In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The World card to guide their discussion. They discuss when they find reader reviews helpful and when they avoid them.
Question of the week: Can you pay attention to reviews? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends and welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is Saturday, September 3rd, 2022 as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my co-host…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: How was your writing week?
JP: Ah, it was okay. I had to do a lot of travel for work and that took up a lot of my morning times. So didn’t get a lot of writing done, but I did listen to some fantastic books. So that’s, I think, Light from Under the Stars, right? No.
Crys: Light from Uncommon Stars, which is like the most bonkers book ever. And I love it.
JP: It’s wild and I loved it. And that book, and then The Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I listened to both of those while I was traveling, and both of them are like these pseudo cozy, I don’t know what you’d call them, but they were the same vibe that I wanted my Publish in Six project to be. And they made me realize a couple things that I want to change in my manuscript, which it’s both good and bad, but I think that it will do good for my manuscript. So I am going to do that this week when I travel because I am going on a 20 hour drive this weekend.
Crys: I want to share my description of Light from Uncommon Stars because I this much.
JP: It’s wild.
Crys: There are three main characters. The first one is a trans mixed teenage sex worker who is a prodigy violinist. Then the other two main characters are two awkward lesbians falling in love, old lesbians, let’s put it that way. One of them is an alien who runs a donut shop which is a cover for their secret hideout. The other is an several hundred years old violinist who made a deal with the devil and has to bring souls to him to earn her freedom. It’s bonkers. It is sci-fi, it is fantasy, it is coming of age, it is love story. It’s wild and it works.
JP: It is wild, and a hundred percent. And also like within every five minutes of reading it or listening, because I did audiobook, they described food and it just made me so hungry the whole time. But the food descriptions are topnotch.
Crys: I think I definitely teared up at some of the emotional descriptions, possibly of food because I do love food that much. Yeah.
JP: The author did a really good job, whether or not they are a violinist, of really depicting the emotion that comes through when listening to music in a really vivid way. Because I 100% agree, like you almost as a reader, you had that same feeling as if you were listening to the music, but it was all written down. Yeah, it’s a really bonkers but delectable book.
Crys: Yes. Now that I’ve sidetracked us, my week I got a little bit of writing done it. It was hard this week for some reason, don’t know why, but I did, I stuck to the writing. I didn’t get my 2000 words every day, but I at least got like 700, a thousand, like no zero days.
And then my second German translation went out and Amazon didn’t block it from sale because of some me needing to prove that I owned the rights to the cover this time. The sales have been great. Like combined, I have earned back the cost of translating the first book. And I think as the books come out that first book will always like pick up more readers as there’s a new release.
My hope is that by the end of the series, each book is earning itself out within a month. That would be amazing. If it doesn’t, if it earns out in two or three months, that’s fine. That’s how my audio started, but that would be lovely. That would be lovely. Then I can keep on doing more German translations.
JP: Yeah. When you sent me the screenshot of where you were at with your categories I definitely cheered.
Crys: I hit number three in my category. I think the highest I hit in the German store was like 260-something. But all three — so the first book, the second book, and the pre-order were on the top 100 of my category at one point. So like German doesn’t have a lot selling, the fact that my pre-order could get up there. I think it was like I had 40 pre-orders on it and it hit the top 100 of the category. I think it was like a thousand in the German store, if that tells you like the velocity of the German store different from the US store. But it’s still happiness.
JP: Yep. A hundred percent. Yay.
Crys: Okay. So this week, our card that we are taking inspiration from is The World, the last card in the Major Arcana. JP, would you describe the card?
JP: Absolutely, last card. Okay, so keywords are completion, integration, accomplishment, and travel. Reversed, seeking personal closure, shortcuts, and delays. So World card as depicted in the Write Away Tarot, it shows a woman wrapped in purple cloth, dancing inside a large Laurel wreath. She looks behind her to the past while her body moves forward in the future, holding wands, et cetera, lots of fun figures going on here.
But the cool part about this is with tarot, The World is both the beginning and the end because it is the end of one cycle and the start of the next one. So with the tarot, it’s not Fool, to The World, and you’re done. But it’s Fool, to The World, you’ve learned something, you’ve come out of it, and you’ve become The Fool again. So that’s really how tarot works, is things are never from point A to point B, but it’s a continuous cycle.
So one of my favorite things about the world is the fact that you have become the “expert” or you have become the learned person for whatever your original Fool beginnings were. But now you’re at the next step where you need to learn something again. So it’s a constant process of relearning and new cycles.
Crys: Yeah. I was going to make sure we pointed that out. So with that in mind, as we were coming up with our questions, the question that we are gonna talk about for craft is: do you pay attention to reader reviews? The reason this question came up for me is the only reason I think you should pay attention to reader reviews at all is to see what you’re going to take from this book to apply to the next one. Have you paid much attention to reader reviews, JP, with your books out? You don’t get many reviews on the Vela because it’s Vela, but with your urban fantasy as well?
JP: Yeah, we have. I think it’s just because, you know, first book release you wanna look at all the reviews. I found them useful, but they are very much, like because they’re positive, they’re the like nice feeling ones. We, oddly enough, like we got one three-star review, and we didn’t know why because the review didn’t come in. And I just was like, whatever, if it won’t provide feedback, then I can’t do anything about it, so there’s no point in thinking about it.
But yeah, I’ve paid attention to the reviews because in my head if there’s anything pointed out there that I can internalize and use moving forward, I would love to. I’m the kind of person that I can take negative feedback and I can try to incorporate it in the future if it’s applicable. But I think that’s like the key, you really have to gauge if you can or can’t take that kind of feedback because some people can’t, and that’s okay that you can’t.
Crys: Yeah. I 100% agree. If you are not the kind of person who can read negative feedback and not dwell on it, then reading reviews is definitely not for you because it’s gonna stop you from writing. The only time that you should pay attention to reviews is if you can take that criticism and process it, discard what doesn’t apply to you, and move forward.
When I started out and I wasn’t using any kind of editor, or any kind of like beta readers, or any kind of feedback before I was publishing, except for proofreading which you need, I used reviews as a way to tell me if I was on track for the genre I was writing in. And those initial reviews were so helpful. And I was writing really fast, so I was using those reviews, taking what I learned, applying it to the next book, in a very rapid turnaround.
And the five-star reviews, they’re never gonna be helpful, they’re just a boost to your ego. Sometimes the four-star reviews will give you a good point that you need to like look at. The three-star reviews, the ones that actually write a review, are your best bet for people who are readers of your genre and readers of your style, but you didn’t quite match with probably. Two stars and one star, they’re not your people really ever, so don’t even worry about it.
I, however, I’m weird, in that I love one stars. I love them because they don’t have anything to do with my work. They have completely to do with the person who read it. It’s about how they interpreted things, not about the value of my work. Unless you got all one stars on something, then something’s going wrong. I don’t know, probably a brigade of trolls, who knows. At least one person in the world’s gonna like your book, even if it’s your mom.
Now, most authors will tell you don’t touch Goodreads with a 10-foot pole when reading your reviews because that’s a reader space. Readers are far more open with their opinions than they are leaving a book review on Amazon. On Amazon, they recognize that the author’s going to see it, they’re going to probably read it. So a lot of readers won’t be completely forthright on Amazon.
It’s no holds barred over on Goodreads. So if you do not have a thick skin, don’t look at your book on Goodreads. I, however, am a monster, and I love my one stars on Goodreads. And I will go through, I don’t know, about once a year and find all my one stars, and I will crack up. I will just sit here laughing. It’s the best. Not my review, but one of the best one-star reviews one of my friends ever got was, “I could write a better novel with alphabet soup.” it’s just like they’re gold. They’re just little of gold.
JP: Yeah. Yeah.
Crys: They don’t have anything to do with your story, with your writing. They have a hundred percent to do with the reader. That’s all. That’s all that is.
JP: Yep. I always get afraid when looking at Goodreads, only because as I’m scrolling, I’m afraid I’m gonna hit the like button or something along those lines. And I’m like, I’m just trying to be a stealth lurker. I’m just looking at reviews, don’t look at me. Because I don’t want it to like randomly show up on their feed, like so and so liked it, like that’s awkward.
Crys: I created a whole new Goodreads, simply because I didn’t want people to know what I’m reading, what I’m liking. It’s like, I just want to keep track of the books that I’m reading or the books I want to, but I don’t want people to be like, oh, Crys Cain said that this was a really good book, or Crys Cain didn’t like this book, I wonder why? I don’t want any of that. And I don’t generally leave like full reviews there, but I just wanted to track and have no one know, particularly my mother. I love you mom, but I don’t want her to know everything I’m reading.
One thing you can do, because reviews can be good for using for your promo, you can take lines from them, you can see what the words are. If you’re the kind of person who can’t look at your reviews for fear that you’ll run across a negative one that will completely derail you, you can get a partner, a friend, to go through and copy out all the good stuff so that you have it in a file. So you can access it if you need to use it for promos, or to research like what are the words that kind of seem to keep popping up in these reviews so that I can figure out how to market my book better.
JP: Yeah, I think one thing that both like reviews and the editing process has humbled me and/or made me think of ways in which like feedback is not an attack towards me, but just towards the project or whatever. It’s just really been that exposure and really like focusing in on like how to make something better based off of someone else’s perspective.
So like when hiring an editor and hearing their feedback, regardless of how negative it is, always coming at it with that it’s not a personal attack, but it’s just explicit to the work. It’s a way in which the work could be improved if they represent that market. Or if they understand that market that you’re trying to reach out to.
And then the same would go for reviews, in my opinion. Where like you said, the one- and two-star reviews, it’s probably not your market that you’re looking for, but those three-star reviews really hold that gold of someone within your market that just it didn’t hit with. So that’s a way to gauge whether or not that is someone that you want to include into that market, or if you really wanna just bunker down in this very specific niche of this very specific group of people. I think using reviews in a means to either improve your work or improve your work through the perspective of other customers, is just a way to improve or expand your market, if that makes sense, which sometimes you don’t wanna do.
Crys: Yeah, absolutely. My question for our listeners this week is: what kind of author are you? Can you pay attention to reviews? Or can you not? And if you already have books out and published, we’d love to hear a story of a review that’s been really helpful for you.
JP: And if you have any funny one stars.
Crys: Yes, please tell us your delightful one stars. Thank you so much for joining us this and every other week. We are about to go record our business episode, which is going to go over the question of: what’s next in the author leveling up? If you’d like to list at that episode and many more, you can join us over at www.patreon.com/writeawaypodcast. We will be discussing soon what will be next, now that we’re done with our journey through tarot. And you’ll probably hear us chat about that on the next episode.
JP: See you later.
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