Death by False Praise & Mediocrity

How failing to be honestly critical hurts the ones you love most.

“Oh gee, honey, that’s a really good drawing!”

A cursed image while making some clip art. AI doesn’t get to hang on the fridge either.

How often do we see and hear this exchange happen between parent and child after the offering of a piece of art their offspring had created? All the time. It’s almost compulsory for a parent to do this. Of course, this is because the child doesn’t know any better. They were doing something creative that made them happy or as a gift to you.

But what I’ve started to notice is that some people never grow out of it.

The habit keeps going and expands. The strongest impulse to give insincere praise is often toward family (If you’re well adjusted or don’t have too many overcompetative siblings) and extends out to friends and those we want to be our friends. We don’t want hurt feelings and for those we want help from to dislike us. This drives us, and I include myself in struggling with this impulse, to couch or soften the true criticism of our work. We downplay the negative and pump up the positive.

So what’s the big deal? We help those people with good reviews, critiques and feedback. They like us and we get our own booster as well. I’ll show you what’s wrong with this by cribbing a bit from The Simpsons:

How does this relate?

As an author, I’m part of several social groups and networks with other creatives and publishers that help each other out offering feedback and critiques in an effort to grow our respective businesses. We work with one another in an effort to cross promote and raise up everyone participating in the network. Note the term ‘participating’, because that has become a non-negotiable componant of it all. You must be contributing and helping people out and in turn you get help you need. Sure there are spillover perks to those not participating, but it’s limited. If you’re not known by your peers, we can’t really help you so much. The days of the cloistered writer, divorcing themselves from public contact let alone needing peers is dead. It has been for over 15 years now, but many people haven’t gotten the message.

Honest feedback is a must in this environment. “A true friend tells you when you have shit on your face”, as my grandmother would say. Yeah, gramma was a feisty one. If something’s bad, we can’t fix it unless we know. This is why false praise or the “speak no evil” method fails everyone in the conversation. The creative can no longer trust the opinion of the person blessing them with faint praise or no praise, and the one giving the critique makes their opinion look suspect to the third party who believed their exaggerated praise, or wasn’t warned off because they gave no feedback when it counted, or refused to leave a review.

I’m not talking being mean or rude criticism. It’s easy to recognize an asshat who has an axe to grind. I’ve had a few reviews myself that I read and saw why they didn’t like my books (One because he was told it was something it wasn’t and went in with the wrong mindset and the other because he was a jealous git just looking to hurt someone writing in a style he hated.) It’s easy to discount it and I’m at the stage of my career where reading critiques is either edifying or educational… and I do read them if I can find them.

More than once, from several different sources, I’ve heard people say “I just won’t leave a review if I don’t like it”. I get that. They’re afraid of being punished by losing access to that person or they don’t want to be thought of as meanspirited. That’s how the slur “racist” had power for so long this century. People were so caught up in projecting the image they were nice and good people, they hid a lot of wickedness, and gave in to a lot of social blackmail.

Honestly, we need to stop being afraid of being considered mean or unkind if we stand on truth or have justified opinions of things. At least then your thoughts have value. I, as either the creative or the third party watching on can trust that when you say something critical, I can trust it. It isn’t meanspirited and it isn’t false praise. That won’t hurt my feelings, and we should wonder about those who are hurt.

Recently though, I’ve noticed something, thanks to becoming involved in several new online creatives groups. Successful and producing authors don’t get their feelings hurt if the feedback is honest. Well, they handle it better. They may have a meltdown in private, but they bounce right back and get to work. They don’t get personal and internalize the hard criticism. It’s not someone bashing them personally. It’s a story that reader has an issue with.

On the other hand, those who are hobbyists, struggling amateurs, wannabes and neverwillbes can lose their minds over bad feedback and critical input. Even if its from a professional and designed to make the work better, all they have to do is use it, they reject it. Too often I got a response from my critical feedback from other authors struggling to make it into the business like this:

“Well, you’re just not my target audience!” they huff.

And they are often right. The story has problems… often severe… that will ensure they never get published by a press, or if they go indie, they’ll never be bought. I’ve worked with several authors on helping them get their covers closer to a professional standard. As a graphic artist on the side, I have good information to share, particularly with typography. Some have rejected that input with scorn. Others have used it and made really good covers. Not saying it was all my work, but the input I gave pushed it over the edge to something that could stand on the shelf next to a Baen or Tor cover and hold it’s head up. These are actually better ones than stuff I’ve tried to save but failed. Don’t be these guys either:

https://lithub.com/50-very-bad-book-covers-for-literary-classics/

Ultimately, I’m writing this as a warning to a lot of people struggling to step up and become full time authors and make their living with their writing. It’s not going to be easy, but it will be impossible if you’re not willing to listen to people giving you feedback and not internalize it as criticism of you. Those of you out there who are critiquing your work are (hopefully) doing so with the honest intent of making your work better so it will not be rejected by the public as amateur or worse, crap. There’s lot of ways you can save yourself, but it will involve wasted money and time if you have to go back and fix things you were warned about in the first place.

The public already has a sour taste in their mouth with indies producing crap work and strutting about like a pigeon on a chess board pretending it won the game. If your work is sub-par because you didn’t care enough to make it as good as you could by taking advice from outsiders giving you honest but often stinging criticism, the public will deliver that message to you in scorn or worse, apathy. You’ll die in silence watching your books fall millions of places on amazon or wherever you’ve put your book up to sell. It’s humiliating, and hurts like hell. Something you could have prevented.

But this is one side of the coin, getting people brave enough to give you the truth despite their love for you and tell you what you need to hear. Just like Harry Chapin’s “30,000 Pounds of Bananas”. Harry… it sucks.

The other side of the coin are those who shill for you. Technically this is a tangent to critiquing, but it’s public facing. These are people who tell the world about your work in reviews and podcasts and interviews. They’re supposed to have read your work and given the public unvarnished, all-be-it entertaining reactions. They’re providing a service to the public more than you saying “Hey world! This project is <insert descriptor here>! Let me tell you about it.” These shills, promoters, critics, interviewers, cheerleaders have an obligation to warn or encourage the public toward your work.

But what happens if they read your work and either keep silent, or worse, damn it with unearned and misleading praise? They hurt you, the creative. They hurt themselves as the untrustworthy critic. Plus they hurt the public by foisting poor quality work onto them. In the process, everyone’s trust and reputation drop. Maybe they’re honest in their praise, even if it is exuberant. It could be you just hit their taste perfectly. Nothing to do in that.

On the other hand, if the public is having a different reaction, then it begs the question about their trustworthiness and your quality, and by extension indies and small presses if that’s what you are. Think of it this way, who trusts the critics now or Rotten Tomato scores after the plethora of times they’ve been caught cooking the books for Disney and Paramount. What schlock-fest of a movie got 90%+ fresh ratings from the critics but bombed out with a sub 15% rotten from the audience? Who’re you gonna trust from then on out? That’s right. Neither. Then the hunt begins for trustworthy critics who can give you a review you can trust.

There’s lots of reasons why this false face of criticism happens too. The biggest, at least for major IPs and creatives is the dreaded fear of “loss of access”. Just like game journalists were being cut out, subverted and denied access from studios who produced crap games and got called out on it, those journalists lost access to early content and shows. They were shunned by an industry that demanded every critique was a boffo blockbuster slam-dunk, and journalism learned. With indies, you don’t see that issue, because indies and small presses generally don’t get enough attention or carry enough weight to cut access. Nobody currently cares because the media ignores, sticking with the “guaranteed” money makers, even if it is just rage/hate watching the latest BS reboot of the big franchises.

That means this warning about failing to give honest promotion and critiques to small and independent press goes to you small channel owners who are doing bangup work of your own and are starting to become brands in your own right. Guard the trust people have in you. We need to know that when you say something is good, there’s little chance we’d disagree much with you. Don’t overhype, and don’t refuse to speak truth about what you’ve examined.

“Well I’m not one of them! If I don’t like it, I won’t say anything,” you may say. And yes, that is true, but that’s fear censoring you. I was once told that a review can’t fix the book in question, it can warn the public and give the author tips on how to improve the next one. Be that person. If it’s bad, tell them what worked and didn’t work for you. Encourage them to do what was good, discourage the poor quality. If those creatives hate you for it, so be it. They probably won’t be writing many more books, because professionals won’t lash out at you or resent your take. It may sting, but they will at least respect that feedback (assuming they’re even reading reviews anymore. Many quit because of the stress and focus on doing their next work. You don’t have to worry about those either.)

The public deserves those honest reviews that the author may not like to have. On more than one occasion as a consumer that 1 and 2 star review is what I listen to. If they aren’t just trolling, they often have strong, honest opinions that I may or may not agree with. I’ve gotten a few sales on my one star review because the person thought the reviewer was full of crap. 3 stars are often balanced or people quibbling on pet peeves. Good reviews are just gushing and fun to read.

There’s a service to be had in those bad reviews to all parties. Either to improve the next book or warn the public. They can also spawn discussion among those who disagree which also provides its own benefit to all parties if you choose to listen or participate. This also goes to improve the impression of quality to the public so they trust others like you. Just as with authors who can’t finish their series and making people shy away from authors till they DO finish a book series (accidentally destroying and demotivating many authors), we can’t be soft on ourselves and friends just because we don’t want them hurt or angry and putting out sub standard, mediocre product we’d never let a big publisher get away with. To be thought of as a peer, you must equal the measure used upon them.

Anyway, that’s what I have to say about false praise, protection of mediocrity and general well-intentioned dishonesty for the sake of our public persona as a virtuous person or the feelings of others who maybe really do need to toughen up and learn to deal with things they do that aren’t up to professional grade.

Let’s do better everyone and be honest about it!

Till next time, vaya con Dios!

I said a horse with a valkyrie! Dammit, AI! Quit drinking on the job!