Episode Description:
In this episode of What If for Authors, Claire Taylor tackles a unique fear that many authors face: being review bombed. When a coordinated effort to flood your book with negative reviews threatens to undermine all your hard work, how do you bounce back? Claire dives deep into the psychological and emotional impact of being review bombed, offering practical tools and advice to help you get through the experience if it ever happens. She explores the nature of anxiety, the importance of emotional regulation, and why trying to control others’ opinions is a recipe for burnout. Claire also shares strategies for rallying support from your true fans and emphasizes the power of resilience when facing adversity as a writer.
Key Takeaways:
Understanding Review Bombing: Claire defines review bombing as a coordinated effort to damage your book’s reputation by flooding it with negative reviews. She explains how this is different from standard negative reviews and why it’s often motivated by personal agendas rather than honest feedback about your work.
Regulating Your Emotions in the Moment: When blindsided by a review bomb, it’s natural to have a strong emotional reaction. Claire offers a step-by-step guide on how to calm yourself, recognize the emotions as they arise, and navigate your initial response. She emphasizes the importance of relocating yourself to a peaceful place—physically and mentally—before taking any action.
Co-Regulation as a Support Tool: Sometimes, self-regulation isn’t enough, and you need help from others. Claire suggests finding trusted people who can help co-regulate your emotions and provide grounding during these moments of high distress.
Rallying Support from True Fans: Once you’ve moved through the initial shock, Claire encourages reaching out to your true fans and letting them know how they can support you. This can be as simple as asking them to leave positive reviews to balance out the negativity.
What NOT to Do: One of Claire’s strongest pieces of advice is to avoid posting on social media during or immediately after the initial shock. She explains why this often backfires and offers tips on when—and how—to communicate effectively, if at all.
Why You Should Listen: If you’re an author worried about negative reviews or the potential of a review bombing campaign, this episode will provide much-needed guidance and comfort. Claire’s insights will help you approach the fear of review bombing with a grounded perspective and a clear set of tools to handle the emotional fallout. Even if you never experience a full-blown review bomb, the strategies shared in this episode will help you better cope with all forms of negative feedback, so you can keep moving forward with your author career.
Join the Conversation: Have you ever dealt with a negative review or an online attack? How did you handle it? Share your experiences and insights by emailing Claire at contact@ffs.media. If you need personalized support or a safe space to work through your anxiety around reviews, consider reaching out for a one-on-one coaching session.
Remember: You’re not alone, and your career is worth pushing through even the most challenging moments.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name is Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors as well as a humor and mystery writer. You can check out my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs.media/ustain. Today, we get to talk about a unique fear of authors that most people in society don't have to worry about.
They get to live their entire lives working for a company or a government agency sheltered individually by the larger reputation. I'm talking, of course, about the threat of being review bombed. Like if someone leaves a poor review online for my husband's police department, first of all, that's kind of funny to leave a bad review for a police department and you know there are gonna be a lot of 'em, uh, but it doesn't necessarily affect him personally.
If someone does that and it doesn't affect his ability to do his job, it doesn't feel as personal. But negative reviews are a big thing for authors to contend [00:01:00] with. It's sort of a fact of life that you will get poor reviews on your books. Now that doesn't make it hurt any less when we happen to see them, but there's usually a whole host of authors ready to welcome you into the club of people who have endured that.
You've probably heard it reframed as something like. That's how you know you're starting to get your books out to a broader audience, when you get one and two star reviews coming in. I think that's a fine way to spin it, especially if it keeps you from giving up.
And ultimately, we can't control how other people feel about the work that we produce. We can't even control if we offend other people. Whether or not someone gets offended is totally their decision.
So yeah, poor reviews are a big part of author life, and from what I've found, people can generally get over this initial pain without too much trouble. Of course, it's much easier to do that if a single bad review doesn't tank your overall average for your book. Now that does sometimes happen in the early days of a release.
So maybe one of your review [00:02:00] team members is actually kind of a shitty person and leaves you a one star review on lunch day. And yeah. I'm being really judgmental about that, because it's well within their right to not like your book, but why the fuck are they on your review team if that's the case?
Anyone with common decency would at least wait a few days if they knew they were going to leave a one star review, so that it didn't ruin your momentum. Not to mention your mood on launch day.
If this sounds like a little bit of a personal vendetta I have going on, Yeah, I had that happen to me with a reviewer on my team and she was very good about leaving her review on review day Which is great. She was even the first one to do it Anyway, grudges aside, which you're welcome to hold on to for as long as you want Just you know, try and keep them private or at least leave the person's name out.
That's probably wisdom right there But negative reviews can really put us in a tough [00:03:00] place and start to affect our overall rating on our book. And when that happens as a result of some sort of orchestrated effort against you, that doesn't just suck. That really fucking sucks. So let's talk about what we can do to more consciously get through a situation like that.
So we come out on the other side not feeling completely demolished. And so that we can make choices along the way that we feel good about. That's why today's episode asks the question, What if I get review bombed?
For clarity's sake, a review bombing, as I'm describing it, is a coordinated effort to leave one star reviews On your book or proliferate nastiness about you and your book, generally on the internet. I've seen it happen, and it is a horror show of people's worst instincts parading as righteousness.
Fortunately, it doesn't happen that much. Most authors will never [00:04:00] experience a large scale review bombing. So I do want to put that into perspective because it's not a super common thing.
There's certainly a bias that our brain can slip into though, because when we see it happening in those few times that it does, When we see that internet pylon getting started or that post of a desperate author saying, what do I do? We can let our empathy inflate the likelihood of it happening based on the intensity of the emotion that we're witnessing.
Even if you're not an empathetic person, viewing one of these orchestrated review bombings from afar will likely make you put yourself in that author's position and vicariously experience some of the horror, the shame, the powerlessness. That they're likely experiencing being on the receiving end of that.
Now, even if something doesn't happen frequently, if the fallout of it would be that intense, our brain will say to hell with probabilities. If there's any [00:05:00] chance that this could happen to me, I need to stay on guard for it. That fear can really set up shop in the back of our minds and add to the general ambiance of anxiety when we're about to publish a book.
Even if the book we're about to publish is as non confrontational and non controversial as a book can be, and we don't have any known enemies to speak of, that fear can still hover over us and suddenly remind us that at any moment our book could be review bombed and there's nothing we could do about it.
So yeah, there's a sort of powerlessness here and the fear that is terrifying. You can't control what other people do. Even our influence over others is fairly limited. And it's not super fun to look at the fact that we can't control life to the extent that we could somehow guarantee we'll never be review bombed.
That's Accepting that lack of control is just a scary thing for humans to look at. But it's important to notice if [00:06:00] this fear is taking up residence in our hearts and minds and bodies, because statistically speaking, it probably will not happen to you. And if it does, you didn't actually have control over it in the first place.
So that's not to freak you out, but as you'll see, accepting what you can and can't control here is key in getting through something like this. Anxiety tends to be a pattern that arises from the belief that we could prepare enough so that something that might hurt us will either be prevented or won't hurt as much if it happens.
I think of anxiety as a call to action, so if you're feeling anxious about something, it can be really useful to ask what that anxiety is calling you to do. It may be calling you to over prepare beyond what's even useful and reasonable. It may be calling for you to try to threaten or control others. It may be calling you to be small and stay out of the way, with the belief that doing so will protect you.[00:07:00]
It may be asking you to have your hands in a lot of different projects at once, so that if one of them goes south, you can bounce immediately.
Not all of the actions our anxiety calls us to take Are productive or realistic or wise, but only once we pull that anxiety out of the back of our minds into our conscious brain and give it some sort of form so that it stops being this nebulous fear. Can we start to really use our powers of discernment to see what it's calling us to do?
And if that's something we want to do. to spend our lives doing. Or if it's something that would just give us the temporary illusion of control, but not actually protect us from the pain we're trying to avoid.
If you're experiencing anxiety about review bombing, let's call out that anxiety and see what it thinks you should do. Maybe there's nothing to do because the anxiety is hoping there's a way you'll feel nothing. When people gang up on you, that it can prepare you, run [00:08:00] through so many different possibilities that you'll feel nothing, that it won't hurt you.
So, feeling nothing when a whole bunch of people scheme and gang up on you is actually a concerning reaction when you think about it. I'm sure many of us would like to believe we could muster up some defiance and shrug it off. But I think if you told a therapist that it didn't bother you to have a bunch of people coordinate and come after your business through reviews, trying to take your book out at the knees and make you feel like shit, any therapist worth a damn would give you that little eyebrow raise and say something like, Hmm, that's interesting.
In other words, They would hope to God that you were bullshitting yourself, rather than actually feeling nothing. Although, if you did feel nothing in that situation, if it doesn't bother you at all to think about review [00:09:00] bombing happening, they might hear a little cash register cha ching in their head, because there's clearly something going on there.
So, it's okay to admit that a review bombing would hurt. It would be really difficult. It would fucking suck. Your anxiety may run circles without end, hoping to find some way that it wouldn't hurt and suck, desperate for some possibility that you can position yourself such that the pain becomes an impossibility in your life.
If you notice that that's happening, remind your anxiety that it's wasting its time and yours too.
So instead, let's look at all the ways you can bounce back after a review bombing, because there are a lot of them. I already know that you can survive things that hurt and fucking suck. You're an author, and no author gets to where they are without having gone through some painful things and some situations that were extremely triggering and fucking sucked.
I'm going to be saying that a lot this episode [00:10:00] because of the topic. So, I know you can do that. And if you don't know that you can do that, then I recommend doing a quick reflection on your life and bringing to your awareness some of those times when you did do that. You may not have known how you got through those rough times, but you got through them.
You're already resilient to that sort of thing. You can deal with pain. So maybe it wasn't this specific situation. Like review bombing, but you've probably experienced something kind of like it with the same set of emotions before. So maybe it was like middle school and all your friends decided to gang up on you for no clear reason.
Maybe they started a rumor about you and spread it around. Maybe someone led a campaign against you earlier in your work career that just really blindsided you and was completely made up. Or maybe it wasn't made up. Maybe there was something to it. It doesn't matter either way. It hurts. [00:11:00] So, it's probably painful just to look back on those moments, but we can do a really kind thing for ourselves by shifting our attention just a little bit forward on that timeline toward how we got back up when those things happened.
The more you can reinforce your internal belief that you have resilience and use evidence from your past to show that, the more you can have faith that whatever happens, you can get to the other side of it and rebound. Developing that sense of faith in your ability to be resilient in the face of extremely painful things that you can't control, it's like taking a broom to a bunch of cobwebs.
You just clear that anxiety out of there. And when you start to feel it creeping up again, you can just remind yourself, I've done this once, I can do it again. I may not know exactly how I'll do it, but I know that I will. So let's walk through a scenario, we'll explore some of the thoughts, emotions, and physical [00:12:00] sensations of that process of being review bombed from a distance, from the perspective of our presently calm and safe minds.
We're going to activate the wisdom, common sense, and compassion that you have available to you right now while listening to this podcast when you're in what is, uh, sometimes called the window of mindfulness opportunity. mindfulness opportunity is when we're not in a hypo aroused or hyper aroused state.
In other words, we're not feeling like there's an immediate threat. Now, listening to this scenario may make your heart rate go up. So, if you notice that happening, take a couple of deep breaths in through your belly, breathing in and out through your nose, And that'll help bring you back down into that window of mindfulness opportunity.
Or back up Into it. So hyperarousal is that agitated state that we tend to associate with being anxious or hypervigilant and then [00:13:00] hypoarousal is similarly an unproductive state, but it looks more like checking out, becoming non dissociating or feeling your energy draining from you.
There's no better or worse one. to move into. But it can be interesting to notice when we go to one or the other, because we may not go to the same one every time. But if you imagine hyper arousal being Above the window of mindfulness opportunity and hypoarousal being below that window, then that can kind of give you a visual.
And if this whole topic piques your interest at all, there's a book called Unshakeable by Joanne Rosen. That's all about trauma informed mindfulness, where she lays this concept out more fully. Okay, so let's walk through this scenario. I'll pretend I'm the author, and as I talk us through this, just remember that I'm actually fine.
Okay? If you are very empathetic, just remember that I'm fine. The third book of my new series is releasing today. Okay? [00:14:00] We're starting the scenario. I already had it up for pre order and it had a few hundred pre orders on it. I sent it out to my review team two weeks ago. My review team consists of 150 people.
I'm excited to see that big number of sales on my dashboard, so I jump out of bed in the morning when my alarm goes off, I grab my coffee, and I head to the computer. Hey, hey, I've made over a thousand bucks off the sales of that book today. Things are looking great. But if I've sold this many books, I wonder what my rank is.
I ski daddle on over to Amazon to find my book sales page and look up the rank. And when I get there, I see that my book already has 78 reviews. And only a 2. 5 average rating. What the fuck? So let's stop here for a second because I think it's important to note that different people are going to experience different emotions at this point.
Will this author feel rage, panic, shame? That really depends on [00:15:00] the person. But it's interesting to ask ourselves what the emotion would likely be for us. I would probably feel like I was physically hit by a truck, and I think my brain would get very fuzzy immediately. I wouldn't be able to even access a particular emotion right away in this situation.
But you may have a completely different reaction. In this scenario and whatever it is, it's okay to just let it be that there's no better or worse way to be blindsided. So our judgment of our reaction is not really useful here.
You'll actually do yourself a huge favor if you can be honest about how messy the initial response might be for you. Again, it's not necessarily impressive to believe it wouldn't bother you. So try to observe yourself in this moment as you visualize being blindsided in that way. Observe the emotions rather than feeling them, if you can.
Observe the thoughts rather than [00:16:00] believing them. And observe the physical sensations without becoming them.
Let's talk about how we get through this awful initial moment that we're observing together. I'll be the author again. So my brain stops being quite so fuzzy. And Instead of everything blurring together, now I'm starting to get tunnel vision. This takes the form of determination to get to the bottom of what the fuck is going on, and hopefully put a stop to it.
Could I actually put a stop to it? Probably not. But I tend to default into a fight response when I'm in a hyper aroused state. So this is just a little of me dropping in here. So maybe I start by digging into the one star reviews and notice a trend. All of the negative reviews seem to be aimed at my personal politics rather than anything associated with the book.
And I'm just pulling this example because it has [00:17:00] happened to me. People have given my books, one star reviews because, , they discovered multiple books in that I wasn't a fan of Trump. I don't know how you read through four, five books of a series called like Jessica Christ, which is clearly a feminist critique on patriarchal structures and somehow think I might be pro Trump, but listen, Some people are a little dense.
I'm sure they have other gifts to bring to the world. Anyway, let's say I look at the reviews and they're aimed at my politics. For me, I would feel slightly less insecure, but possibly more angry. So this hypothetical author might not turn to anger as quickly as I would in this scenario. It may make them wonder what else these people are going to coordinate against them.
That could be scary. I don't know. Um, I've done a lot of work to accept that I'll likely die at the hands of a man considering how I act and the structures that I live in. But not everyone [00:18:00] has. And that's okay. So if this idea that there are a bunch of people out there to get you freaks you out, that's totally understandable.
Totally. Or maybe you're feeling shame and regret, and you're angry at yourself for publishing something that could be controversial. Or maybe you said something politically controversial in public at some point, or on social media. Whatever your emotions are in this moment, now that you understand the sentiment that led to this pylon, the best thing you can do for yourself, if possible, is to start to notice that you are in a state of really high emotion.
If you can name some of the emotions. You've got your foot in the door to bring yourself back into the driver's seat here. And if you can remember listening to me in this podcast episode, here's a crucial piece of advice. Relocate yourself to somewhere that calms you. Ideally, out of the [00:19:00] reach of a device connected to the internet.
And I think you know why. Uh, this review bombing will feel like an urgent crisis, but you're not ready to handle it until you can regulate your thoughts, emotions, and sensations at least a little bit. So your calm place might be your bed with the lights off and some soft music playing. It may be sitting on your back patio or going for a walk in nature.
It may be a coffee shop where you know the barista's, it may be a little corner of your apartment that you've dedicated as like a prayer or meditation space, but use this opportunity of listening to the podcast right now as a moment to think about where your peaceful space is. You're going to be able to think about the situation more clearly now, right?
The possibility of a review bombing is going to move through you in a much, with much more clarity now because you are in the window of mindfulness [00:20:00] opportunity in this moment. So find that peaceful place. Figure out what it is. Take a moment, pause this if you need, and determine what, where your peaceful space is.
Hell, your peaceful space could be your car or in the shower. Whatever it is, it's fine as long as it's a place where you have a pattern established of getting yourself into a peaceful and centered state. If you don't have that space yet, or you can't figure it out, or you're like, I don't know, I don't really have that.
Your homework from this episode is to create it. No excuses. Like, find a good tree to sit under, if nothing else, but figure out what that space is. Now, the Buddhist approach is to create that peaceful space inside of you so that it's available to you wherever you go. You can close your eyes and see it there and visit it as needed.
I think that's a great goal in all, but I'm going to be realistic and just say that you'll do yourself a [00:21:00] huge favor if you start with a tangible, peaceful space that you can physically relocate to. It's easier, and it might be enough to get you started in this regulation.
So once you're in your peaceful space, I encourage you to start talking to the scared part of yourself. And when I say scared part, it may look angry. It may look panicky, it may look ashamed, but this is fear coming up. So talk to that part of yourself. Validate it. Yeah, this sucks. This is, this is bad, right?
Let it know you understand. Because you do. It's you, right? Spoiler. It's you. So, so remind yourself that this is the bad part. It's not forever. Right now, it hurts. But if you can remember that, it just hurts right now. You've tackled the sense of permanence that can add to our fear when something goes wrong.
Telling ourselves this was the bad part is a proven method for lessening the tunnel [00:22:00] vision we may feel. I found something somewhat similar in phrasing and identical to this idea and function in Buddhism, cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, internal family systems therapy, and I use it myself.
So this is a very useful tool to have in your author toolbox in case of emergency. I can't tell you how much relief I've experienced from just being able to pause and say, This is the bad part. It reminds me that this is only a part. It's not the whole. Life is not bad from here on out. My career is not bad from here on out.
It's not ruined. This is just a painful moment. That also helps signal to me to start taking the steps I know to take during the bad part. The first of which is trying to self regulate. If you find that you're [00:23:00] in your peaceful place and you still can't bring yourself down and return to yourself, great news.
You have the option of co regulation. So co regulation is reaching out to someone who cares about you and can remain in their window of mindfulness opportunity while you relate to them what happened and how you're feeling. Because we're social creatures, we're wired to sync with others. So our breathing impulse will start to drop if the people we're around have a slower heart rate.
But you want to find someone who's good at regulation. So some people are really not the person for this job, often because they care about you too much and take on some of the emotions you're feeling rather than receiving your emotions and helping to calm you.
So figure out who your co regulation people are. If you're having a hard time regulating your own emotions, your body, and your thoughts, then do yourself a favor and reach out to someone who can help you. [00:24:00] Notice that at no point in this process did I recommend replying to the one star comments or jumping on social media to publicly regulate yourself.
I think I explained pretty well in the episode on public shaming why that is not a good idea. So let me just say it here in case you didn't listen to that episode. If anything in your brain, heart, or body. If anyone tells you to get online and post something on Twitter or Threads or Facebook or Tumblr or to your email list or on TikTok or Instagram about this review bombing, in as loving a way as possible, please tell that part of you to respectfully shut the fuck up.
And this advice is not just for Enneagram 8s. But it's also definitely for any of grandmates.
If you find that you did post something [00:25:00] in the initial minutes of that shock, after discovering you'd been review bombed, that is okay, we're all good. We get to do things that may not be in our best interest from time to time. But as soon as you can, Go delete that. It will not do the thing you think it will do.
I repeat, posting on social media in the midst of a review bomb will not do the thing you think it will do.
Now, once you feel more like yourself, which may take a while, and that's okay, it's time to start figuring out what is and is not within your control in this situation. We really want to focus our attention on what is within our control. So one thing that's within your control is not writing the book off as a loss.
The thing about trolls is that they tend to lose interest fairly quickly.
They may have shown up all at once, but over time you can get the people who genuinely like your book to show up for [00:26:00] you.
A lot of the time, if you let your true fans know, Hey, this thing happened to me and it sucks, but I think you'll understand why. I would really appreciate a positive review from those who will love the book. People will show up for you. It may take some time, but you can absolutely recover from a review bomb.
I need you to hear that. So I'll say it again. You and your book can recover and go on to live a long and healthy life after a review bomb. I've seen it happen. And the only time I haven't seen it happen is when the author gave up on marketing the book because they were discouraged. If you don't have the emotional energy to push the boulder up the hill right now, if it's still too painful for you to even think about that book, that's perfectly understandable.
And it's a perfectly fine place to be. You're absolutely free to step away from the whole situation for a while. And sometimes that's the best idea. If you do that, though, I would still encourage you to talk to someone who can give you perspective [00:27:00] and guide you through some of the feelings of shame, anger, and powerlessness you're experiencing.
You're not obligated to ever return to that book and try to dig it out of the hole, but you do deserve to not carry those feelings around with you.
So there may be some people listening who are hungry for me to do some sort of Enneagram type breakdown of what to do if you're review bombed based on type, but I'll be honest, I think it's beyond the scope of standard type generalizations to address something that can be truly traumatic. Like experiencing a pylon in your reviews.
I don't know if you caught it when I was describing what it would feel like for me, in my body, mind, and heart, to log on on release day and see that there had been some sort of coordinated effort to stop my book from having success. I described the body feeling like it was hit by a truck. The brain, my brain would be foggy, the heart center absolutely numb and not showing up.
So, that's what [00:28:00] happens to me in traumatic events. That's a description of a trauma response, really. That's why your reaction may be completely different and unpredictable. Trauma is a very complex and individualized experience that takes a lot of personal history into account.
Now, after that initial moment, You may be more likely to focus your emotions into panic if you're a 5, 6, or 7, shame if you're a 4, or anger if you're an 1, just based on the way that the triads shake out. But as much as I think that's a helpful thing to ask yourself if you're falling into a pattern, I also don't want you to feel like you should be feeling a particular way based on your type.
The important thing here is to simply ask yourself how you're feeling and accept that that is how you're feeling. Just observe it if you can. In other words, let's not have feelings about our feelings. [00:29:00] So what happens next? What happens once you've experienced a review bomb and managed to get yourself back into that window of mindfulness opportunity?
The truth is, you have all kinds of good options. So I've gotten some truly deranged reviews on my books, and I've reported them to retailers, asking them to take it down because it wasn't reflective or even related to the product. And yes, even Amazon has indulged me in this a handful of times. If someone simply doesn't like your book, then retailers won't take that down.
But that's not really the problem we're looking at here, right? Something else you can do is, just like I said earlier, rally support. And we're not rallying it for an attack on someone else, we're just rallying support for ourselves. So, if you have a large group of haters, you probably also have a large group of fans.
Many of those fans may have never left a review in their life because that's just not part of their consumer habits. [00:30:00] It happens. But if you let them know how impactful their positive review would be for you, most of your fans would be more than happy to show up for you in that way. When that does happen, make sure you bring your attention to it.
Don't let the negativity bias only allow you to see the people who attacked you. It's crucial For our well being, that we can bring as much of our attention toward the people who show up for us as the people who come after us. So that's where you'll find the courage to keep going, to keep writing books and publishing them, and to keep nurturing your fanbase.
Not because it's strategically useful, but because you feel genuine love and gratitude for the people who showed up for you during the bad part. When they didn't have to. They don't have to, but they did. So humanity, yeah, can be cruel. And it can also be wonderful. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
But it's up to us to bring our attention toward the good, [00:31:00] because the bad is pretty easy to notice. It's low hanging fruit. Deep cynicism shows a lack of this mindful approach. And it's a sort of easy default thing to fall toward. But being able to recognize the ugly part and find ways to return to ourselves and intentionally turn our attention toward the possibility of the beautiful part is one of the most inspiringly wonderful things that a human can do.
So I want that for you. And I know it's possible. And if you ever feel like nobody's showing up for you, I hope you'll remember that I'm here and I really am rooting for you.
Your career is worth the courage to get through to the other side of the bad part and to bounce back. So to answer the question of what if my book gets review bombed, I'll say that it's unlikely this will ever happen to you. But if it does, [00:32:00] you now have a few tools and steps to get you out of the initial shock of it, like finding a peaceful place and reaching out to someone who can help you regulate.
You know what not to do, posting online when you're still very much in the thick of the experience, and hopefully you can carry with you the belief that it is possible to bounce back, that the bad part doesn't last forever, and that if you let people know how much you need them to show up for you, they will in whatever way they can.
Your career will go on, and someday, you may witness someone else going through the same thing. And you'll be able to reach out to them and let them know that this is just the bad part. But you're living proof that an author can get to the other side of it, even if it's messy and painful. That's it for this week's episode of What If for Authors.
I encourage you to not immediately go to another podcast after this one ends, but instead give yourself maybe 30 seconds to To [00:33:00] take some deep breaths and remember that if you're an author, you are a person who's gotten through some hard shit and found a way to thrive on the other side of it. So that's awesome.
Give yourself that recognition. I'm Claire Taylor and thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you'll come back next time and feel free to share this episode with someone you think might benefit from it. Oh, and I would be remiss not to ask you to rate and review the podcast wherever you listen to it.
Thank you and happy writing.