5 Tough Tips for Surviving (and Triumphing Over) Really Rotten Book Reviews

You know the feeling — the shock, the shattering pain, the sick sensation in the pit of your stomach. A reviewer has just demolished your book and you feel stunned, attacked, and ashamed.

Make no mistake; you have just been very publicly humiliated.

“Newspapers last forever! I will regret this forever!” the famous movie star, Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) cries in Notting Hill when the paparazzi snap photos of her and William Thacker, half-dressed. Thacker (Hugh Grant) responds by asking her for a “normal amount of perspective.”

But those were newspapers. One can imagine them yellowing, burning or, as Thacker suggests, lining waste paper bins.

But the cloud really is forever; the cloud is eternal.

Recently, after a blistering review of his new novel, a friend sent me an email with the subject line “I’m going to Jump off a bridge.” I knew exactly how he felt. (I also knew he was not going to jump off a bridge.) But the incident brought back the pain of a bad review I received years ago, words that seared into me like fire.

It was my second children’s novel for Houghton Mifflin; my first book with them had sold well and received sterling reviews Now my new book was being destroyed by small, sharp stones hurled by a faceless librarian hiding in a cubby hole (I imagined). She described my main character, who I had imbued with my own heart and soul, as “extreme and…