Regarding the Tyrannical Reader

A friend called me the other day with, “Do you have a minute? I just need to vent.” I’ve long accepted that I’m incurably nosy as hell, so I said, “I have more than a minute. Go for it.”

My friend owns a business, and her story was a tale as old as time for those of us who run a public-facing business (if you publish books, you own a public-facing business). She had a customer who didn’t read the contract, didn’t take her advice, decided to be as cheap as possible, and was unhappy with the result. And he thought she ought to bend over backward to make him happy.

She was trying, that’s for sure. But she also needs to make a profit, and she had no obligation to do more for him than she already had. Yet he wouldn’t let up. He kept accusing her shady dealings and was threatening to report her to the Better Business Bureau if she didn’t replace his cheap product with a more expensive version at no cost to him.

I let her vent for a while (I was at the gym, so I was out of breath anyway), and then finally I couldn’t hold it in anymore: “He doesn’t want to be pleased.”

She fell silent for a minute, then said, “Oh, maybe not. But that’s so weird.”

Yes, it is weird. Yet some people are like that. There are people out there who don’t want to feel better. They only want to make others feel worse.

I told my friend, “He’s more interested in exercising control over you and keeping you afraid than being happy himself. Maybe decide how much more of your time and money you want to give him if you know it won’t change the outcome.”

One of the reasons I had such clarity on this situation is that I’ve coached more people through it than I can count, and I’ve encountered my fair share of folks like this. When you’re in it, it seems like you might be able to do x, y, or z to please them… if you can only figure out what that is. Often, they’ll tell you what they want you do to, but when you do it, they’re far from satisfied. They’ll find nitpicky things to take issue with or come up with a whole new complaint.

I hope you’ll read this right now and remember it for when you find yourself in a situation like this later: Some people do not wish to be satisfied, happy, or pleased.

That’s not their aim. Such emotional states would seem too unfamiliar to them and would therefore feel threatening. So instead, they seek control over others, and they use their anger and displeasure to do so.

They want to control someone’s emotions, thoughts, or actions with threats. They are, if we’re going to distill it, bullies.

They have rejected too many essential parts of themselves, and they are miserable. Rather than doing the healing work required to reconnect to themselves, they attempt to spread the misery.

This doesn’t mean they cannot change. This doesn’t mean they can never do the healing work required to risk being happy and pleased. But for now, they do not want to be happy, and you cannot do the hard work for them. You cannot reach inside them and heal what is hurt.

I say all this because there are readers who fall into this category of disgruntlement. It’s crucial for authors to understand that this is a pattern of behavior exists, and when you encounter it, there is no contorting yourself just right to offset it and avoid whatever punishment they have in store for you. There is no needle to thread here. There is no winning them over.

Some readers do not want to like your books.

Some readers want to hate your books.

Some readers want to hate you.

It’s crucial for those of us with any people-pleasing tendencies to read those sentences again (you know who you are). It’s essential that we accept this reality and allow this to be the case without fighting it and insisting we’ll be the person to save them from themselves.

Many authors are confused on this point and believe that the highly critical reader wants to like your books. Therefore, if they have a complaint, you may believe that there is something you can do to change their mind or make them happy on the next go-round. And so you begin to make small concessions, omit certain things that you otherwise would’ve kept in, compromise the very things about your story that set it apart and that your easy-to-please readers love.

In chasing the approval of such impossible-to-please readers, you inevitably forfeit things that are important to you about the writing process.

Worse than that, you ignore the readers who like what you do and simply want more of it.

There is a trade-off here. You can’t focus on the impossible-to-please readers AND the easily pleased ones. We will lie to ourselves and say we can (if we’re just good enough, efficient enough, perfect enough, kind enough, smart enough, etc.), but we cannot. We are making a choice to abandon one of these groups, so which one are you choosing?

I’m not saying that we don’t make mistakes and we should ignore all reader feedback. Certainly not. You understand there’s a difference between a fan kindly pointing out something they weren’t big on and a dysregulated bully coming for you with their claws out, though, right?

So, why do we bother? Why do we try to please the people who are hard to please, neglecting those who like our books just the way we write them?

For many of us, this goes back to childhood. We were taught that it was our job to please an impossible-to-please authority figure, and when you’re a child, your ability to at least temporarily diffuse the bomb of volatile adult emotions is nothing short of a survival skill. It makes sense, in this case, that you would create and reinforce a pattern of attention that flows toward those who are displeased with you.

But we’re adults now. We run a business. We understand more of how the world works. Therefore, we have the agency to decide if we want to protect and continue this pattern of attention or practice a new one that will shift our feelings about being an author in a positive and productive direction.

The world is full of aggrieved people who don’t wish to do what it takes to feel genuinely better. Many of them feel entitled to make others feel worse rather than exhibiting the courage to make themselves feel better. Added to that, the recent proliferation of authoritarian belief systems trains adults to forfeit their agency and expect a hero to come along and save them from their misery and despair.

You will encounter readers whose only goal is to make you feel foolish, ashamed, scared, and small.

Your ability to stay a creative and independent thinker depends on your skill in spotting these people early and consciously shifting your attention away from them and toward those who love what you do.

The degree to which your attention naturally flows toward pleasing impossible-to-please people varies from person to person and from day to day. You may be more inclined simply to focus on difficult-to-please readers rather than impossible-to-please readers because you get a huge hit of endorphins in the rare case that you win them over. I ask you to seriously reconsider if this is a pattern you to want to continue, knowing now that you’re neglecting your wonderful easy-to-please readers in the process.

Do you want to spend your time on difficult-to-please readers? You don’t have to do it.

If you commit your attention to the people who love what you do, that’s what kind of readership you’ll water, and you’ll gain more of that in your life. Let the complainers realize that you’re not going to play their games of control, and they’ll show themselves out.

“But what if they threaten a one-star review when I ignore them?”

My friend, they were never going to leave you a five-star review. Never. I need you to understand that.

Besides, everyone has one-star reviews. They want it to feel like you’re taking the L, but I’m here to tell you every time you let go of the need to try to win over a reader like that, that’s a big ol’ W.  

You may not believe me, but I’m going to say it anyway: you will be okay if you refuse to give those readers attention. You can still have a successful career. You can still have books with a high rating. You can still enjoy writing.

In fact, those things are more likely outcomes when you pay attention to the readers that love your work.

Letting go of the need to have difficult people like you is a process of maturation that every author can benefit from. It’s a way to take the shackles off your creativity and craft the story the way it’s begging to be told without sanitizing it or ending up in such a doubt cycle that you never finish it.

This pattern can hide in plain sight for decades, though, and only once we bring attention to it and ask ourselves if this is a tendency that we have can we start to unwind it and try something new.

I encourage you to take a moment and ask yourself: Am I letting a specter of an impossible-to-please reader live rent-free in my head? Have I neglected the readers who love what I write to try to please someone who doesn’t want to be happy? What would it feel like to let go of that pattern?

Am I brave enough to give it a try?