Here's one for the haters

I always feel nervous when a new book comes out. I avoid the book review sections of newspapers. I don’t go anywhere near my books on Amazon. My publishers send photocopies of clippings from papers magazines but I leave the envelopes they come in unopened.

I hate reading reviews of my stuff. Good, bad or indifferent, I’d rather not know.

Having said that, it seems that over the years I haven’t got that many bad reviews. Just one shocker for Vroom with a View from Bruce Elder in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was bitter, mean-spirited and personal. Amongst other things he called me a lazy writer.

I would have been none-the-wiser it except that it appeared in my home town in a paper all my friends read. My phone didn’t stop ringing from people asking me if I’d seen it.

It wouldn’t have bothered me so much except that the review bore an uncanny resemblance to a review he’d done a few weeks before on Antarctica on a Plate by Alexa Thomson, another Random House author.

My publishers told me that they had just rejected a book proposal from Mr Elder. And he was quoting the reasons they gave for rejecting his book.

Again, not much I could do about it. But when Vroom with a View came out in the UK, the reviewer for the Daily Mail couldn’t be bothered reading it, googled the Australian version to see what reviewers done there had said and then proceeded to quote the Bruce Elder review!

So, like I said, I avoid reviews now. I’d rather get my feedback from you guys. Critics, I’m afraid, have too many agendas, too many grudges and too many ‘friends’ to puff up.

Which, in a roundabout way, gets me to the video I’ve linked to below. When I found out about the Bruce Elder review I went onto the Internet and found his home address and personal phone number.

I was just about to set off on a trip around Australia and my plan was to send him a postcard from every town I went through. I wasn’t going to write anything on them. I hoped that would freak him out. Except for the last one. I was going to scribble ‘Well you did say I was a lazy writer’ on it.

Sally didn’t let me do it. She said the best thing to do was to ignore the nasty little gnome.

But I can totally relate to the Pelle Carlberg song below.

It’s much easier to criticize than create.