Jun 19 2010
Great Literature Retitled to Boost Google Results
Mike Lacher has a pretty funny list on McSweeny’s Internet Tendency. I especially liked “Seven Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism.” Here are some reworked titles of my own.
- A Wannabe Philosopher Goes Ax-Crazy on a Pawnbroker
- They Turn on Each Other, in a Frenzy of Beating and Chanting that Devolves into a Mass Orgy of Drugs and Sex (I can’t phrase it any better than Wikipedia)
- Everybody Dies
- America, F*** Yeah!–nonfiction, obviously 😉
- It’s Like an Acid Trip but Legal
- I Get Paid by the Word, and You Can Too!
- Even Air Italy Isn’t This Bad (well, except that it actually is).
- British Schoolchildren Gone Wild!
The first step to taking criticism professionally is not getting upset, no matter what anybody says or writes. Overreacting to a negative review is FAR more likely to jeopardize your career than the review ever was (see: Alice Hoffman).
A bad review is more likely to GENERATE sales, because 99% of the people that read the review have never been introduced to your work and introducing it to them can only increase the likelihood that they buy it. Even a savage review will convince a surprising number of readers to see whether the book really is that bad.
Anyway, please do your career a favor and don’t overreact when you get highly critical reviews. Even if they’re aimed at you personally. For example, someone wrote this review on the above post:
Budding literary scholars, if somebody labels something as a comedy, maybe it’s not meant to be taken literally. 😉
So, yeah, don’t take it personally. To succeed professionally, you only need to please:
1) yourself
2) your editors/publisher & agent, if applicable, and
3) enough readers to pay your bills.
Nobody else is worth getting worked up over. 😀