Your book got a lousy review? Twitter seems to be the tool of choice for hitting back at the reviewer.Alice Hoffman called Boston Globe critic Roberta Silman a moron for this review (which actually contains plenty that isn't negative!) and demanded to know :
How do some people get to review books? Now any idiot can be a critic.She then tweeted (is there such a verb, or should that be twote?) Silman's phone number and email address to the world asking her followers to :
... tell her what u think of snarky critics ...This bordered on harrassment writes Kate Ward at Entertainment Weekly who adds a rather amusing aside :
Thanks to a tipster, we stumbled upon an interview with author Richard Ford, in which he admits to putting a gunshot hole through a book written by a writer who panned one of his books. The reviewer? Alice Hoffman.UCL's professor of English, John Mullan in The Guardian reckons we can expect more authors sounding off on Twitter because it is a safety valve, but reckons that the best response to a less than good review is a dignified silence. This blogger agrees.
Postscript :
Philip Hensher writes in The Telegraph :
The danger of the internet ... is not so much that anyone can express their opinion – if that is true, everyone is also free to ignore that opinion – but the way it sets a casual statement in stone, and propagates it freely. An author's response to a bad review may be immediate, but the heartfelt expression of your emotional pain is there for as long as anyone chooses to preserve it. ... A comment in conversation, a bad-tempered grunt over breakfast, disappears into thin air; five foul-tempered sentences responding to a blog stay there indefinitely. In former times, what preserved your writing was what came out in hard covers.
