The eternal struggle: To read reviews or not to read reviews.

Honestly, I’ve been reading them. I come from fanfic land, where a comment is like a little tasty treat dropped into your inbox. For me, it’s not necessary for me to enjoy the experience of writing and posting but it’s absolutely an added bonus. Reviews on a published book are a little different. There’s no added cushion of a shared, mutual interest in a specific fandom. I’ve been on the internet a long time and I’ve gotten really good at curating my online spaces, so that I don’t see a lot of negative stuff.

But reviewers on sites like goodreads and amazon have no obligation besides leaving honest feedback and they certainly don’t know me or have any loyalty to me. So it’s with some anxiety that I check them, but I have been extremely lucky that the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive so far. To the point where now that I’m past the initial launch phase of the book, I feel less compelled to constantly check to see how the book is doing. I think that’s healthy, I think that’s a good sign for me. The book is its own thing now. I’ve done all I can possibly do to create it, support it, and send it out into the world. It’s too late to change anything, so reviews, good or bad, just are what they are.

One thing I’m excited about is something I learned from my personal lord and savior, Taylor Alison Swift, and that’s the art of the era. I’m really looking forward to revamping everything to aesthetically fall in line with my next book, tentatively out next year. Changing the color scheme, changing the imagery, all that fun stuff. I just got the next round of edits back on that today, which is obviously why I’m writing this blog post and not looking over those.

Speaking of Taylor Swift, her new album Midnights comes out officially tomorrow, but the perk of living on the west coast is that I’ll get it at 9pm tonight, so I better get some work done before then because we all know a new Taylor Swift album takes you out emotionally for a minimum of three days. Okay, okay, I’LL OPEN THE EDITS. Wish me luck.