I totally wish this was my cake.

Don’t worry folk I Ate’nt Dead, just getting married. I’ll be back with the writing advice and poorly crafted Doctor Who jokes on Monday.

I’ll try to limit the sap, but I do want to say this: without my soon to be wife the writing wouldn’t happen. She’s been everything from my much needed editor to my cheerleading team of one.

I feel damn lucky.

I’ll put up some wedding photos when I get back if anyone’s keen to see them.

Now I have to go and put together a retro golfing outfit for my bachelor party. My brother told me that’s how I have to dress but that’s all he’s told me.

I’m sure there’s no way this can possibly go wrong.

Nootropics are a class of drugs and supplements which are used as “brain boosters” or cognitive enhancers depending on who you’re talking to. They range from the very mild and very common (caffeine) to the dangerous and illegal (technically cocaine counts as a nootropic*). Before I tell about the supplements themselves I think I should talk about what nootropics can and can’t do.

For one thing, no brain boosting drug can make you a better writer. They can make you feel more awake, some can improve your health and some of them can improve your memory but not one of them can improve your creativity directly. You should never feel like your writing depends on any drug of any kind and if you do then it’s time to take a break from that drug or seek professional help**.

I should also say that I’m only writing from my own experience and research, I am not a Doctor. Before you take anything listed here you need to talk to a Doctor (a real Doctor, not some dude you met on a street corner) and make sure that nothing else you’re taking will interact with any of the supplements here.

I knew a woman who took a series of supplements without checking into the interactions those supplements had with each other and she ended up having to be hospitalised with Serotonin Syndrome a condition which can be fatal. That’s how serious this is and that’s how important is that you speak to a medical professional before you take any of the supplements I’m going to talk about.

All of what I’m about to write here is my subjective experience, so take it with a grain of salt.

So, let’s start with the basics:

 1. Caffeine

Found in coffee beans, sports drinks and my bloodstream this is the most common nootropic in the world (except maybe for nicotine). It increases your sense of wakefulness and can help you with your reaction times and you memory.

In small doses, and on the proviso that you don’t have any health problems, caffeine is pretty harmless. In large doses it can give you heart palpitations, keep you awake long after you wanted the wakefulness to go away and give you weird muscle twitches that will make you look even crazier than you actually are (just try buying a new kitchen knife with your eye twitching away like it wants to cede from your body).

The major downside to caffeine is that it’s very subtly addictive. Because it doesn’t seem to do you any lasting harm*** it’s very easy to think that’s six cups a day is a normal habit to have. You can build up a tolerance to caffeine so if you use it all the time, you can find yourself crossing the impressive/ludicrous line when it comes to your intake.

I, being an idiot, smoked for awhile when I was younger and I found cigarettes far easier to give up than coffee. I still drink plenty of coffee and even though I have cut my intake way back the idea of not having a cup in the morning fills me with dread.

2. Nicotine

Before I get into this let me say that I am in no way suggesting you take up smoking. When I tried out nicotine as a writing aid I used chewable nicotine gum because of this article I found on a website called T- nation (kind of NSFW, depending on your workplace rules).

The long and short of it is that nicotine works really well to give you that bright, clear minded feeling that can go along with really good writing sessions. I found my word count was way up when I was taking nicotine.

Sounds great, but there’s a downside to nicotine; for one thing the gum (and the patches) are quite expensive. Secondly there’s a reason most of the packets have “not for non-smokers” on them and that’s that nicotine is addictive.

The gum is far less addictive than cigarettes because the different delivery method changes the way your body reacts to the drug. That doesn’t mean it can’t hook you if you’re an addictive personality.

Finally, while I found no overall ill effects from taking nicotine, it did make me feel sick if I had more than 2 grams per day of the gum. There have been reports of severe nausea from the gum and terrible headaches from the patches.

I can’t in good conscience say “you can’t use nicotine” when I have and I’ve had good results, however it is a drug and therefore worthy of both respect and further research from you before you take any.

3. Rhodiola

Rhodiola doesn’t work in the same way as the other nootropics on this list, but I think it’s worth listing here because of the benefits it can give writers, particularly writers who are under a lot of strain.

Rhodiola rosea is a herb, in some ways similar to Siberian Ginseng, that belongs to a group of substances called adaptogens. What adaptogens do is help your body adapt to outside stressors without falling apart.

I take it to help me keep colds and flu at bay while I’m both training MMA and writing. I find that it works best if you save it for times of extra stress rather than taking it every day.

The actual feeling of it is a lot like coffee but without the jitters and sleeplessness that can come from a caffeine overdose. It also lasts far longer.

There are no side effects that I know of, except for wakefulness, but it can interact with some medicines so definitely speak to your doctor before taking this one.

4. Lecithin

Soy lecithin is a true nootropic that works as a cholinergic agent (it gets the neurotransmitter acetylcholine  into your brain) and helps you with both cognitive processes and memory formation.

Lecithin is extremely well tolerated (assuming you don’t have a soy allergy) and non toxic so I recommend most people at least give this one a try. You can get it in pill form or in granules from your supermarket (a friend of mine puts it on his cereal).

I found it made me feel far sharper and like the brain fog that follows me around was cleared away.

It’s still worth a check with your Doc just to make sure that you’ll be okay with lecithin even though it’s well tolerated.

5. B Vitamins

This might seem like a very boring option, but surprisingly I’ve had far more success with vitamin B than I’ve had with almost anything else. I find they give me a real boost both physically and mentally and I definitely notice if I stop taking them.

You may not get the same effect that I do from them if your diet is already very high in B vitamins; however I think vitamin B is another extremely well tolerated supplement and is extremely effective.

Where to from here?

Have a talk to your registered medical professional and see what they think. Do you own research and come to your own conclusions as to if this is something you want to try. Of course, Ideally you shouldn’t take anything to help you write…but I know sometimes that’s not an option if you want to write your book and make it through your day without hurling a chair through a window.

* For the love of Pete, don’t snort cocaine because you think it’ll help your writing.

** Admittedly I do drink a LOT of coffee.

*** There is actually a lot of debate about coffee being good for you, at least in normal doses. Apparently an espresso away makes the grim reaper go away and pick on someone else for awhile.

Sadly the answer is, as always, “it depends”.

It depends on whether or not you take the advice literally and write only what you know in real life or if you decide to use it in the spirit that it was intended. It also depends on what it is you want to write about.

If you want to write spy thrillers, this advice doesn’t help much. Most of us aren’t spies and this couldn’t go anywhere near the genre. However even real spies taking this piece of advice literally wouldn’t be able to turn out a great spy thriller because (from the little I know) most spycraft isn’t the stuff of James Bond movies**. A lot of it’s sifting through vast amounts of information and getting very nervous people to do things they don’t want to do.

On the other hand a writer who has never even met a real spy can still write a decent spy thriller by writing what they know.

Now, the average writer has spent far more time behind a desk than they have behind a gun***, but almost all of us know what fear feels like. Whether it’s the heart hammering a new hole in your throat kind of fear that comes from being chased or the deep dread that comes from realizing you’ve just screwed up badly at work we know what fear feels like. All a writer does to write what they know is change the reference point for the fear they are writing about.

Instead of being chased by the school bully, the protagonist is being chased by enemy agents. Instead of dreading the fallout from the accounting department, they dread the fallout from a dirty bomb. Of course a good writer will ramp the fear up for their protagonist but the feeling is basically the same.

The point of all of this is that people experience the world in more or less the same way (and if one of your characters doesn’t, then you can make that a plot point). Fear is fear, love is love and excitement is excitement. So while you have never experienced fleeing from a rampaging werewolf you can still put that in your story and write what you know, even though you’re really writing the unknown.

* Except perhaps “this is a public place, put on some clothes!”

** I have it on good authority that alcoholic, syphilitic sociopaths don’t make great spies.

*** Ironically so have most spies

Fortunately the stories we told each other to try and explain the world got a little bit more complex than that and gave rise to a truly astonishing variety of stories, myths and legends that weave in and out of human history.

These old tales can add a spin to your story that something that’s been made up out of whole cloth* just won’t have. Not that the things you invent in your own head are necessarily less, but they won’t have the same sense to them that an element of real mythology will have.

For example; have a look at the first of the Repairman Jack novels by F Paul Wilson. Titled The Tomb the protagonist Jack** fetches up against a family of monsters called Rakosh. These are based (loosely) on the Rakshasa of Hindu folklore. Wilson could easily have called the monstrous flesh eaters something else, however by rooting them in existing mythology it provided a reference point for the magic in the books.

You by no means have to borrow from mythology, and it’s probably not appropriate for your legally accurate courtroom drama (although I personally would love to see a courtroom drama with slavering monstrosities), but if you do need a god or a monster then you can do far worse than looking to humanity’s collective myths for inspiration.

I say inspiration because as much as you’re looking to add the myths to your story, most of them will be improved (at least in regards to your particular story) by you altering them slightly to fit in with the way your narrative works.

Regardless of what you take from mythology and how you alter it for your own purposes, it will benefit you to do the research and have a good understanding of what it is you’re borrowing from. That way if you make a major change, you can at the very least hang a lampshade on it.

Tell me, do you take from mythology in your writing? If so what do you look for?

* One! One cliché! Muhahaha!

** Jack. Just Jack.

Perhaps a better question would be “do I want an agent?” because with the rise of self publishing as a viable method of making a living it’s now coming down to personal choice as to whether a new writer goes for legacy publishing or self publishing. If you still want in to legacy publishing you will almost certainly need an agent to help you get there.

Literary agents get a bad rap from some people in the industry, especially those heavily invested in self publishing, but there is a lot an agent can do for you and I don’t think it’s wise to ignore the idea of getting an agent without knowing what they can do for you. They do charge a commission of 15%* and this commission based payment ensures an agent will always be working to get the best deal for you.

Obviously if you want to see your book printed by the big six publishers an agent is going to be invaluable in getting an editors attention and helping you navigate the contract processes and negotiations.

However that’s not all a literary agent can do for you. Every agent (at least, every good agent) will have a series of contacts in the industry that they can use to your advantage. You may need a specialist to help you with foreign sales of your work and chances are your agent will know one.

An agent can also act as a career coach, and help you with the decision making process when it comes to planning your next career move. An agent will probably tell you your planned 700 page epic about navel lint is a project best left to later in your career.

They will also keep an eye on what trends are developing in the things editors are looking for and may be able to help guide a project as you’re writing it.

If you’re self published an agent may be in your future despite what you might think at first. Let’s say your self published novel does really well and sells several thousand copies (I’ve heard the number was 2000 copies but that may well be higher now) you may want to approach a publisher to see if they’d like to take you on now that you have a proven sales record. An agent can help you negotiate the best possible deal for you, and statistically speaking deals negotiated by agents more than cover the amount paid to the agent.

Also, as above, if a foreign publisher decides they like the look of your self published book and asks to publish a local copy, you’d be foolish to try and negotiate a deal involving foreign law and publishers without the help of an expert. It’s up to you if that expert is an agent or a lawyer, but agents who specialise in foreign sales will have significantly more contacts in the local industry.

Do you have to have an agent? No, there is good money to be made going it alone. That said there is a lot an agent can do for you no matter which path you decide to follow so I would recommend keeping them in mind no matter how you tackle your career.

* You should never have to pay an agent up front. Agents work on commission only, if they ask for your money up front they’re not an agent you should be dealing with.

Here are ten of the most common myths I’ve seen used by writers in fight scenes:

1. You Can’t Kill Someone by Shoving Their Nose Back Into Their Brain

This one’s been around for a long, long time. Since Imperial China in fact. The idea is simple enough: a powerful blow with the heel of the hand to the base of the nose drives a splinter of bone into the brain of the victim…and they die.

Except that they don’t. You might break the cartilage in their nose, and it certainly hurts (I’ve broken my nose so many times I can just crunch it back into place*) but you can’t shove a bone back into someone’s brain because there are no bones there.

Yes, I know it happened in The Last Boy Scout. That movie is full of lies.

It is possible (theoretically) to kill someone by striking just above the bridge of the nose, but the amount of force required is astronomical. You could have a super powered character killing this way, but even for them it would be far easier to just break someone’s neck. For a normal person to manage it without a sledgehammer is unlikely at best.

The other reason this is so unlikely is that people just don’t hold still in a brawl, the precision required for this sort of blow is beyond anyone except professional fighters and true martial arts masters.

2. Getting Knocked Out Is No Big Deal

We get this in fiction a lot. Batman spends so much time unconscious you have to wonder if he just likes taking naps on the job.

Sadly the reality is that being knocked out, whether by a blow to the head or being drugged can easily kill you. In fact it’s far easier to accidentally kill someone while trying to knock them out than it is to keep them reliably unconscious for more than a minute or so.

Secondly, concussions are cumulative. Have a look at boxers as they age. The ones whose style involves getting smacked in the head a lot often develop degenerative brain conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease and Pugilistic Dementia. Our brains are sensitive instruments and they only shut down when they have absolutely no other choice.

I’ve been knocked cold twice. Each time when I came to I immediately felt intensely ill and it took me several minutes before I even knew where I was. If it had happened in a street fight I would not have been leaping to the attack at that point unless you count vomiting on someone’s shoes.

3. Pressure Points Work In Real Fights

Nope. Sorry but this just isn’t true. Yes there are pain compliance points on the body that can cause you a lot of grief if someone puts pressure on them. The problem is that you have to hold very still in order for these to be effective.

The second problem is adrenaline. If you try a pressure point attack on someone in a fight, they might not even feel it because the adrenaline will dull any pain they should be feeling. Adrenaline will also affect you ability to apply anything that requires fine motor movement as that part of your brain that handles fine motor movement goes into shutdown the moment you get scared or excited.

There are however structural weak points on the body, and attacks on these do work in real fights. A hard punch to the point of the jaw will knock most people out. A kick to the liver hurts so much it will incapacitate the receiver for several minutes (if you don’t believe me find a local Thai boxing gym and take a kick to the liver from one their fighters). Joint locks like kneebars, kimuras** and choke holds all attack parts of the body with structural weaknesses. These really do work but take some skill to apply.

4. A Kick To The Groin is Game Over

While a hard blow to the groin does tend to end fights if it lands cleanly, it’s not the combative panacea it’s made to be. First of all, most people really do not want to be kicked in the groin and they will go to quite extreme measures to protect that area of themselves.

Secondly even after a very hard shot, most men get between three and five seconds before the pain sets in so badly they’re incapacitated. Pretty much every athlete that plays contact sports will know this and can keep working until the pain sets in. Guys who don’t know about the three seconds they have often go down the moment they get hit because even the initial pain is frightening.

There are also some guys who for whatever reason are predicting they are going to take a shot to the groin at some point, and they buy a groin guard. Great if they’re a good person doing good things, not so great if they’re bad guys who’ve thought ahead.

5. A Kick To The Groin Is Just Painful

Actually a hard kick in the nuts can seriously injure a full grown man. It’s played for humour in fiction but what’s almost never shown is just how bad a groin shot can be.

While it’s true that a kick to the groin isn’t necessarily the end of the fight (see above) if a man does take a kick from a strong, trained opponent then the sheer shock of the pain caused is enough to send that man into shock. While it’s rarely fatal it can cause the testicles rupture, at which point they have to be removed.

If your characters get struck in the groin, make sure there are consequences. It can’t just be shrugged off in a few moments, if it’s a hard hit it will be some time before they can do anything except pray for death.

6. Grappling Beats Everything

Er…this one’s harder. It’s not true but there’s an element of truth to the idea that grappling trumps all other fighting styles. It comes partly from the first UFC competitions where a slight Brazilian man name Royce Gracie ran rough shod over his much larger opponents using his families grappling art Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

As a grappler (mostly) I can say that if you’re an experienced grappler fighting someone who doesn’t know how to fight on the ground, or stop you from taking them to the down, then it’s going to be very hard for them to beat you even if they’re larger than you.

However, this assumes that they’re unarmed, alone and don’t know enough stand up grappling (wrestling, judo etc) to keep the fight standing so they can knock you out. It also assumes you’re standing on a surface that’s safe to roll around on.

In my experience grappling is awesome, and a lot of fun, but it needs to be supplemented with other styles.

7. Grappling Is Useless In Real Fights

Despite what I’ve said above, don’t discount grappling as an option for your characters.

The myth says that a good street fighter will either knock a grappler out before the grappler can take them down or use dirty tricks to hurt the grappler before they can be choked unconscious or have a bone broken.

I can say from my own personal experiences that this just isn’t true. Before I studied grappling I tried my hand against a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fighter who consistently beat me to the punch (and kick) before I could hit him. I was hardly a hard hitter at that point but I was very quick and I still couldn’t hit him before he took me down.

Once I was on the ground I never had a chance to use any dirty tricks because he held me in positions that gave me no chance at all to fight back. If I’d tried to eye gouge or bite him I would have been handing him my arms or throat to attack before I could have hurt him. Plus of course there would have been no reason he couldn’t have gouged me back if he’d wanted to.

8. You Can Punch People In The Head With Impunity

If your hero punches an opponent in the head without either some from of hand protection or a serious amount of training and conditioning, then chances are they’ll break their hand.

Your hand is full of small bones and the human skull is basically one huge bone (more so for some than others). Punches generate a lot of force if thrown correctly and if you hit one of the harder parts of the head (like the forehead) it’s easy to fracture those little bones. In fact it’s so common it’s known as a boxer’s or brawler’s fracture.

If you hit someone in the mouth then you easily get a bit of tooth lodged in your hand. This not only hurts (trust me) it can get infected really easily because human mouths are basically nightclubs for various kinds of disgusting bacterium.

This can add some nice detail to the aftermath of your fight scenes and even if you ignore the injuries you can at least add realism by hanging a lampshade on it.

9. Complex, Esoteric Martial Arts Are Better

All things told one of the best martial arts out there is boxing. Boxers are fit, conditioned to fight, used to getting punched and hit harder than you would believe possible.

I’ve done a lot of different martial arts over the last twenty years (God I feel old) and I can say that the only ones that have helped out at all when I’ve been fighting have been boxing, Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) and the BJJ/wrestling hybrid I’ve been taught.

Everything else failed me when it counted and I took a beating.

It’s not true for everyone; there will be Kung fu masters who are badass and masters of even more esoteric styles that can really fight…but there also plenty of football players that can really fight despite never being taught how to throw a punch.

Simple, repetitive moves are easy to remember even when you’re under stress. That punch you’ve thrown forty thousand times in training will be the one that comes out when you get mugged.

10. Martial Arts Guarantee A Win

I wish this was true but it just isn’t. All martial arts can do is improve your odds of defeating someone you didn’t have a chance against before. A bigger person can still knock you out with one hefty punch. Someone who’s armed can cut you to ribbons or shoot you dead before you can fire a kick off.

Even if you’re better than they are, anyone can be surprised. I’ve been punched in the back of the head by people I never even knew were standing there.

If you need to humble your hero this can be used to great effect in your story. Have them surprised by a weaker opponent, or simply overwhelm them with numbers. No one martial art can guarantee you’ll come away from a confrontation unscathed.

Not even the ones made by Smith and Wesson.

You Tell Me

What martial myths have you seen? Do you disagree with me on any of these (history would suggest I’m wrong about at least one of them)? Let me know in the comments.

* Sadly a lot of my broken noses have been user failure rather than enemy action. I’m amazed I can keep breathing without injuring myself.

** A kind of bent arm shoulder lock

If you’d like to find me on Twitter I’m @ajackwriting. Yes, that’s a sonic screwdriver.

@elizabethscraig Elizabeth tweets writing links all day every day, grabbing the best advice articles from around the web and sharing them. If you follow her stream I guarantee you’ll learn something useful.

@chuckwendig Chuck Wendig is some kind of beard powered force of nature. I’ve already pimped his website www.terribleminds.com and his many, many books on writing. It’s also worth following Chuck on Twitter if only for the fact that he’s a really funny dude and his tweets are entertaining.

@fantasyfaction If you write genre fiction you can’t go past Fantasy Faction either as a website or a Twitter stream. Useful advice, top notch reviews and interesting links. Well worth a follow.

@mightymur Mur Lafferty, creator of I Should Be Writing and possibly the saviour of the universe, or at least the destroyer of Matt Wallace which amounts to more or less the same thing. Speaking of which…

@mattfnwallace Matt’s tweet stream is practically an Eldritch Abomination in and of itself. If swearing, violence or pure unbiased hatred of all life bothers you then this might not be the stream for you…on the other hand if you can cope with all that then Matt is an entertaining tweeter.

@scalzi John Scalzi, author, president of SFWA and human blog hybrid. Tweets useful advice, links to important blogs and updates.

@lilithsaintcrow Lilith Saintcrow is both absolutely hilarious and an excellent writer. She tweets pretty much constantly and it’s all good stuff.

@sfwa Science Fiction Writers Of America links, warning and news pertinent to genre writers.

@howardtayler Creator/cartoonist of Schlock Mercenary and one of the best writers anywhere for anything (although I doubt he’d believe me if I told him that). Living proof that excellent storytelling isn’t confined to novel format.

@cstross Charles Stross author of The Laundry series of supernatural thrillers (and lots of sci fi). Follow him for the same reason I do. He has a ridiculously enormou9s brain and you hope to absorb some of his intelligence through osmosis.

@rsullivan9597 Robin Sullivan heads up Ridan Publishing and has great advice coming out of her ears. In the same mention I also recommend following Michael J Sullivan at @author_sullivan

@kristadb1 Prolific writer of doom and dispenser of both excellent advice and excellent snark.

@Julie_Butcher because she’s awesome. That is all.

@skyladawn Skyla Dawn Cameron Author, blogger and acquiring editor. Also the person who can help stop you from making a complete dick of yourself if you follow her advice.

@dinajames Author of the superb All Wounds (as original a take on Urban Fantasy I’ve seen in a long time) and general dispenser of evil. Knows a lot about guns and helps me out by telling me things about weaponry I have no idea about.

Who would you recommend I follow on Twitter? Who do you keep in your Twitter feed (as opposed to your basement)?

Let me know in the comments

I am yet to be eaten by a bear. Some consider this inevitable and I am glad to have been able to prove them wrong again. That said, no promises for February.

Frankly, I understand if you want to side with the bear on this one.

Writing is going reasonably well, I’m completely re-cutting and redrafting my novel Unquiet Nights to deal with its pacing issues. They weren’t bad, but they did slow things down in critical places. I hope (and I have hoped in vain before) that I’ll be finished by March, but we’ll see.

I plan on entering the Fantasy Faction short story contest and I think you should too.  It’s got very favorable terms and there’s no entry charge. However, and this is perhaps the most important thing, you get to keep the rights to your story.

That is awesome.

I’m trying to blog every weekday. While I don’t want to promise I will always be able to do that, it’s been good for me to put my thoughts on writing down each day. The site is getting correspondingly more hits and I’m glad to be talking to so many people.

On the health front I’ve lost twelve kilos since November and I intend to keep going. It’s nice to feel like myself again.

By the way, I’m getting married in two weeks! That’s right on February 4th my long-suffering fiancée and I are getting hitched. She’s been an incredible supporter of my writing and she’s been an invaluable editor of my stuff. That I can even write a coherent sentence is often down to her.

Things are good.

I can’t tell you what the real answer is; I can only give you my perspective. That won’t stop me from talking about it like it’s the truth from here on out of course…

Now is a great time to be a writer, maybe it really is the best time to be a writer…as long as you can hustle.

Now, more than ever, writers have a better chance to control their futures thanks to the internet. This applies to traditionally published writers just as much as it does to self published authors. Even five years ago, all writers were dependant on the publishing system for success.

You needed to have a marketing team on your side to get word of your book out into the world and if for any reason you didn’t have that kind of powerhouse behind you then your chances of success dropped dramatically. A great book could still shine, but it was markedly harder.

These days though, success is far more dependant on the author’s efforts than the publishers. Again a great book can win out no matter what, and authors heavily backed by invested publishers will still do well…but for the starting author the playing field is more level than it’s ever been.

The level field is partly due to self publishing itself, partly due to the marketing power of the net and partly down to the fading stigma of self publishing.

It used to be that self publishing a book was an admission of failure on par with wearing a barrel to your bankruptcy hearing. These days it’s a valid way into serious sales numbers and even publishing contracts with major publishers.

There is a downside to all this:

It’s now totally up to you, and that means you either have to learn how to do everything or pay people who already know what they’re doing. Whether you pay up front or you end up signing a contract and you end up paying for it via a publisher doesn’t really matter.

You still have to write a book that stands head and shoulders above everyone else’s and there is still an element of luck that’s part of publishing no matter how you do it.

The way I see it though, if the only downside to the new world of publishing is that my success is now even more tied to the amount of work I put in then I say now is a great time to be a writer.

Is it the best time ever? I don’t know. Maybe next year will be the best ever, but 2012  is the best I’ve ever seen.

What do you think?

Are we living the dream as authors or is this the kindlepocalypse?

And it sucks. A bad review can make you feel like hiding in a corner and never writing anything but awkward poetry about marmosets that you won’t show anyone just in case they review it.

Maybe that’s just me.

However a bad review, no matter how painful, can actually help you far more than it hurts you. The next time you get a one or two star review, bear these points in mind:

1. Perfect scores generate suspicion

If I see a book with five perfect glowing reviews on Amazon, I do wonder if those five reviews have come from the authors five closest friends. Now, to be fair, this is going to happen if it’s your first work. People that love you want to give you good reviews and they’ll tend to give you five stars whether you deserve it or not for fear of hurting your feelings.

However a single negative review shows that someone you didn’t know has gotten a hold of your work, and even if they didn’t like it, it affected them enough to leave feedback.

When you first start out, quantity of reviews matters far more than quality (within the boundaries of reason). Having fifty 3 star reviews will benefit you far more than having three five star reviews.

2. They can make a valid point

Those friends that left you the five star reviews may well be being perfectly honest; maybe you really did deserve five stars (it could happen), however they may also be being influenced by how they feel about you and that’s making your story seem better than it is.

A bad review from a stranger can shed light on your story that no amount of well meaning reviews from friends can. If you can separate yourself from the sting of criticism, there may well be some very good advice about the way that you write that can carry over into whatever you write next.

3. It let’s you know your work is getting read

As Mur Lafferty once said: “Anyone can get five star reviews, but once someone hates you, you know you’ve made it.”

It can be hard to tell who is picking up your work, and why, but if you get a terrible review you know that your book has gotten the attention of someone outside your immediate social circle…even though they didn’t like it that much.

4. It can help you toughen up

No matter how vitriolic the review, no matter how unlikely it is that the reviewer has actually read your work, I can guarantee that worse is coming. The more popular your stuff becomes the more likely it is to attract a breed of reviewer that lives to give one star reviews.

These particular beasts don’t actually seem to read a lot, and you can spot them on Amazon and Goodreads by the fact that all of there five hundred plus reviews are one star and full of hate. You don’t have to pay too much attention to these ones.

But there is worse coming, as I said, and getting these nasty little reviews will help prepare you for the rare review where you’ve offended someone so much they threaten you.

These threats are almost always meaningless (if someone bothers to email you, or indicates they know where you are then it’s more serious and time to call the police) but it still hurts to know that your lovingly crafted story makes someone want to punch you in the reproductive organs.

5. It means your cover is working

Assuming that the person doing the review has actually read your book, then they bought it on the strength of your idea and your cover art. This is an amazingly positive sign, as a bad review can just mean that the book didn’t suit the reviewer, however the concept and the cover art was enough to get them to try it out in the first place.

One caveat…

If you are getting ONLY bad reviews, then something is wrong and it might be time to pull your book (assuming you self published. If you’re traditionally published and you get only bad reviews you have my sympathy) and see if what’s angering your reviewers is something that can be fixed.

There is a tale about the three horses and a donkey. I don’t know where this one came from so if anyone would like to let me know in the comments I’d be grateful.

The story says that if you purchase a horse and on the way home someone tells you that you actually bought a donkey, you can ignore them.

If, on the way home, two people stop you and tell you that you have indeed somehow purchased a donkey then you should probably check the horse and listen for suspicious braying noises.

If a third person says you bought a donkey, you bought a donkey.

So, applying that to writing, if you end up with three reviews criticising one particular aspect of your story, then at the very least it’s worth checking to see if those reviewers are right.