I just woke up and checked Wattpad, as per usual. The first thing I saw was this lovely thread of comments from someone who read my Different trilogy and apparently hated it, so they felt the need to comment multiple paragraphs about how much they hated it.

DON'T GO AFTER THIS PERSON. DON'T COMMENT ON THE THREAD. You can locate it yourself for easier reading if you want, but please don't fuel the fire. I'm just showing this to comment on it at the end and use it as an example of what not to say to an author.

Check the end for a TL;DR (Too long, didn't read) if you don't want to read the whole thing.

And yep.... it keeps going.

TL;DR: They hate my book. They love Dylan's character development but compared her romance with Newt to the bland lack of taste everything has when you get Corona. They said at least it didn't make them want to kill themself. They don't know why they keep reading Newt books when he keeps dying and that I should have put a warning.

So I took the time to respond, because there were several key points I wanted to address and I couldn't just ignore this.

I get constructive criticism. I like it— it's one of the ways I can improve as an author. But as I mentioned in my reply, most of that was not constructive, it was just hate. And it kept going. They would try to scramble for compliments only to drag my work through the mud. And saying "at least it didn't make me kill myself" ???? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???

I write on a stupid orange hellsite. I write because it's fun, it's something I deeply enjoy, and it's something I'm very passionate about. But this is fanfiction. I'm not a professional author, my work isn't going through a paid editor, and there's no quota for the quality of work that gets published. I could make a chapter consisting of "andmfkakakdnekoqjd" and publish it. Of course I'm going to make mistakes and things aren't always going to be the greatest. My work isn't the quality of published books because guess what? I'm not a published author. I'm just a girl who discovered a passion for writing at ten years old and who made many mistakes along the way.

Of course I'm not asking for unequivocal praise on my books. I often mention (as I did in the reply) how I'm not very proud of Different because it's not a great representation of my writing now. It's been gaining reads at an astronomical pace recently and while I'm extremely grateful, it makes me upset because it's arguably my worst book and yet it's receiving the most attention. Not to mention it's for a fandom I now hate.

Different is the prime example that popularity ≠ quality all the time. It has a very large amount of reads (at the time I'm writing this, 2.5m) and yet it's so bad. I'm often embarrassed of it. I believe the next two books are much better, and yet they only have a very small fraction of the reads that book 1 has.

I know that most of my followers would never comment something like that on someone's work, but I still wanted to put it here so I could 1) rant, and 2) show you guys how these things affect authors.

What a wonderful way to start my morning :)