The first one-star review one of our books received said, in its entirety: “Boring. Nothing happens.” The book in question was a literary novel about a retired schoolteacher coming to terms with the end of her career. Quite a lot happens in it, actually, but all of it happens internally, in the character’s thoughts and memories and shifting self-understanding. If your definition of “something happening” requires car chases or murders, then I suppose the reviewer had a point. But I disagree with their definition.

That review was posted eight years ago. I can still quote it from memory. This tells you something about the relationship publishers have with negative reviews, which is that we remember every single one, usually in precise detail, long after the positive reviews have blurred together into a warm fog of gratitude.

I want to talk honestly about how we at ScrollWorks deal with negative reviews, because I think most publishers either lie about this or avoid the topic entirely. The standard line is something like “all feedback is valuable” or “we learn from every review.” Those statements are technically true and emotionally dishonest. The truth is more complicated, more human, and more interesting.

The Initial Reaction

When I see a negative review of a ScrollWorks book, my first reaction is always emotional and usually irrational. I feel defensive. I feel angry. I feel the urge to respond, to explain why the reviewer is wrong, to point out the things they missed, to defend the author who worked so hard on this book. These feelings are intense and immediate, and they are, without exception, feelings I should not act on.

I learned this lesson the hard way. Very early in my publishing career, before ScrollWorks existed, I once responded to a negative review of a book I’d edited. I was polite, or at least I thought I was polite. I pointed out, factually and calmly, that the reviewer had misunderstood a key plot point. The response was instantaneous and brutal. Other reviewers piled on. The author, who had been handling the negative review with grace, was suddenly dragged into a public argument she didn’t want. The incident generated more attention than the original review, all of it bad. I never responded to a review again.

This is now a firm policy at ScrollWorks: we do not respond to reviews, positive or negative. Not on Amazon, not on Goodreads, not on social media. Authors who publish with us are strongly encouraged (but not required) to follow the same policy. The temptation to respond is always there, and it is always wrong to give in to it.

The Sorting Process

After the initial emotional reaction passes, usually within a few hours, I start what I think of as the sorting process. I read the review again, trying to separate the useful information from the noise. Negative reviews, in my experience, fall into roughly four categories.

The first category is reviews that identify a genuine problem. These are the most valuable and the least common. A reviewer might point out a structural weakness, a character inconsistency, or a pacing issue that we should have caught during editing but didn’t. When this happens, I note the criticism and think about whether it applies to future projects. We can’t fix a published book, but we can learn from its shortcomings.

The second category is reviews that reflect a mismatch between the book and the reader. This is by far the largest category. Someone who loves fast-paced thrillers picks up one of our literary novels and is disappointed that it doesn’t read like a thriller. Someone who wants a traditional narrative structure is frustrated by an experimental approach. Someone who expected nonfiction is annoyed to discover they’re reading fiction. These reviews are not useful to us as editors, because the problem isn’t with the book; it’s with the reader’s expectations. But they are useful to us as marketers, because they tell us that our cover design, our jacket copy, or our positioning might be sending the wrong signals about what the book is.

The third category is reviews that are simply mean. These exist on a spectrum from casually dismissive (“waste of time”) to elaborately cruel (multi-paragraph takedowns that seem designed to hurt the author’s feelings rather than to evaluate the book). These reviews have no useful information. They tell you nothing about the book and everything about the reviewer. I try to ignore them, but I’m not always successful.

The fourth category is reviews that are wrong about facts. The reviewer says the book is set in the 1950s when it’s set in the 1940s. The reviewer attributes a plot point to the wrong character. The reviewer misquotes a passage. These are irritating in a specific way, because the review is publicly visible and contains misinformation that might influence other potential readers. But per our policy, we don’t respond, and we rely on other reviewers to correct the record if it matters.

The Author Conversation

The hardest part of my job, when it comes to negative reviews, is talking to the author. Authors read their reviews. I wish they didn’t, and I always advise against it, but they do. They read every single one, and they remember the bad ones the same way I do: permanently and in precise detail.

When an author calls me after a bad review, my job is not to make them feel better. Making someone feel better about a bad review is almost impossible, because the pain is genuine and specific. A stranger read something you spent years creating and said it was bad. That hurts. Pretending it doesn’t help nothing.

What I try to do instead is provide context. I remind the author that every book gets bad reviews. I can name specific books that are now considered masterworks and that received savage reviews upon publication. I point out that a bad review means someone read the book, which means the book is reaching people, and reaching people means some of those people won’t like it. This is not a failure; it’s a mathematical certainty. A book that everyone likes is either a unicorn or a book that nobody has strong feelings about, and I’d rather publish the latter than the former. Wait, I mean the former rather than the latter. Actually, I mean I’d rather publish a book that provokes strong reactions, both positive and negative, than one that generates universal indifference.

Some authors handle negative reviews with remarkable equanimity. One of our authors keeps a file of her worst reviews and reads them before she sits down to write, as a kind of motivational defiance. “If that person hated my last book,” she told me, “then I must be doing something right, because that person and I have nothing in common aesthetically.” I admire this attitude tremendously, even though I can’t quite manage it myself.

The Star Rating Problem

I have a specific grudge against star ratings, and I’m going to take a moment to articulate it. The five-star scale that Amazon and Goodreads use to rate books is a terrible system for evaluating literature. It reduces the entire spectrum of possible responses to a book, from intellectual stimulation to emotional devastation to quiet appreciation to profound boredom, into a single number between one and five. This is absurd. A book isn’t a hotel room. You can’t assess it on a linear scale of quality.

I’ve seen books that I consider genuinely great sitting at 3.5 stars on Goodreads, and books that I consider mediocre sitting at 4.3. The reason is usually that the great book is challenging or unusual in ways that polarize readers (some love it, some hate it, the average lands in the middle), while the mediocre book is pleasant and inoffensive in a way that generates uniform but unenthusiastic approval. The star rating rewards pleasantness and punishes ambition. It’s the wrong incentive for an art form.

As a publisher, I try not to let star ratings influence our decisions. But it’s hard, because star ratings influence reader behavior, and reader behavior influences sales. A book with a 3.5-star average will sell fewer copies than the same book with a 4.3-star average, all else being equal, because many readers use star ratings as a screening mechanism. They won’t even look at the reviews if the average is below some threshold. This creates a system where the most interesting books, the ones that provoke disagreement and passion, are systematically disadvantaged in the marketplace.

What We Actually Do With Negative Feedback

I’ve described a lot of emotional processing, but we also do practical things with negative feedback. Here’s what that looks like.

For each book, we maintain an internal document that tracks recurring themes in negative reviews. If five different reviewers mention that the middle section drags, that’s a pattern worth noting. It won’t change the current book, but it will inform how we edit the author’s next one. If several reviewers express confusion about a particular plot point, that tells us something about the clarity of the writing that we should pay more attention to in future editing passes.

We also look at negative reviews for marketing insights. If reviewers consistently describe a book differently from how we positioned it (for example, if we marketed it as a literary novel and reviewers keep calling it a thriller), that’s a sign that our positioning was off. We’ve adjusted marketing copy and even cover designs for paperback editions based on patterns we noticed in reviews.

And, honestly, we use negative reviews as a gut check on our own taste. If I loved a book during the editorial process and multiple thoughtful reviewers identify the same weakness, I have to consider the possibility that I was wrong about something. Not that the book is bad, necessarily, but that my closeness to the project blinded me to a problem that outside readers could see clearly. This kind of self-correction is uncomfortable but necessary. An editor who never questions their own judgment is an editor who’s stopped growing.

The Philosophical View

I’ve been in publishing long enough to have developed a philosophical framework for thinking about negative reviews, and I’ll share it, with the caveat that philosophical frameworks are easier to articulate than to practice.

A book is a communication between an author and a reader. Like all communications, it can fail in many ways: the message can be unclear, the receiver can be inattentive, the channel can introduce noise, the expectations can be misaligned. A negative review is often not a judgment on the book’s quality but a record of a failed communication. The book tried to say something and the reader didn’t hear it, or heard something different, or wasn’t interested in what was being said.

This framing helps me because it removes the moral dimension. A negative review is not an indictment of the author’s talent or the publisher’s judgment. It’s a data point about how a particular book landed with a particular reader at a particular moment. Some of those data points are informative. Some are not. The skill is in telling the difference.

The other thing I believe, and this one is harder to maintain in the face of a truly nasty review, is that negative reviews are a sign of a healthy literary culture. A culture where every book gets praised is a culture where no one is paying attention. Disagreement about books means that people care about what they read, that they have standards and opinions, and that they’re willing to express them publicly. I’d rather publish books that some people hate and some people love than books that everybody thinks are merely okay.

Our books, including The Cartographer’s Dilemma and Still Waters, have received their share of both enthusiastic praise and pointed criticism. We’re proud of all of them, and we’re grateful to every reader who took the time to share their honest response, whether that response was five stars or one.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We read the reviews. We feel the feelings. And then we get back to work.