A Curious Incident
A few weeks ago my well received "romantic suspense thriller" novel Archangel received its first rating below 5 stars. It's bound to happen one day, but it stuck in my mind partly because I (like every author here) spend hundreds of hours monthly trying to squeak a little higher on the world's wall, especially in the early months when establishing the value of a major work is so critical. Even very small rating reductions can be tremendous setbacks that bump us hundreds of books down in some sorted list, obliterating months of careful reader/reviewer relationship cultivation, advertising, and promotional effort.
And it stuck in my mind for another reason: The reviewer seemed to be rating many dozens of books, and had judged essentially none of them (except one vampire book I think) above a three! Virtually all were given only one, two, or three stars. (At least she'd set mine at the top of her range!) It was hard to believe all those works she'd chosen to read were so poor; it seemed almost more probable that the reader, if she was a reader at all (and if she was even a she), was unable to absorb what was in those works, but of course entertaining that possibility didn't diminish the damage she was doing to authors' hard-fought dreams.
Moreover, it seemed she'd given no reason, for ANY of her ratings. Taking myself as just one example, after eleven years of diligent toil on my novel, this enigmatic member with no profile and no avatar had not applied even ten seconds to jot down why she felt qualified to think so little of my life's work.
But I made my peace with it, and just resigned myself to let go of what I cannot control. Until yesterday.
Yesterday I noticed that my rating average was back up to five full stars. Strange...the average-reducing 3-star rating was gone. The reviewer herself was also gone from all the lists I frequent, and maybe from GoodReads entirely (although that's hard to tell). Could someone have blown a whistle? Could it have been a "fake" GR member created by one author or small agent-model publisher to damage others? So hard to imagine this kind of thing in our constructive reader/writer community, and yet Smashwords just recently had this very problem and ferretted out some false accounts that had been created specifically to down-rate authors' work to one star, presumably to allow others to bubble toward the surface.
I've personally drawn no conclusions, but I do occasionally wonder if other members ever wonder too. If I'm imagining things, well, I'll draw no conclusions so it's just a curious story, and water under the bridge. If I've stumbled onto something by accident, I hope that will be the end of it! I do love this community and the readers, authors, and group administrators I've met. We're a microcosm that represents the continuing value of literature, and in that sense we're one of the ongoing hopes of humankind.
By all means, share your thoughts with me, in comments or privately! As I said, it's probably just a curious incident, worthy of no concern and minimal debate. Feel free to say so, or to share your own observations as you like.
I for one intend to give credit where it's due. There's room for many thousands of great novels in this world, and it takes someone's fully dedicated life to coax each one of them into being. Critics are aplenty, and all too easy to become; what this world needs are creators and experiencers (and I don't think we can be good at one without also being partly the other). My opinions...what are yours?
And it stuck in my mind for another reason: The reviewer seemed to be rating many dozens of books, and had judged essentially none of them (except one vampire book I think) above a three! Virtually all were given only one, two, or three stars. (At least she'd set mine at the top of her range!) It was hard to believe all those works she'd chosen to read were so poor; it seemed almost more probable that the reader, if she was a reader at all (and if she was even a she), was unable to absorb what was in those works, but of course entertaining that possibility didn't diminish the damage she was doing to authors' hard-fought dreams.
Moreover, it seemed she'd given no reason, for ANY of her ratings. Taking myself as just one example, after eleven years of diligent toil on my novel, this enigmatic member with no profile and no avatar had not applied even ten seconds to jot down why she felt qualified to think so little of my life's work.
But I made my peace with it, and just resigned myself to let go of what I cannot control. Until yesterday.
Yesterday I noticed that my rating average was back up to five full stars. Strange...the average-reducing 3-star rating was gone. The reviewer herself was also gone from all the lists I frequent, and maybe from GoodReads entirely (although that's hard to tell). Could someone have blown a whistle? Could it have been a "fake" GR member created by one author or small agent-model publisher to damage others? So hard to imagine this kind of thing in our constructive reader/writer community, and yet Smashwords just recently had this very problem and ferretted out some false accounts that had been created specifically to down-rate authors' work to one star, presumably to allow others to bubble toward the surface.
I've personally drawn no conclusions, but I do occasionally wonder if other members ever wonder too. If I'm imagining things, well, I'll draw no conclusions so it's just a curious story, and water under the bridge. If I've stumbled onto something by accident, I hope that will be the end of it! I do love this community and the readers, authors, and group administrators I've met. We're a microcosm that represents the continuing value of literature, and in that sense we're one of the ongoing hopes of humankind.
By all means, share your thoughts with me, in comments or privately! As I said, it's probably just a curious incident, worthy of no concern and minimal debate. Feel free to say so, or to share your own observations as you like.
I for one intend to give credit where it's due. There's room for many thousands of great novels in this world, and it takes someone's fully dedicated life to coax each one of them into being. Critics are aplenty, and all too easy to become; what this world needs are creators and experiencers (and I don't think we can be good at one without also being partly the other). My opinions...what are yours?
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