Image by Tom und Nicki Löschner from Pixabay
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Reviews and ratings play an important role in lives of books. They help readers decide which of many books to pick up next. The wisdom of the crowd is something we’ve come to rely on in an age of superabundant choices. A positive and articulate review from a trusted source will make a better case for readers investing their time in a book than the best advertising copy.
For the purposes of this post, reviews and ratings overlap but are not the same thing.
Ratings
Ratings are a simple score of how much a reader enjoyed the book. Four-point-three out of five stars! They provide a reader with a flash assessment. Being numbers, they are easy for a computer to file, rank, and analyze. Authors smile at high ratings. It’s nice to see that people like or value your work. Low ratings are a mix of disappointing, depressing, and frustrating. Failing and not knowing why you failed makes the world seem that much more arbitrary and cruel.
Stellar ratings suggest that all the pieces fit. This time. Do the same thing again. If you can. And it might work as well.
Terrible ratings suggest that one or more of the pieces failed catastrophically. Did you write a bad book? Market it to the wrong audience? Is it time for a new pen name? It can be hard to tell.
Reviews
A book review can go into greater depth. The reviewer offers a mix of insight into what they read and how they felt about it.
Prospective readers risks encountering plot spoilers and having their experience of the book colored by the review, but they learn more about what the story is about and why the reviewer liked or disliked it.
Authors should find reviews—positive or negative—interesting. The reviewer is opening a window into their experience of the book and many important questions might be answered, including, but not limited to…
Did they follow the plot?
If not, where did you lose them? Authors are free to play games with intricate plots, flashbacks, flashforwards, unreliable narrators, and a host of other devices with the potential to confuse. Readers may enjoy the story being a puzzle. They may appreciate how confusion conveys the chaos of the characters’ lives and world. They expect it to be intentional. For the most part, they expect the design to be revealed by the end of the book.
Did they feel the way you hoped?
And intended. It is mortifying to have what one has written in all seriousness read as comedy. It is frustrating to have what one wrote as satire taken seriously. It is best to know when these inversions have occurred and to adjust the marketing plan accordingly.
Were they the reader you imagined?
Whether an author is writing to market or not, they have expectations as to the type of reader who will be interested in their story. A reviewer from outside those expectations is promising or perilous from a marketing perspective. Promising if the book got a positive review from an unexpected quarter. There’s an opportunity to reach out to a whole new audience. Yay! Perilous if the book’s marketing landed it with someone whose tastes and sensibilities are incompatible with its contents. Now that reviewer is saying harsh things about how a cerebral examination of a family in crisis fails as a psychological thriller. Ooops!
Ratings vs Reviews
As you might guess, I find reviews more interesting than ratings.
Aggregate ratings such as Amazon’s can lead you to stay the course, try something different, or pull the plug on marketing a book. That’s something, and not a small thing. But it’s not meaty. Positive ratings from celebrities or authoritative sources can be folded into advertising to good effect. At least that’s what I suspect. I haven’t had any experience putting such into play.
Reviews can highlight strengths and weaknesses in your craft. They can lend weight in support of or against decisions you made while writing your story. Those lessons can be brought to bear on future writing projects. A sweet pull-quote from a favorable review is free quality advertising copy.
There aren’t many ethical ways to solicit ratings independent of reviews. Paying someone to give your book a high rating is straight-up wrong. Paying someone to honestly rate your book is problematic. Asking for ratings is considered tacky and you’ll probably get what you pay for. In either case, most rating aggregators won’t tell you who provided a simple rating, there’s no way to know how or if the rater did their job. Attributed ratings lack proof of work.
There are legitimate channels to solicit reviews (which may include a rating as a form of summary).
Some channels do not involve a money changing hands. A robust social network or diligent research can connect you with book bloggers who are intrigued by something about your book. Terms vary, but you are generally hoping for positive exposure and the blogger is hoping for the chance to write an interesting blog post. This is akin to querying literary agents. Bloggers are looking for what they’re looking for and even if you have it, their dance cards may be full.
The modest scope of my (excellent) social network and unhappy memories of the query-wait-hope-wait-wait-hope-wait-rejection cycle led me to look for alternatives. To date, I have tried two.
Reedsy Discovery
For a modest fee, Reedsy’s Discovery site will make your book visible to a pool of reviewers who might or might not choose to review it. Ideally you post it to Discovery as part of the build-up to your book’s launch to create buzz and win pre-orders. Discovery recommends posting weeks in advance of your launch date. I did not do this. I submitted Raether to Discovery on its actual launch date and set the Discovery launch date five weeks later. During that interval I hoped that some of the discovery readers would find it, read it, like it, and review it. They did not do this. Sigh.
Grumpy
The nice folks at Discovery offered to extend the (potential) review period. I took them up on that offer. Nada. Zilch. I oscillated between despair and anger, as one does, before settling into a grumpy curiosity. How much weight should I put on this failure? Who was it that wasn’t responding to the awesome cover and intriguing premise? Would it make sense to approach some of the reviewers directly?
Heigh-ho!
Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go. Off to the open-bit mines. I made my way through the directory of thriller reviewers (link goes to the current directory), dipping into each profile to see what mix of ratings and reviews each had done overall, in the last year, and in the last six months. This was slow-going, as Discovery only lists twenty per page and bounces back to the top of the first page when you return to the list from a profile. After examining the first forty-seven thriller reviewers (out of about 200), a pattern began to emerge.
| Ratings | Reviews | 6 months | 12 months |
| 21 | 2 | 15 | 21 |
| 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 385 | 0 | 51 | 126 |
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 513 | 0 | 41 | 89 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 14 | 0 | 11 | 14 |
| 318 | 0 | 25 | 59 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 215 | 0 | 21 | 60 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 16 | 2 | 2 | 6 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 149 | 1 | 48 | 55 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 768 | 0 | 49 | 108 |
| 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 218 | 1 | 6 | 23 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 4 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
My read on these numbers was: Most of the reviewers are not engaged in the Discovery review process. The ones that are posting skew heavily toward rating vs. long-form reviews.
My impression from scanning the profiles was: Most of the reviewers are book bloggers, aspiring book bloggers, or the YouTube equivalent of book bloggers. Discovery reviewing is an adjunct to their book blogging platform and probably an experimental one at that. Reviewers follow each other and import their reading lists from outside, suggesting that for them, Discovery is a social media platform which is likely secondary to Goodreads.
Genre Shift
Someone from Discovery reached out to me during this second interval of quiet failure with a generous offer to review the cover and blurb and make suggestions on how to make them more appealing to the site’s reviewers. They weren’t able to suggest a change in wording but proposed moving the book into science fiction. Perhaps the reviewers there would be more receptive. This was a reasonable and good idea. The story has a science fictional component to it, as does the cover art. This did not work.
Down on Discovery?
Do I have a negative opinion of Discovery? A bit. I think it’s an interesting idea but that it lacks transparency with respect to odds making. It’s not an easy equation to figure and your odds certainly improve if you’ve written a book that people want to read. I may not have done that. But I get the sense that success on Discovery is also sensitive to the distribution of reviewer interests across genres and your timing relative to potential reviewer’s availability for engagement. Alternately: You need certain amount of luck place your book when and where it will get a review. This is not a bug from Discovery’s perspective so long as they have enough material coming in to interest readers and fill their newsletters.
All is not lost.
Raether emerged into public view on Discovery. A few people have seen it there.
Kirkus Reviews
Chances are you’ve seen Kirkus Reviews cited in book advertisements, especially their starred reviews. Kirkus has been around for a long time and is a known quantity in the world of book reviews. For indie authors, their deal is that for a fee, they will match your book to one of their reviewers. In four to eight weeks, they’ll get back to you with the review, which is by default private. If you want to move forward with the process, you tell them so and they publish the review on their website. You are then welcome to quote it subject to their guidelines. If you aren’t happy with the review, it remains private.
The fee will give some pause, but it is fair. You’re hiring a publishing industry professional to read novel and write a review. If the reviewer assignment process did a good job, the reviewer might well enjoy the read, but it is still work. They deserve to be paid for it. Amazon estimates that Raether is a nine-hour read. If you take out a cut for Kirkus and add in the time required to write the review, the reviewer isn’t making big bucks. It’s probably a freelance side-hustle or entry-level gig.
The fee didn’t give me pause. It’s a marketing expense. I have made peace with risking speculative investments in my book’s success. As a sensitive and insecure artistic spirit, I dreaded the possibility that this stranger would dislike my story, a dread I knew from querying agents but more acute and grounded by the fact that here it wasn’t my pitch or first chapter that was being tested, but the whole of the actual story. Any fault across those hundreds of pages could sink it. A minor irritation with the style would accumulate across 114,000 words and erupt in a caustic condemnation of the whole work. Yeah, I came up reasons not to enlist Kirkus. In the end, pride and curiosity won out. The promise that I could bury the review if I didn’t like it helped. I paid Tensile Press’s money, uploaded the manuscript, and began the wait.
Kirkus took their full time, two months, to deliver the review. During that interval, I was sanguine. It was going to be okay. When the email arrived saying I could download the review, the butterflies in my stomach took flight again.
It begins.
A Kirkus indie review begins with a short description of the premise.
Raether’s review does a good job of this.
And continues.
Next comes an in-depth paragraph that touches on characters, plot, highlights, and lowlights.
The reviewer starts with a light synopsis the story’s first act, which is mostly accurate and only a bit spoiler-y. The highlights and lowlights that follow are fair and more focused on characters and tone than plot. The review warns that the tone becomes dark and cites examples in a mix of specific and abstract terms. My first reaction was that this was entering spoiler territory. And it is, but in a way that I’ve come to understand and respect. The reviewer is cautioning the reader that there are nasty surprises lurking between the covers. Cruelty and violence that are outside of what some thriller readers may enjoy. Startling trope subversions. Readers seek out reviews to make informed buying decisions. This review’s warnings balance that purpose with preserving most of the reader’s experience of discovering the tale for themselves.
Then ends.
The review ends with a one-sentence summary judgement.
Raether’s review ends thus:
“A plausibly chilling what-if tale with a smart, sensitive hero.” — Kirkus Reviews
Well, there it is…
If you read the Kirkus excerpting policies, you know that for me to use that quote here, I had to release the review for publication on their website. Click here to read the whole thing. I sat on the review for a full day before pulling the trigger. It took a couple more days to get the cover art to display with the review. It isn’t the rave, starred review I wished for, but it is on the whole positive and that pull-quote may prove useful. I’ve added it as an ‘editorial review’ on Raether’s Amazon product page and will seek other opportunities to use it in my marketing efforts. Kirkus sent me a follow-up email with details about who to contact there about promoting the book on their site and in their magazine. I’ll pursue that in days to come.
Questions answered?
I suggested (above) that a review could answer questions an author should ask. Did the Kirkus review supply any of those answers?
Did they follow the plot? Yes. The reviewer synopsized the first part of the story accurately and didn’t note tripping over anything later.
Did they feel the way I hoped? I think so. They found the premise intriguing. They loathed the villains and liked Megan and her friends. They found the disturbing things disturbing. I’m not sure they liked being disturbed in those ways, but their response was appropriate. The ending worked for them on an emotional level.
Were they the reader I imagined? Yes, but…
One of the agents I queried required submissions to include a description of the story’s audience. It was a fair thing to ask and something I hadn’t thought through before I wrote the manuscript. Working backwards from the manuscript, I came up with:
Raether’s Enzyme is looking for adult readers who enjoy a provocative premise but may not be willing to enter the alien worlds of science fiction. They appreciate the brisk pace of a thriller but not at the expense of humanity and theme. They are intrigued by imperfect characters making (and avoiding) hard choices in a world where personal and societal ethics are in turbulent flux. They are comfortable with modern technologies and aware that there is a dark side to our connected world. Their reading tastes are eclectic enough to embrace a full-on geekfest colliding with the machinations of a brutal mercenary within one story. They may not have use for superheroes, but they are willing to cheer on an ordinary person as she struggles to master a power that Superman would envy.
Experiences with early readers expanded that envelope to the point where I think the Kirkus reviewer was akin to readers I already knew.
Place your bets.
And take your chances. It’s not a game of complete information.
My small bet on Reeds’ Discovery crapped out.
If I can translate my Kirkus review into a few hundred sales, it will pay off.
Time will tell.
The story of my story is still being written. Stay tuned.