Reviews and reading your next book

[M.]

I have a few special questions of all my Space Opera friends. Do you ever leave a review on Amazon after reading a book? Do you buy or read a book based on the number of reviews posted on Amazon? Do you believe on the numbers posted on Amazon about the reviews, for example I recently saw a good book called The Trilisk Ruins Book 1 and that it had 1803 free Kindle store books out and was high in three ratings but they also said it had 1,493 reviews. Hmm. I have some questions about those reviews. M. Garnet - Author

[Teresa, Plan B is in Effect]

Sometimes I leave a review. Usually I just tap the rating on my Kindle. I’m more likely to write a review on Goodreads than on Amazon but even then most of the time I just give it stars.

Amazon does some funky things where some stats only count if the person rating it bought the book from Amazon. And there are definitely people who get paid for fake ratings and fake reviews.

[L J]

M. wrote: "I have a few special questions of all my Space Opera friends. Do you ever leave a review on Amazon after reading a book? Do you buy or read a book based on the number of reviews posted on Amazon? D..."

I have done book reviews on Amazon in the past but find it pretty pointless now that there are so many. I'm more likely to post comment in groups I'm in on Goodreads.
Lots of ratings and reviews might make me curious enough to try a book but won't cause me to buy one.
I sometimes look at reviews on Amazon but usually go to 3 star because I want to know what reviewer liked and didn't like about the book.
I look at rating and review numbers like I look at survey numbers. They may be interesting to look at but without knowing the methodology behind them they are, in the end, meaningless.

[Teresa, Plan B is in Effect]

I don’t buy based on reviews or star ratings. They sometimes influence me to get the free preview. I don’t buy without reading at least some of the free preview unless it’s an author I have read and liked before.

[M.]

Well I am beginning to have some questions about all those reviews. I have heard some rumors that they are not all from real people and that they are fed in from sources. No, I don't buy a book because of a large bunch of reviews but I do put some on Goodreads.

[Brandon]

The ranking in Free in Kindle Store, Hard Science Fiction, and the other categories is a snapshot of the popularity at the moment, not an indicator of bestseller status for the life of the book. I believe those rankings are correct according to whatever algorithm Amazon uses, but I do not care about them.

I will generally write a review for Goodreads but not Amazon. The reviews and ratings, once they get over a certain number, give me a starting place as to whether or not I will like a book. The preview pages are the best indicator, as they are the actual beginning of the book.

The days of Harriet Klausner and other bogus reviewing on Amazon are mostly in the past, at least in my experience. There will always be people who post a review based on an incomplete reading or starting with a certain agenda, but they tend to get balanced out by the rest of them that are purely readers' reactions to the book over time.

[Betsy]

I don't read or even notice reviews on Amazon, but I do read reviews on Goodreads, and often those affect my buying decisions. I nearly always write a review for Goodreads, but my reviews are usually pretty short.

[G.R.]

When I first joined GoodReads I tried to put a rating down for most of the books that I can remember reading but I certainly wasn't going to retroactively write a review for every book I ever read. Now, however, I will always write a review (usually just on GoodReads though) and, whether long or short, sums up what I thought of the story.

I read Amazon reviews all the time (for all other products) but have mostly stopped doing so for books as I haven't always found them to be reliable. One star reviews are usually just people ranting about something that rubbed them the wrong way and five-star reviews are usually too gushing about how great the story was. Occasionally there will be a few good five or one star reviews, but I mostly determine whether I will like a story, the author's prose, the characters, etc. from the two, three and four star reviews.

Yet, even with all this pre-work before choosing a book to put on my Kindle shelf, I still get burned a few times, even by wildly popular traditional authors. A couple times I've even gone back and reread the negative reviews and gone, "Oh, now I see. Why didn't I pick up on that reviewer's comment before? They were spot on." So even though it's gotten more difficult in recent years to navigate the sea published books (both self-pubbed and traditional), I would rather have too many reviews to sift through than too few.

Just my opinion.