I like Goodreads. It's great to find indie books that no one else knows about (I found The Last Falcon through it and thoroughly enjoyed it). They hold competitions where you can win books (although I've yet to win any). It has a large forum with lots of different groups you can join to discuss books and writing. You can get in touch with authors and, if you're an author, you can have a platform to reach readers.
But mostly it has reviews.
I don't know if anybody has done any statistics on Goodreads ratings but I would guess the average would be around 3.8. And also I disagree with a lot of them. Example:
A Great and Terrible Beauty (loved): 3.78
Evernight (hated): 3.66
The difference is small.
Doing a quick search, these are the average ratings for bestselling YA books:
The Hunger Games: 4.4
Harry Potter (1): 4.38
Twilight: 3.56
The Maze Runner: 4.02
Gone: 3.87
Inkheart: 3.83
Uglies: 3.87
These are the average ratings for some indie books:
The Last Falcon (read in one day): 3.67
Switch! The Lost Kingdom of Karibou (gave up): 4.46
Switched: 3.89 (this was a self-published book that became a bestseller and was picked up for traditional publication)
Arrow of the mist (haven't read yet): 4.22
Altors (haven't read yet): 4.25
And not an indie, but not so well known: The Night Circus: 4 - this was very pretty but I hated the plot and the characters.
Another example of differences depending on the version is Stargirl, a book I absolutely loved when I was a teenager: the one book version is rated at 3.76 for book 1 and 3.78 for book 2, but the boxset is rated at 4.05.
Other famous sci-fi/ fantasy books I've read:
Transition (Ian M. Banks): 3.82
The Assassin's Apprentice (Robin Hobb): 4.1 or 4.27 (depending on the version)
The colour of magic: 3.94 or 4.15 (depending on the version)
The Lies of Locke Lamora: 4.27
Now of course, the averages for the famous books are from over 10,000 ratings (sometimes considerably more), whereas for lesser known books it can be from a dozen or up to a few hundreds, so it's not a fair comparison. Also the readership is different: the rater for Ian Banks is not going to be the same person as the rater for Harry Potter - well, unless they're like me.
My point is that the difference in ratings between great books and average books is small, and sometimes null. Books that frustrated me are loved by some, and books I love are hated by others.
What gives me hope is this: people have different tastes.
Not to say that I won't accept feedback - I always (over)think about it. But it helps me get over the fact that not everyone will like my story. Not everyone will like my character and my world.
And that's ok. I only hope that some will.
Now there's loads of other things involved in rating books, so if there's anything you've noticed, please leave a comment. Let's get a discussion going!
I think that the Twilight rating is interesting, because it's like a book people 'love to hate'. So people might go out of their way to make a bad review on Goodreads because it's so polarising. I wonder if ratings are different on different website - for example, are people on Amazon a different type of person or are they led to review in a different kind of way?
ReplyDeleteWhat's also interesting is that reviews are really dependent upon how people feel at the time. For example, my review straight after finishing a book will be completely different from how I might feel about it a fortnight later. Also, my review will be affected by whether I have read other reviews. So books that are read by more reflective people will have a different kind of 'review process' to ones that might be read by more impulsive types (but then also impulsive people might be less likely to review books in the first place, so there is a 'goodreads filter')...
Not to mention perverse types, like me, who seeing a bad review or a book with an unusually large spread of reviews, will regard that as a 'challenge' to like something.
It also reminds me of this graphic: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/06/dumb-vs-smart-books/
The way this graphic was put together was from Facebook likes of books and the average SAT scores of the universities that people attended who liked them. What you see here is a kind of intellectual snobbery ("Atlas Shrugged") for example.
I agree with Mark. It is quite difficult to understand those reviews. And at the same time, I think, as you do, that it is somehow reassuring to see that people have different tastes.
ReplyDeleteBut there's something else. I don't know if it is the case on Goodreads, but there have been cases on Amazon. Some authors (from what I've heard, mostly self-published authors) actually payed companies or people to get good reviews on their books in order to attract more readers. When you have good reviews on Amazon, your book gains more visibility on the website. So that can happen as well...
There has also been a case (an author I know) where the author was hated (for some reasons) by a guy who managed to write many bad reviews on her books, pretending that he was other persons. The guy just wanted to ruin her efforts to get more readers.
I'm not trying to scare you there, but you should not over-think about reviews, unless the comments are constructive of course (dumb comments are useless anyway).
Thanks guys for your comments! Comments, happy times! :D
ReplyDeleteI've heard of stories like the one you mention Caroline, and it's so sad because it can really ruin somebody's writing career. I've also heard of online groups being destroyed by those kinds of behaviours, because at the end of the day, even if they're not true they force the person under attack to join the debate to defend themselves. It's dirty business. *shudders*
Hi Soizic,
ReplyDeleteBest of luck with your endeavour. Along the lines of your post, here's something to keep in mind …
"It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need." –Alan Moore
cheers,
James
Thanks James. Great quote - and food for thought!
ReplyDeleteNow I go and look up who Alan Moore is and hide in shame...