On Ratings

I've been thinking a lot about ratings and reviews lately. So far, with The Steam and Steel Chronicles, I've had mostly positive reviews. No one has rated it less than 3 stars on any site I've found, and pretty much everyone who reads the first one says they'll go on to read the second. No one has hated it so much that they bothered to email me or post a scathing review anywhere. I think that's probably a good thing.

But at the same time, it's rare that I get a 5-star review. I've had some 4-stars, and some 3-stars, but only a couple of 5-stars from people I don't know (gotta love my husband for giving it 5 stars on Goodreads). My average rating on Goodreads, for all of my books, stands at 4.24. Not bad, but not great. It feels mediocre to me. And in case I haven't mentioned it before, mediocrity is my biggest fear. I do not say that lightly. It really is. The idea of being "average" or "acceptable" scares the crap out of me.

Finally, I looked at the Goodreads ratings of some of my favorite authors, to get an idea of  how much I suck compared to them. And honestly, the results made me feel better. Here they are (name links to their website, if they have one, rating links to their Goodreads page):

Neil Gaiman: 4.11
China Mieville: 3.85
Wil Wheaton: 4.09
Stephen King: 3.77
Barbara Kingsolver: 3.88
Jeffrey Lent: 3.69
Jonathan Franzen: 3.64 (not a favorite by any means, but he's one of the best-known authors out there at the moment)
Gwyn Hyman Rubio: 3.35 (she's the author of Icy Sparks, which was in Oprah's book club)
Sheri Reynolds: 3.67 (author of The Rapture of Canaan, another Oprah book)
J.K. Rowling: 4.31

So out of 10 well-known, excellent authors, only one has a higher overall rating than I do. Now, before anyone jumps to conclusions, by no means am I saying I'm a better author than 9 out of the 10 above. I mean, come on, I'd have to be delusional to think that. But what this does tell me is that regardless of how good you are, you're probably going to find that general opinion puts you at mediocre or a little above. It doesn't mean you actually are, it's just how human nature works. Given a choice on a 5-star scale, we're likely to rate somewhere in the middle (2-4 stars) unless we absolutely loved something or absolutely hated it. It has to be really exceptional in order to get ranked at one extreme or the other. And very, very few books are ever going to be considered exceptional by enough people to overcome the average.

This is comforting to me. It tells me that just because I've been getting a lot of 3-star and 4-star reviews, doesn't mean that I'm destined to massive, unending suckitude (though coming up with that particular phrase might). The fact that other authors, whom I greatly admire, are in the same boat makes me feel better about my own rankings. And hey, if at some point I have more than 17 ratings on Goodreads, and my numbers stay above 4, then maybe that means I can actually feel pretty good about people's perceptions of my writing.