Those really terrible reviews we all get

Yesterday Lexxie Couper sent me an email to ask if I’d seen a review that had been left on one of the bookstore pages of Exotic Indulgence.

Rather than reword what she said, here is a copy of her email:

ROTFLMAO Did you see this review of EI?

Anonymous
Posted February 20, 2012
 Ugh youpeople are gaross
Sex is personl unles you are a submissive at a bonage party

Now, had I seen this review a couple of years ago, I would have instantly gotten stomach cramps and wanted to cry. Because, seriously, who likes a bad review? My philosophy was always ‘my writing is only as good as my last review.’ So if the last review was a good one, I was on top of the world, but if the last review was a bad one, well, then I was all ready to give up writing forever, no questions asked, end of story. But over the years I’ve found I’ve had to toughen up a bit. In fact, my skin is so darn thick now, you could pinch me and I wouldn’t feel it. Which is why it’s almost (yeah, almost) fun to trawl the net to find bad reviews. I’ve had my fair share.

What I thought I’d do today, is not only share some of my WORST reviews, but invite the other ladies from IH to share some of theirs. Because when you write erotic romance – very explicit erotic romance – and readers aren’t expecting it, then believe me, there are some crackers! So here you go. For your reading entertainment:

JESS DEE:

These came through after Going All In was posted as a freebie for a month:

“This story was like a train wreck. I will be more careful what I download next time.”

“Yuck. I enjoy a good romance now and again, but this is not a story, it’s a 15 minute porn episode. I wouldn’t call it a guilty pleasure either, it’s just a nasty piece of garbage.”

“Copy machine repair stories are more believable”

And how about these for Exotic Indulgence:

“Tripe...This book should have been called nymphomaniac on the loose. No woman would behave as written. Poor authors must be short on love and high on erotic dreams. That’s why their book is published free. My advice give it a miss.”

“I absolutley HATED reading this…… such a waste of time! Maybe if this was based on a dream that Kylie was having that would have been different and I would have felt different about this short read….. it was completely unrealistic and honestly I felt like I had just read instead of watched a porn flick…. come on now, 3 guy’s on 1 girl, lets call it what it is…. a gang bang!”

But this one, without a doubt, is my all time favorite. It’s Mrs Giggle’s Review for Ask Adam:

“The only way I will enjoy this book is if someone hurts AJ really badly in this story, preferably by clamping his puny little balls to some electrocuting device and getting an orangutan to go crazy on the buttons on that device while showing the whole thing live over a web podcast.”

And finally, I had to share my most recent one, from Office Affair:

Omg If you guys read this you people are perves

Jess

MARI CARR:

Oh man…I hear you on the bad reviews. I’ve had some that still sting if I think about them too hard.

Retreat, one of my first books, was particularly massacred.

“What’s not boring and paint-by-numbers is patently ridiculous.”

“The biggest problem I had with this book was that it should have been a lot darker, and it should have been a lot less superficial.”

“The first half of the book wasn’t bad – if you overlook the clumsy and amatuerish writing issues such as dialogue tag abuse, stilted dialogue, and telling rather than showing – but then the story took a big nosedive. Right into a flaming lake of stupid.”

Then…when Come Monday and Rough Cut were offered up for free, I got a lot of reviews from folks who didn’t realize they were getting erotic romance novels with BDSM elements. Yikes!

“This book was free, and I paid too much.”

“This book present pointless rambling, wasted words, lack of perception and challenge, and one-dimensional dull characters with nothing interesting to say. The sex scenes are predictable and cliché and the writing is horrible.”

“This book when downhill as soon as i read about all the sex toys involved and really nasty rear end action happening.”

“There’s only one word that sums up this book. Garbage.”