Too true. As has been noted a few times on the thread, no one’s going to pull their punches on the Play Store – or in reviews in mainstream media, should your work end up there.
I’ve written before about my experience with reviews of my CoG game on the app stores, but the brutal review that stung the most was for an earlier dead-tree writing project. A decade and a half ago, I threw my heart and soul into writing a narrative nonfiction book about the most vivid and traumatic experience I’d had in my life to date – the murder of my colleagues while working in Afghanistan. There were reviews that said “sobering" and "wrenching.” And there was the one that said “long-winded and superfluously stuffed,” which smarts to this day.
But the thing is, they weren’t wrong. I missed a couple of deadlines, got the draft book in just before the publication wire, and so it didn’t get the editorial attention it would have benefited from. If I ever get the chance at a re-issue, I’ll tighten some things up.
It would have been great if I’d been writing that book in a community of regular readers so that I could have had that feedback – however punchily expressed! – in time to make changes then, before I got it in the immortal form of a Kirkus review.
An author needs to be able to bear that in mind no matter how their critics are presenting their comments. But I certainly agree that a good critic will also bear it in mind.
It’s also not within our power, unless (as I wrote on another thread a couple of years ago) you’re the author’s “publisher, their patron, the government, or a crazy Misery-style fan who has them chained up in a cabin.” My fundamental perspective remains the same as it was then: “Telling the author how they should have done things is the reviewers’ prerogative…as readers, as customers, as human beings with opinions about how things oughtta be. That doesn’t force me to agree with them. It remains my prerogative to disagree and/or ignore them and follow my own tastes.”
Malin’s guidance on how to get the feedback you need is brilliant and should be turned into a standard resource for CS authors.