Review Response Bingo

As a bit of fun, I thought I’d put together a list of responses that negative reviews sometimes generate (I have seen, or heard about, variations on all of these). Eyes down for the full house…

It’s just your opinion. You are jealous of the author. What are your qualifications? You are overthinking. You don’t understand the genre.
You don’t appreciate how much time and effort the author put in. You make unreasonable demands of the book. How many novels have you written? I don’t care about good writing; I just want to be entertained. You want to appear smarter than you are.
You don’t know good books. You have a vendetta. Who reviews the reviewers? You are just trying to prove that you are cleverer than the author. You are being deliberately contrarian to satisfy your ego.
You should be grateful to the author for having written the book. You really need to have read the other books in the series. Look at all these 5* reviews of the book! If you had read the book properly, you would see that… You shouldn’t be critical.

9 Comments

  1. I’ve often thought of putting something like this together – well done!

  2. Very funny! I have read another one: you didn’t read the right version!

  3. This is pretty wonderful. I think my favorite is “You should be grateful to the author for having written the book.”

  4. Funny. I’m sure any book blogger could come up with a few more 🙂

  5. David Hebblethwaite

    8th April 2011 at 10:58 am

    Thanks, all — I’m glad you liked it.

    MumuGB: Heh, I think I know which review you mean there…

    Alley: That one is probably also my favourite.

  6. This is amazing. 🙂

    I’ve had “Look at all these 5* reviews of the book!” and “You don’t understand the genre.” — sadly I’m nowhere close to a Bingo!

  7. I’ve had most of these. The ones you don’t mention are, “you’re biased in favour of subgenre X”, “you’re not one of the most important reviewers anyway”, and my all-time favourite, “you’re an idiot”.

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