn't the top review staring at me. If you ask a hundred authors this question, should you respond to review? I think you'll get 100 different answers because everyone looks at this situation differently. And to be honest, it really depends on the type of negative review that was left. I've seen some authors that will simply reply and say thank you for your feedback. And then if it is a legitimate concern, sometimes it is good to reply to that person and let them know you've taken action on that concern. For instance, for Heather Hart and I's book Teen Devotionals for Girls, there was a reviewer that left a remark that there was an edit that needed to take place. There was an error in our table of contents, and they said if there's an error in the table of contents, there's probably so many errors throughout the book. Well, we did have the book professionally edited and that error was still missed. So we can never be 100% perfect and we have to accept that we're all human, even our editors. And so we had that corrected right away. And I simply replied to the review and let them know, thank you for your feedback, I appreciate it. And we have updated the book with the corrections. I also let them know that we did have a professional editor edit the book, but there's always things that get missed. So something like that, it was professional and it basically just let them know that we did address their concerns. So sometimes that can be appropriate as well. However, I wouldn't finish think of a negative review as just negative. Sometimes it can actually be helpful because if your book has all five star reviews, people may start to think that your reviews are only from your supporters, maybe your friends and your family. Or maybe that you even bought reviews. Which by the way, never, never ever, ever buy a review because that's against Amazon's terms of service. But I encourage you not to be afraid of getting negative reviews. Expect that they will come and then process that and move on. You know, if you've written a good book, good reviews will continue to come in faster than the bad reviews and your overall rating will still remain high. So my lesson for today is 90% of the time, do not respond to negative reviews. There may be an occasion here or there where you do need to reply and address the person's concern, but for the most part, let your fans and followers reply to those negative reviewers and be the ones that are defending and supporting you. It works much better that way and you don't get into an argument that you will not win. I encourage you. Keep writing those books. And if you'd like more content on reviews, you can check out my book, how to Get Honest Reviews. It's available in print and ebook format. I'll see you guys next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.