oh please shut up shut up

There are a couple really important things about Amazon I learned as an author:

• No matter how good you are, there will always be people who hate you on Amazon and say your book sucks.
• If people say your book sucks on Amazon, often they are right.
• Regardless of how much people hate you on Amazon, the worst thing in the world you can do is reply. All you will do by replying to your critics is sound whiny, thus making the people who hate you hate you more and potentially making those who like you like you less. Shut up. Log off. Do better work next time.

It is with these rules in mind that I give you the Amazon customer reviews page for Blood Canticle, the latest book in the ongoing (or is that neverending) Vampire Chronicles saga from Madame Anne Rice. It is not getting good customer reviews (I can’t say if they are warranted; I stopped reading the series after book four or so).

But if you page down you can find a rebuttal from Ms Rice herself, in which she lashes out at her reviewers for the “sheer outrageous stupidity of many things you’ve said here,” for misunderstanding the book altogether, for using Amazon as a “a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies.” She goes on to EXPLAIN the parts of the book that people missed, to go on about the themes and the poetry and this and that, and also to rant about how horrible editors are for a bit (which given that the rebuttal is some 400 words long and has no paragraph breaks is a big smacking choice bit of irony right there). I can just picture her in a big second-floor room somewhere in the Garden District, velvet wallhangings everwhere, sitting at some enormous antique desk off in the corner, wringing her hands, rending her clothing, beating her breast and typing away furiously in anguish. Heathens! Troglodytes! Misbegotten fools! You cannot understand my Art!

Oh god, its so embarrassing. Ms Rice: Please. Shut up. Log off. Do better work next time.

(I got it from metafilter)