Amazon reviews bring out the worst in writers - but we must never respond

It's easy to ignore someone who doesn't know how to use an apostrophe, says Marcus Berkmann

Illustration by Ping Zhu

I have a book out this week, and as always I have been bricking it. The only thing worse than bad reviews is no reviews at all, and I have experienced both in the past. Writers are sensitive souls, with egos the size of small villages, which can be punctured with a single well-aimed pin-prick. I vividly remember one review, written maybe two decades ago by a personal enemy of mine. He bent over backwards, forwards and sideways to be fair, this ugly, malformed little troll, but he couldn't manage it. The piece he wrote wasn't just about how bad my book was. It was about how much it pained him to tell the world how bad my book was. We bump into each other at parties from time to time and greet each other like old friends. I'll get him in the end. There's still time.

All newspaper and magazine reviews, though, are gone, forgotten, dead within a few weeks. Unless quoted on the book cover, they have no afterlife. This is in bleak contrast to a far more dangerous threat to our sanity, the reviews on Amazon (as featured in this magazine last week). It's not actually true that when we have a book out, most writers spend an inordinate amount of time monitoring their sales rankings on Amazon and seeing if anyone has written a review yet. All right, it is true. I know writers who have got up at four in the morning to check their sales ranking. If it has gone up, someone has bought a copy and they can go back to bed happy. If it has gone down, their career is over and destitution is imminent. They may never sleep again.

Amazon reviews fall into certain categories. There are the intelligent, thoughtful ones written by people who read the book to the end and respected its intention. There aren't many of those. The most galling are the one-star reviews from people who are angry because the book took a week to arrive, or had a small tear in the cover. You'll get three stars from someone who bought the book for someone else and has no intention of ever reading it. "Ok, some amusing bits, but didn't think it was up to the standard of some of the authors previous work," read one of mine recently. Fair comment, I suppose, although it's relatively easy to ignore the opinion of anyone who doesn't know how to use an apostrophe.

But see what happened there! I'm not usually that pompous, but Amazon reviews bring out the worst in us all. Experience teaches us that we must never respond to them, because we can never win. Long after we are all dead, when vast, hyper-intelligent arthropods stalk the Earth, this review will still be on Amazon: "I bought this for my husband after enjoying an article about it in the Daily Mail. Whilst my husband enjoyed most of it he did not enjoy the foul langauage." [sic]

I have lunch with my two women novelist friends, and tell them of an idea I have for a short story. A serial killer is loose. A dozen people around the country have been horribly murdered. There is no apparent link between them. Detectives are baffled. No one thinks to look on Amazon and see whether any of these people had written any reviews lately. The writer, for it is he, is never caught, although there's a new spate of violent deaths every time he has a book out. My friends love the idea but say it could never happen. Their eyes start to glaze over, as they imagine doing it themselves.