A
wise person once told me that the best way to respond to a compliment is simply
to say “thank you” and leave it at that. It’s good advice, and I do my
imperfect best to follow it.
In
the past couple of months I’ve had more occasion than usual to follow the
advice, or try to. The publication of my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, and the resultant publicity led to the
realization that a gratifyingly high number of people I know were willing to
buy the book, read it, or both. Consequently, there were a number of follow-up
compliments.
Back
in August, I wrote in this space about the problematic nature of evaluating
reviews of one’s book — especially the type that can be put up on Amazon by
anyone who bought it. That’s a plenty daunting proposition, but it’s easier
than trying to assess the validity of compliments from friends and
acquaintances.
Experience of a Cynical Newspaperman
My
attitude toward receiving compliments will be colored, to my dying day, by two
decades of working for a newspaper. For more than half the time I was an editor
with the power to determine which stories got written. In that position, there
was a pretty simple rule about compliments. At least 98 percent of the time you
got one, it would soon be followed by a request for a favor and ha to be
considered insincere.
As
the proud author of a book, I’m not dealing with favor-seekers anymore, but
with well-meaning friends. And the first consideration in evaluating their compliments
is to remember that almost no friend is going to tell you your book is a piece
of crap and you just made a public jackass of yourself by publishing it. So
when they tell you they loved it, what do they mean?
You
can go nuts obsessing about that, and I try not to. But I have, for whatever
it’s worth, come up with a few rules of thumb for evaluating praise. If someone
says, “I loved your book,” then changes the subject, it may mean they didn’t
like it (or didn’t read it) but felt they had to say something nice. Or it
could mean they did like it but are uncomfortable giving a compliment. I give
the friend the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter but try not to assign
much weight to it.
The Compliments That Resonate
What
really gets my attention is when the compliment is followed by further
discussion of the book. If the compliment is followed, for example, by a number
of questions about the book, how I got the ideas for it, how long it took to
write, etc., I figure that’s probably an expression of genuine interest and
take the compliment more seriously.
Better
yet is when the person who compliments the book talks about its content in some
detail and with genuine perception. Last week I got a call from one of Linda’s
friends, who wanted to say she enjoyed the book and went on to talk about some
of the details she liked in Chapter 7. They were details I felt I had nailed,
so the compliment was particularly meaningful.
Best
of all, of course, are the rare compliments from total strangers. A woman in
the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, who has never met me, wrote on a blog that she
had read The McHenry Inheritance
while recovering from a major surgery, had really enjoyed it, and planned to
recommend it to her book club. Now that’s
a compliment you can take to the bank.
