Joanne Harris: A Storm in a Tweecup or: Don't Shit in the Sandbox, Kids.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the intense (and sometimes uneasy) relationship between readers and the public. Last time I wrote about feedback, and suggested that, by definition, feedback is a two-way process. One of the marvellous things the internet provides is the possibility…
*sighs*
Look. I love a good debate about reviewing as much as the next person, but this piece is missing the point. Namely:
If you are a famous author, someone with a powerful social media presence, and you choose to offer public criticism of a specific, identified reviewer in social media - a forum on which you have four times the reach of the person you’re criticising - then you are punching down. You are taking all the support and power that you possess as a famous literary figure, and you are directing that power against someone who possesses vastly less of it than you do. That’s why this is being called silencing: because when push comes to shove, you have infinitely more push than the other person. You can silence her in a way that she can’t silence you, and as far as criticism is concerned - as far as social media manners are concerned - that’s a very bad thing to be doing.
It doesn’t matter if that wasn’t your intention. It’s what you actually did. Once you tweeted your criticism of the review, the reviewers were bombarded with hate mail and criticism from your fans, and while they had fans of their own who responded in kind, a simple glance at your respective follower numbers - not to mention a moment of awareness about your respective fame and power - would’ve told you that you’d be punching down: that you would, by simple virtue of the facts and numbers in evidence, be wielding your greater social power against a weaker opponent.
And the thing is, that’s a relevant factor. That’s what people are ultimately objecting to, here; and a big part of why is the native difference between authors and reviewers. Authors are paid for what they do; the vast majority of book bloggers are not. Reviewers might have an established readership and a fan following, but with few exceptions, most authors are going to have more fame and bigger fanbases than even popular reviewers do. The point of a review is analysis - for the reviewer to tell their readers what they thought of a book, predominantly in the context of recommending it in the marketplace. And given that authors really want their books to sell, that’s a bias right there: of course you like your own book, because you wrote it! So when you engage publicly with a reviewer, whether in comments on their blog or openly on social media, you’re doing two things: you’re pitting your supporters against theirs, and no matter how distanced your motives are from saying My Book Is Really Awesome And This Person Is Wrong, the spectre of that response is always going to be there, so you’re never going to look good.
This isn’t a case of reviewers being able to dish it out, but not take it (as one of your followers suggested) - it’s simply a case where, regardless of your intentions, the baggage surrounding fame, commercial necessity and social media usage will invariably combine to bad effect. If one tweet from you - or several tweets, as the case may be - sends a deluge of complaint against a reviewer, then whether or not you meant for that to happen, the effect is still one of silencing, because receiving a flood of criticism has the effect of dissuading reviewers from doing their jobs (as evidenced by the fact that the review in question was shortly thereafter taken down).
And yes, of course you’ve received flak in turn - because you broke the social contract. You punched downards against someone who quite obviously had less power than you, and the results were visibly upsetting. Just like the reviewer, you’re still just one person sitting there on the other end of your Twitter feed, being called names and insulted, and that’s not fun - but in this case, you started it. You started it, because if what you really wanted was to have a discussion about why a particular type of reviewing bugged you, you didn’t need to link to the review in question to make that point, and you certainly didn’t need to tweet at the person who wrote it.
Of course you get to have opinions about reviews of your work! The discussion about reviewers responding to the book they wish you’d written, rather than the one you actually did, is a compelling topic that bears further analysis. Other authors do similar things all the time - Seanan McGuire, for instance, has responded to criticism she’s received on multiple occasions, most famously about the question of when, not if, her female characters would be raped. But she did that without identifying the person who’d asked the original question, and as such, there was no problem with it.
That’s the issue. That’s why you’re being criticised. You openly engaged with a particular reviewer in a forum where she couldn’t help but see what you’d said, and then acted surprised when people commented back. Tweeting an @ message to someone is the online equivalent of addressing them by name while saying, ‘Hey, come look at this!’ - blogging about them, or better yet, blogging about that thing they said without actually naming them, is an entirely different ballgame.
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theliteraryhag reblogged this from fozmeadows rosepetals1984 reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
And this is one of the many reasons why I love Foz Meadows. Well said, indeed, and verbatim my thoughts on the matter.
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ablackbrick said: On the internet or in real life, it’s very hard to find people who understand that a different viewpoint is not a personal attack.
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meeksp reblogged this from joannechocolat and added:
Personally, I appreciate your willingness to engage with your readers! I’ve become accustomed to reading as an...
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orphans-and-animals reblogged this from great-work-begins and added:
Foz Meadows continues to make sense of a screaming world. I just lost a couple of hours of my life chasing this feud...
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somethingaboutaboat-blog reblogged this from cloudsinvenice and added:
+10 and all of the internets for Foz Meadows, who articulates the problem much better than I’ve been able to.
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great-work-begins reblogged this from redheadedkb and added:
Bravo, Foz. Nailed it once again. I’m sadly not surprised by how many people wildly miss the point with stuff like this.
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writer-of-wrongs reblogged this from mizgillianberry mizgillianberry reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
WHAT FOZ SAID TIMES A MILLION.
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