How I stopped caring for reviews
And why you should as well
A day doesn’t go by without an author complaining about reviews, or the lack thereof, on social media. It can get as bad as writers having a nervous breakdown for anything less than four stars or sobbing audibly when their book doesn’t get enough.
As everything that happens of socials such as Twitter (pardon, I meant whatever the fuck is supposed to be now), this is best understood as a performance. Call me optimistic - but I want to believe that my fellow writers are not so easily sent spiraling.
However I still think that most authors, especially indie ones, still care deeply. While I understand and reviews definitely drive sales, I think fretting about them brings more harm than good.
It’s out of your hands
As the saying goes, there is no point on stressing about things you cannot control. Reviews sit firmly in this category.
You cannot control how your work will be perceived. You cannot force your readers to read it from start to finish, even less you can expect they will enjoy it.
A basic model of communication sciences describes a sender (A) a medium, and a receiver (B). In our case, it's a one to many channel. The book, our medium, can reach multiple receivers.
For sure as authors we would like for our message to go through to all the readers. We would like for them to "get us", to understand the themes 100%, to be on the journey with us, to be excited for our worlds or characters. However communication is not flawless and you need to understand that for you, this is a numbers game.
If you are lucky enough to have a large audience (even only relatively large) you also have to accept that not everyone will be 100% on board. This doesn't indicate necessarily a failure on your part - it's just the nature of communication.
Put yourself in the reader's shoes. Do you respect and review each author you read? When you dislike a book, do you stop to think that maybe it's because you misunderstood the message?
My bet is that you don't, and you would rather defend your opinions about books that you like and books that you don't like. And that's ok. It would be extremely obnoxious for someone to sweep in and try to rob you of your right to express an opinion.
You see, then, that you must hold your readers to the same standard.
In short: you're not owed a review, you're not owed any stars, and you're not owed a full, attentive read of your work. While we can wish for those things, we must never demand them. Doing so reeks of entitlement.
Sure, it's painful if something we've written gets discarded in the DNF pile. but we cannot control how people decide to spend their leisure time.
Don’t invest in a broken system.
You probably already have a quite precise idea on how the review system is easily broken. I mostly use Goodreads, and was surprised when I discovered that two stars there are supposed to mean “it was ok”, while three are “I liked it”.
Useless to say, the common reader wouldn't buy a book with an average rating of three. Furthermore, even putting aside issues as review-bombing and fake reviews, grading system like this operate on the assumption that the readers assign a similar value to each grade. We most surely do not. This is mostly studied in education - where schools strive to find an objective, bias-free way of evaluating students’ work - and it’s far from a solved problem.
I guarantee that what constitutes a 4-stars for me will be way different than yours. I struggle even more with 5-stars, since I have some great, seminal work in that rank and every new book that wants to join as to deal with some frankly unrealistic assumptions. After all, some books are really outside those simple lines. Can we really describe the importance of Primo Levi’s “If this is a man” with a simple, sanitized five-point system?
In attempt to make reviews more clear, many clarify beforehand what value they assign to each star or how they evaluate a work. While this is a step forward, it’s not as important as the buyers often see aggregated data (the average of your grades, rather than every single review in-depth).
Now factor in fakes, review bombing, and possible bad faith reviewers.
Guidelines for moving forward
If you stress about a thing that you can’t control you’re contributing to increasing your mental load - it doesn’t help you, and it doesn’t help your craft. Heartfelt pleads to your reader base for good reviews, even when coming from a good place, won’t address the issue as well, as the system is already faulty.
Most of all, you want to avoid looking entitled, because you aren’t. You can’t, and should expect to, have a say on how your readers feel and how they spend their time.
What we can do is spread the understanding that the current setup is faulty at best, broken at worst, and possibly be ready to support a better system when it presents itself.
Last but not least. My short story collection, Reality and Contagion, will be on sale at 1.99 till the end of August as part of the Narratess Indie Sale. Inside you'll find 14 short stories of speculative fiction. I can summarize them as a modern take on the golden age of scifi and pulp, with some nods here and there to the new weird and to internet culture.
All the info, links and more over to my website: https://en.mwrites.net/rec
My book is not alone: plenty of excellent indie books have joined the sale as well. Give it a look and feel free to write (or not write) reviews about it.
Was this useful? Maybe you’d consider clicking on one of those two buttons?