Publishers need to sign on to this, too, because so many marketing campaigns include Goodreads giveaways. Goodreads doesn’t have a quantifiable effect on sales. Doing giveaways there is really another bullet point publishers can show authors so they (the publisher) can say “We did this for your book!”
The main thing I, as an author, find valuable about those Goodreads giveaways is that it requires users to add the books to their TBR, and then on release day, everyone with the book on their TBR shelf gets an email saying that a book on their TBR shelf has released.
I've seen some publishers do Goodreads reviews *after* release and I find those less useful. The valuable thing to me is all those readers being reminded that my book is out and they should buy it.
But that's really it. Like you said, it's an easy "we did this for your book!" bullet point to check off.
Still, it's something that a publisher has to *do* for the book. Half the other bullet points on marketing lists are "we'll make a page for it on the publisher website" and "the author will post to their own social media" *stares into the midlist distance*
I also wonder, though, how many people who put the book on their bookshelves & receive the email actually purchase the book. It would be interesting to see data on that.
I know I have 1000+ books on my TBR shelf so I don't enter too many giveaways, only for books I'm really interested in. Getting that email reminds me about it. However, my MO is to read it from the library and if I really like it, it goes on my Kobo wishlist to support the author. so my direct translation to sales would be low. There is value in the reminder email IMO.
Yeah, that is a fair question! I know I try to view it as a positive, since it's sometimes one of the only things a book gets. (Have you seen Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? Insert the "Love Kernels" song here.)
So the Love Kernels view: The add (and giveaway) shows up on friends' newsfeeds (I don't look at mine, but I guess some people do), and the emails are a reminder of the book's existence. The hope is that enough reminders will eventually get someone to buy it.
But it's easy to see that most books (including mine) have waaaay more adds than ratings/reviews. So...yeah. I suspect that *most* of those emails are not resulting in purchases.
I get that. Then again, these days there are very few marketing moves that directly translate into sales. It's getting the multiple impressions that move the needle. The only thing I really think of that can move a lot of books is getting someone influential to recommend the book, whether that's a reviewer or a personality. And that's hard to get.
> The main thing I, as an author, find valuable about those Goodreads giveaways is that it requires users to add the books to their TBR, and then on release day, everyone with the book on their TBR shelf gets an email saying that a book on their TBR shelf has released.
That's really interesting! It makes sense, but I hadn't thought about it before.
As an author are there other advantages to having a lot of people save a book?
This might seem simplistic at first glance, but I believe the solution to this phenomenon is for these sites to abandon the idea of star ratings altogether. I can't be the only person who values reviews because they reflect a person's emotional and intellectual engagement with the material; the interesting part is in the engagement itself not some clunky consumer guide system that's absent all nuance.
Agree. Reviewing books is not like reviewing a physical product, where we all can kind of agree what we're rating based on. Every single reader is looking for something else in a book and a good read, so the aggregate of stars is literally meaningless
Personally, I use Goodread reviews to find well written reviews (some indication this is an intelligent person) who uses adjectives that tell me what a book FEELS like, so I can make the judgement myself
Agreed. Plus, people use those rating scales in all kinds of ways. For me, every book starts out with five stars, before I ever open the cover ... and where we go from there depends on what I discover. Others have a much lower rater profile (average rating); mine is relatively high. When I get a low rating from a reviewer, I often check their average. If they gave me a 3 and their average is 3.28, I'm going to weight it differently when I think about it.
I seldom read my reviews anymore, because not all books are for all people ... but when the ratings affect sales, it's worth knowing what they look like.
All good points, especially weighing the reviewer's average. I hadn't considered that. I know I use them (reluctantly, under silent process, etc.) in a fairly blunt way: one star = not good, two stars = some redeeming features, three stars = okay to decent, four stars = good to very good, and five stars = excellent. But how is anyone to know my (or anyone else's) criteria?
I once wrote music reviews, and the media outlet I wrote for didn't use star ratings, which I appreciated since I could then express my engagement with the music on its own terms and not get distracted by this arbitrary and, let's face it, impossibly blunt instrument. When they began to introduce a star system, I drifted away. It took away the enjoyment. And also, a simple five star system is ludicrously inadequate for expressing anything; Goodreads uses it, and Amazon too, whereas (for film) Letterboxd at least allows half stars. And for music, Pitchfork gives the most fine-grained version I've seen.
But as a reader there, the star ratings help me quickly sort into books I want to recommend when I'm asked for one, and authors to avoid when I get recommended their new book. I read 200+ plus books a year and while for the past year I've made a point of doing a review for myself (I hate that it factors into book visibility) I haven't always. Devalue it, yes. But for us voracious readers, it's a godsend.
I try to stay out of Goodreads as much as possible. Personally, it doesn’t appeal to me as a site; when I first joined it upon its debut, I realized that my ratings of books were MUCH harsher than that of my peers, and since then, I’ve moved my book-logging to a personal document. I’d rather people not know what I’m reading or how I personally rate it. If there’s a book that I love and would like to share with the public, I take it to Twitter or Instagram.
Yeah I mostly don't rate books on Goodreads anymore. You can only offend authors you know if you do less than 5 stars. I should just put everything in an excel file and be done with it!
I've always felt that Goodreads can be unnecessarily tough on authors when it came to reviews. There's an anger to some of the reviews that I don't see elsewhere.
I guess this is why I like Substack so much. It’s not driven the algorithm and engagement, engagement, engagement. It’s about writing, good writing, and yes - provocative writing. The idea of enaging on goodreads was just giving me the hereby-jeebies. Thank goodness for Substack!
I adore this article. You've given voice to some thoughts I've had for a while, and yes, the recent Gilbert debacle is just the most recent, and perhaps the most media-heavy, of these instances of pre-publication reader-canceling. Why, indeed, are reviews allowed for unreleased stuff? That applies to lots of other sites, like IMDB, too. It's maddening and unfair. Thanks for writing this, Lincoln!
Gilbert is part of the goddamn problem. She pulled her book and thus gave her approval for trolling. If she had a pair she would have completely turned this around.
I don't read them! I read all my ones in newspapers and lit sites, but I restrain myself on Goodreads. But I do see the rating average whenever I log in. I wish I could migrate my book tracking somewhere else tbh.
Amazon's ownership and Goodreads' toxicity prompted me to move my book tracking to StoryGraph, which is a Black woman-owned platform that has really taken off in the past year. Not quite as slick as Goodreads but it just feels better to give them my clicks.
When Amazon bought it I stopped using it to track my books. I have a spreadsheet on Google Drive now. If it's important to you for others to see what you've read, this is obviously no good. But if it's just for your own use it works fine. And you can set your own criteria for what you log. And if you do it in Excel you can create graphs! To annoy people with! https://janerawson.substack.com/p/obligatory-end-of-year-book-wrap
I agree, Lincoln. My heart sank when I heard that Amazon had bought Goodreads. I review rarely and only positively when I put up a recent read. For me, the platform is simply a convenient way to track what I've read. This is the sentence in your piece that really hit home for me. "I think the fundamental problem with Goodreads is the same of social media in general: they care about engagement not accuracy."
Same for me as far as my heart sinking when Amazon bought Goodreads. I used to use Goodreads to keep track of books I wanted to read and ones I had read, and then, once I started publishing books, that did make it hard to ignore the reviews of my own books. In the end I deleted all of the books on my bookshelves and all of my reviews. It no longer felt like a place I wanted to be part of. I still have an author page and people can review my books, but I only look at it when a book has just published, out of curiosity. I now keep track of books I read in Notion, privately.
I have recently been review bombed on GR because someone didn't like my review of a different book. The torches and pitch fork crowd got a whistle from their leader, which also spread to FB and in 36 hours I got 178 fake reviews and one star ratings. I have complained to GR and am waiting to see what will happen, if anything. GR has become horrible, this is true. But so have people. People have become insanely dumber and angrier and more mean spirited in the past few years. In theory, people will be able to separate genuine reviews from the fake ones - but these bloodthirsty packs know precisely how to make a fake review appear real. By looking at the preview pages on amazon, they are able to grab a few key names and phrases to make it appear that they read the book. They YA readers (my book is as far away from YA as possible) are the ones who are most vicious. I agree that the 5 star rating system is problematic especially since it's the first thing someone sees next to the book cover and yes it screws up all the "algorithms" but we also have a massive cultural problem.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links on substack since this is the first time I'm posting a comment but if you're interested, here's the book in question:
I'm a heavy GR user, and I think it's the best platform (except probably this one) for engagement on intellectual topics in depth. It just requires having a certain reading diet and not engaging with unserious people. I've never cared about the actual star ratings for a book. It would be better to have more finely tuned filter for written reviews to get high quality ones faster.
Many years ago, a fellow author received a negative review by someone who had not read the book; there were literally five ARC copies, carefully controlled, and this person was not one of the recipients. When the matter was reported to Goodreads, their "leadership" stated that there was no way to prove that the person hadn't read the book and so the review would be allowed to stand. Almost all of it was negative comments about the author.
On another occasion, someone was looking for books in a particular genre at which a fellow author excels. I recommended one of her titles, disclosing in the process that we were FB friends (we have never met in real life). I got reamed for "self-promotion, since your friend is probably giving you a cut." This was not only untrue, it was absurd.
I seldom use Goodreads anymore from an authorial perspective; it's solely to track my own reading. It's not for those of us who write and, sadly, since Amazon took over it's not really great for the readers, either. I anticipate that eventually the 'Zon will kill it, just like they did Book Depository after they took it over.
Link a credit card and proof of purchase before allowing a rating. Pre-release buzz needs it’s own section, e.g. anticipation meter, like Trakt does for ‘highly anticipated’ shows. Also, book piracy hurts authors more than ratings.
I actually wasn't aware of how much of an issue this was, because I largely don't pay much attention to book ratings on there and merely use it for tracking my own reading, as well as a quick way to read the synopsis of a book. If I do go to the reviews, I definitely read them to try and be informed (with my BS radar switched on!)
There's a similar issue in the games industry. Games are subject to mass review bombings, but the platform Steam does a reasonable job of making you aware of whether it's happened for any given game, showing a timeline of review ratings and alerting you to any suspicious spikes, as well as some algorithmic checking of the content of reviews, I believe. I think it does a decent job of controlling this as well as simply being transparent about whether you should trust the review scores.
It baffles me that Goodreads allows reviews before a book is published. If it's Advanced reader copies, sure maybe, but they need separate review tags or scores.
Publishers need to sign on to this, too, because so many marketing campaigns include Goodreads giveaways. Goodreads doesn’t have a quantifiable effect on sales. Doing giveaways there is really another bullet point publishers can show authors so they (the publisher) can say “We did this for your book!”
The main thing I, as an author, find valuable about those Goodreads giveaways is that it requires users to add the books to their TBR, and then on release day, everyone with the book on their TBR shelf gets an email saying that a book on their TBR shelf has released.
I've seen some publishers do Goodreads reviews *after* release and I find those less useful. The valuable thing to me is all those readers being reminded that my book is out and they should buy it.
But that's really it. Like you said, it's an easy "we did this for your book!" bullet point to check off.
Still, it's something that a publisher has to *do* for the book. Half the other bullet points on marketing lists are "we'll make a page for it on the publisher website" and "the author will post to their own social media" *stares into the midlist distance*
I also wonder, though, how many people who put the book on their bookshelves & receive the email actually purchase the book. It would be interesting to see data on that.
I know I have 1000+ books on my TBR shelf so I don't enter too many giveaways, only for books I'm really interested in. Getting that email reminds me about it. However, my MO is to read it from the library and if I really like it, it goes on my Kobo wishlist to support the author. so my direct translation to sales would be low. There is value in the reminder email IMO.
Yeah, that is a fair question! I know I try to view it as a positive, since it's sometimes one of the only things a book gets. (Have you seen Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? Insert the "Love Kernels" song here.)
So the Love Kernels view: The add (and giveaway) shows up on friends' newsfeeds (I don't look at mine, but I guess some people do), and the emails are a reminder of the book's existence. The hope is that enough reminders will eventually get someone to buy it.
But it's easy to see that most books (including mine) have waaaay more adds than ratings/reviews. So...yeah. I suspect that *most* of those emails are not resulting in purchases.
I get that. Then again, these days there are very few marketing moves that directly translate into sales. It's getting the multiple impressions that move the needle. The only thing I really think of that can move a lot of books is getting someone influential to recommend the book, whether that's a reviewer or a personality. And that's hard to get.
> The main thing I, as an author, find valuable about those Goodreads giveaways is that it requires users to add the books to their TBR, and then on release day, everyone with the book on their TBR shelf gets an email saying that a book on their TBR shelf has released.
That's really interesting! It makes sense, but I hadn't thought about it before.
As an author are there other advantages to having a lot of people save a book?
Well said! I wish Amazon didn't now also list a book's Goodreads rating under their own rating. Double-damned in the one-star follies.
This might seem simplistic at first glance, but I believe the solution to this phenomenon is for these sites to abandon the idea of star ratings altogether. I can't be the only person who values reviews because they reflect a person's emotional and intellectual engagement with the material; the interesting part is in the engagement itself not some clunky consumer guide system that's absent all nuance.
Agree. Reviewing books is not like reviewing a physical product, where we all can kind of agree what we're rating based on. Every single reader is looking for something else in a book and a good read, so the aggregate of stars is literally meaningless
Personally, I use Goodread reviews to find well written reviews (some indication this is an intelligent person) who uses adjectives that tell me what a book FEELS like, so I can make the judgement myself
Exactly. Well put.
Agreed. Plus, people use those rating scales in all kinds of ways. For me, every book starts out with five stars, before I ever open the cover ... and where we go from there depends on what I discover. Others have a much lower rater profile (average rating); mine is relatively high. When I get a low rating from a reviewer, I often check their average. If they gave me a 3 and their average is 3.28, I'm going to weight it differently when I think about it.
I seldom read my reviews anymore, because not all books are for all people ... but when the ratings affect sales, it's worth knowing what they look like.
All good points, especially weighing the reviewer's average. I hadn't considered that. I know I use them (reluctantly, under silent process, etc.) in a fairly blunt way: one star = not good, two stars = some redeeming features, three stars = okay to decent, four stars = good to very good, and five stars = excellent. But how is anyone to know my (or anyone else's) criteria?
I once wrote music reviews, and the media outlet I wrote for didn't use star ratings, which I appreciated since I could then express my engagement with the music on its own terms and not get distracted by this arbitrary and, let's face it, impossibly blunt instrument. When they began to introduce a star system, I drifted away. It took away the enjoyment. And also, a simple five star system is ludicrously inadequate for expressing anything; Goodreads uses it, and Amazon too, whereas (for film) Letterboxd at least allows half stars. And for music, Pitchfork gives the most fine-grained version I've seen.
But as a reader there, the star ratings help me quickly sort into books I want to recommend when I'm asked for one, and authors to avoid when I get recommended their new book. I read 200+ plus books a year and while for the past year I've made a point of doing a review for myself (I hate that it factors into book visibility) I haven't always. Devalue it, yes. But for us voracious readers, it's a godsend.
I try to stay out of Goodreads as much as possible. Personally, it doesn’t appeal to me as a site; when I first joined it upon its debut, I realized that my ratings of books were MUCH harsher than that of my peers, and since then, I’ve moved my book-logging to a personal document. I’d rather people not know what I’m reading or how I personally rate it. If there’s a book that I love and would like to share with the public, I take it to Twitter or Instagram.
Yeah I mostly don't rate books on Goodreads anymore. You can only offend authors you know if you do less than 5 stars. I should just put everything in an excel file and be done with it!
I fully support you in your Excel spreadsheet endeavor.
I've always felt that Goodreads can be unnecessarily tough on authors when it came to reviews. There's an anger to some of the reviews that I don't see elsewhere.
I guess this is why I like Substack so much. It’s not driven the algorithm and engagement, engagement, engagement. It’s about writing, good writing, and yes - provocative writing. The idea of enaging on goodreads was just giving me the hereby-jeebies. Thank goodness for Substack!
I adore this article. You've given voice to some thoughts I've had for a while, and yes, the recent Gilbert debacle is just the most recent, and perhaps the most media-heavy, of these instances of pre-publication reader-canceling. Why, indeed, are reviews allowed for unreleased stuff? That applies to lots of other sites, like IMDB, too. It's maddening and unfair. Thanks for writing this, Lincoln!
Gilbert is part of the goddamn problem. She pulled her book and thus gave her approval for trolling. If she had a pair she would have completely turned this around.
So the Goodreads page is down now and reflecting this error message:
"page unavailable
an unexpected error occurred. We will investigate this problem as soon as possible — please check back soon! "
Coincidence? (Unlikely!)
Great read, is it hard for you to avoid looking at your own Goodreads reviews? I would find that extremely difficult!
I don't read them! I read all my ones in newspapers and lit sites, but I restrain myself on Goodreads. But I do see the rating average whenever I log in. I wish I could migrate my book tracking somewhere else tbh.
Amazon's ownership and Goodreads' toxicity prompted me to move my book tracking to StoryGraph, which is a Black woman-owned platform that has really taken off in the past year. Not quite as slick as Goodreads but it just feels better to give them my clicks.
Yes, and it’s pretty easy to import goodreads data to StoryGraph too.
I haven't even heard of StoryGraph. But I need to check it out before publishing my first book.
When Amazon bought it I stopped using it to track my books. I have a spreadsheet on Google Drive now. If it's important to you for others to see what you've read, this is obviously no good. But if it's just for your own use it works fine. And you can set your own criteria for what you log. And if you do it in Excel you can create graphs! To annoy people with! https://janerawson.substack.com/p/obligatory-end-of-year-book-wrap
I agree, Lincoln. My heart sank when I heard that Amazon had bought Goodreads. I review rarely and only positively when I put up a recent read. For me, the platform is simply a convenient way to track what I've read. This is the sentence in your piece that really hit home for me. "I think the fundamental problem with Goodreads is the same of social media in general: they care about engagement not accuracy."
Same for me as far as my heart sinking when Amazon bought Goodreads. I used to use Goodreads to keep track of books I wanted to read and ones I had read, and then, once I started publishing books, that did make it hard to ignore the reviews of my own books. In the end I deleted all of the books on my bookshelves and all of my reviews. It no longer felt like a place I wanted to be part of. I still have an author page and people can review my books, but I only look at it when a book has just published, out of curiosity. I now keep track of books I read in Notion, privately.
Great read, as usual!
I have recently been review bombed on GR because someone didn't like my review of a different book. The torches and pitch fork crowd got a whistle from their leader, which also spread to FB and in 36 hours I got 178 fake reviews and one star ratings. I have complained to GR and am waiting to see what will happen, if anything. GR has become horrible, this is true. But so have people. People have become insanely dumber and angrier and more mean spirited in the past few years. In theory, people will be able to separate genuine reviews from the fake ones - but these bloodthirsty packs know precisely how to make a fake review appear real. By looking at the preview pages on amazon, they are able to grab a few key names and phrases to make it appear that they read the book. They YA readers (my book is as far away from YA as possible) are the ones who are most vicious. I agree that the 5 star rating system is problematic especially since it's the first thing someone sees next to the book cover and yes it screws up all the "algorithms" but we also have a massive cultural problem.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links on substack since this is the first time I'm posting a comment but if you're interested, here's the book in question:
https://www.johnkolchak.com/
And here's the GR page. 168 of the 173 negatives happened since Friday. It is now Sunday.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123202131-the-eternal-return
Wow...definitely cancelling my Goodreads membership after this. Haven't gone on in years, but I had no idea it was this bad!
It's worse than you can imagine. It's a viper nest of people who have nothing better to do than to troll or worse.
I'm a heavy GR user, and I think it's the best platform (except probably this one) for engagement on intellectual topics in depth. It just requires having a certain reading diet and not engaging with unserious people. I've never cared about the actual star ratings for a book. It would be better to have more finely tuned filter for written reviews to get high quality ones faster.
Many years ago, a fellow author received a negative review by someone who had not read the book; there were literally five ARC copies, carefully controlled, and this person was not one of the recipients. When the matter was reported to Goodreads, their "leadership" stated that there was no way to prove that the person hadn't read the book and so the review would be allowed to stand. Almost all of it was negative comments about the author.
On another occasion, someone was looking for books in a particular genre at which a fellow author excels. I recommended one of her titles, disclosing in the process that we were FB friends (we have never met in real life). I got reamed for "self-promotion, since your friend is probably giving you a cut." This was not only untrue, it was absurd.
I seldom use Goodreads anymore from an authorial perspective; it's solely to track my own reading. It's not for those of us who write and, sadly, since Amazon took over it's not really great for the readers, either. I anticipate that eventually the 'Zon will kill it, just like they did Book Depository after they took it over.
Link a credit card and proof of purchase before allowing a rating. Pre-release buzz needs it’s own section, e.g. anticipation meter, like Trakt does for ‘highly anticipated’ shows. Also, book piracy hurts authors more than ratings.
This is a deeply goofy comment; libraries still exist!
I actually wasn't aware of how much of an issue this was, because I largely don't pay much attention to book ratings on there and merely use it for tracking my own reading, as well as a quick way to read the synopsis of a book. If I do go to the reviews, I definitely read them to try and be informed (with my BS radar switched on!)
There's a similar issue in the games industry. Games are subject to mass review bombings, but the platform Steam does a reasonable job of making you aware of whether it's happened for any given game, showing a timeline of review ratings and alerting you to any suspicious spikes, as well as some algorithmic checking of the content of reviews, I believe. I think it does a decent job of controlling this as well as simply being transparent about whether you should trust the review scores.
It baffles me that Goodreads allows reviews before a book is published. If it's Advanced reader copies, sure maybe, but they need separate review tags or scores.