Feeding Trolls

Author 101

I had someone ask me for my best advice, this is what I wrote and they told me to post it. It's funny but honest.

You look at Amazon and 60% of your reviews are gone. Get pissed off, that's cool. Vent with some friends and suck it up, because they're going to do it again in 6 months. They did the same thing to Rick Riordan. Famous Authors also have reviews removed.

Twitter purge comes and the work feels pointless. Well, you've got to eat that too. Katy Perry lost millions of followers. Are you better than Katy Perry? Nobody is, she's a sparkly unicorn being.

Now, if you're feeling really self-deprecating, go check out your book's Amazon reviews in another country. You're happy with most but then you see a 1 star...Wow. Ouch man. You read the review because, you're here, so you must be up for some self-loathing. That one stung a little.

Now, this is where you stalk their account so you can see what they're saying about other authors. I promise you 99% of the time, it'll look like you should feel honored to be part of this wack jobs 10,000 author slander campaign. How legit is this review? Can someone really do this? Yes, they totally can and there's a 100% chance it's the one review that will live on in infamy. This is where you go and check to see how many people liked their reviews. It's in big print. You notice there are only 140 likes. Weird...So, 9,860 people did not like your review. This is where I usually have to fight the urge to passive-aggressively apologize for sucking so bad. I'm Canadian. It's a thing. You'll probably want to comment but you can't! Don't you dare! Slowly back away from your computer. If you feed the trolls they do worse things.

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