On Twitter today, I saw a note where someone called reputation management the activity of responding to negative criticism.  At first glance, I thought nothing of it, until I remembered the adage I learned from my author friends who cautioned me never to respond to a negative review of my fiction.  How can the two be different?  Doesn't an author have as much a stake in his or her business as a corporation does.

What an author is selling, however, is not a business--it's a work of art.  Art is something strange, in which the consumer brings as much to the enjoyment of the piece as the creator.  This subjective experience is one of the arguments against critical reviews of fiction, the best description of which was expressed, possibly apocryphally, by Elvis Costello when he said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Most people view that as a negative statement, but I always thought of it as positive, in that to adequately express the feeling of one kind of art, one must make art. When reading a book review, it helps to have read other writing by that same reviewer, to know if you and the reviewer feel the same way about other books. It's the reason why many book reviews contain comparisons of the book to previous books by entirely different authors.

A business, even one that sells products instead of a service, is selling itself (the Brand) with every product. And, make no doubt about it, a business sells product, not art. The buyer's experience with a product should be uniformly great, no matter the product. That is, unlike art, it shouldn't be subjective.  (Yes, I know there are exceptions, which, as they say, may prove this rule.)  A business wants to respond to negative comments on its products, because every user expects that their experience with the product will be the same as every other user.  Say I buy a toothbrush and the first time I use it the bristles fall out. If I write this on Twitter, another toothbrush user isn't going to think, "That's just the reviewer's opinion. I like bristle fall out when I brush." No, the Twitter reader is going to think, "Well, I'm not going to buy that toothbrush."  That is, unless the toothbrush manufacturer steps in and responds ("Please send that brush, with its original packaging if you still have it, to this address, and we'll send you a store coupon to cover the cost of doing so and more."). 

The actual business of the author, in the sense of relationship management, is the author.  A negative review of your fiction is directed at the object of art, not the creator (or, at least it should be--sometimes a reviewer conflates the two, and sometimes a thin-skinned author will feel personally slighted because the reviewer dislikes the work).  The work of art should speak for itself and stand on its own. Reputation management for an author is managing their public appearances: signings, conferences, etc. If someone posts a comment saying, "John Writer made an ass of himself at World of Books by stating that he thought they ought to bring slavery back," John Writer might want to clarify and add that he was talking about a TV show he was working on set in the South of the early 1800s that had gotten too far away from its setting to be realistic.