Receiving a bad review can be one of the most distressing things for an author. Trust me, it doesn’t get any easier with time or frequency, so the upshot is that you’re going to have to learn to deal with it.

Maybe you think this doesn’t concern you. After all, your new book is great, right? Perhaps it is. Either way, it’s going to get bad reviews. Here’s the simple bit: all books get bad reviews. Any book exposed to enough readers will be on the end of an absolute slating from some corner or other. That’s the subjective nature of art. Take a look at some of the reviews below, which I’ve taken from Amazon:

All I can say is that I think this is one of the most boring and, at times frankly irritating, murder mysteries I’ve ever read. I didn’t think there was any suspense or any shocks … The characters are not engaging in the slightest – I was almost willing them to be killed off. I forced myself to finish the book because I stupidly paid £4.99 for it, but otherwise would have abandoned it early on. (The only reason I bought it was because it had so many fantastic reviews, which I am at a complete loss to explain.) I couldn’t wait for it to finish as it was a tedious tome from the start. I’m only surprised that so many people enjoy this tripe!

Sounds terrible, right? In fact, I can attest to that book actually being one of the greatest murder mysteries of all time. Perhaps the greatest. It’s also the third-biggest-selling book of all time in the English language, and has shifted more than 100 million copies. It’s Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

How about another?

This is the single most appallingly (sp.) overrated nonsense I have ever had my displeasure to read. It starts badly and just gets worse. The descriptions are turgid, the characterisation unbelievable and the use of language frighteningly dull.

Truth is I have never managed to get past the first of the three books that make up this shockfest. When I say always I must confess that I have attempted to read this thing three times and always come to the same conclusion – it is too bad to be worthy of my time.

Wow. What a stinker of a book. Nope, it’s J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The second-biggest-selling book of all time, with more than 150 million copies sold and a huge film franchise behind it.

How about this, then?

A very disappointing book – only the opening and closing quotations of note. Heavy handed prose, characters have no depth and the central theme … just doesn’t work and fails to convince…

Well you’re good at spotting patterns, anyway. That’s Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, the best-selling book of all time with more than 200 million copies sold. What I’m trying to say is that even the three most popular books of all time will still receive a terrible review from time to time.

Of course, Amazon wasn’t around then but I’m pretty sure there’d have been bad reviews in the press for A Tale of Two Cities in the 1850s, too. Had Dickens succumbed to them and believed them, Great Expectations might never have existed two years later. Had Christie decided enough was enough, we’d have missed out on 40 of her 66 novels.

Read this words and then read them again until they’re firmly lodged in your mind: A bad review does not equal a bad book. In fact, no books are bad. All books are purely subjective and all reviews are only the reviewer’s opinion — nothing else. One of my books has a review saying ‘This is the best book ever’ and another saying ‘This is the worst book ever’. They can’t both be right. In fact, they are. And they’re both wrong, too. Opinion is subjective, and for one reader it was the best book he’d ever read and for the other it was the worst.

Oh, and whatever you do, don’t respond to negative reviews. It never ends well. The trick is to separate yourself from the book. The review is someone’s opinion of your book; it’s not a fact about your book and it’s certainly not a criticism of you personally.

Do you have any tips for dealing with criticism and bad reviews? If so, leave a message in the comments box below.