fret not over reviews
I occasionally tell younger writers not to take reviews personally, and today I can provide an excellent example.
Recently I read a thriller novel. It was reasonably solid but I hadn’t decided if I liked it enough to read the sequel, so after I went on Amazon to browse the reviews for the book. It’s always interesting and occasionally amusing to see what other people think of a book. While doing so, I came across a 1-star review that complained of the “frequent explicit sex scenes” in the book.
This was somewhat surprising, because there weren’t any sex scenes in the book.
Like, none at all.
The closest is the start of the chapter after the heroine spends the night at her boyfriend’s apartment, and the book says she feels “refreshed” after spending time with her boyfriend. It was even more discreet than a 1940s movie where the male and female lead would walk into a hotel, the screen would fade to black, and then the character would be fully dressed in the next scene. In fact, from the way the scene is written in the book, you could just as easily assume they spent the night watching TV or playing Super Smash Brothers or something. I wondered if the reviewer had left the review on the wrong book (I once had someone leave a review for one of my books complaining the compression socks she had ordered aggravated her varicose veins), but no, the review mentioned all the characters by name.
This leads to three possible conclusions.
1.) The reviewer hallucinated the explicit scenes.
2.) The reviewer made stuff up.
3.) The reviewer didn’t like the book but was unable to articulate the reason why, and so went with the “explicit scenes” complaint.
So, the moral of the story is you can’t please everyone, so you shouldn’t take reviews personally. Like, last year I had people email to complain that SEVENFOLD SWORD: TOWER was both 1.) too long, and 2.) too short. It literally cannot be both!
Often, bad reviews have no actual basis in reality, so best not to worry about them too much.
-JM
Easy for you to say. I notice that your first 4 Ghost Night books are rated 5.0, 4.9, 4.7 and 4.8. All but a handful of your last 50 books have ratings 4.5 and above.
YOU can afford an occasional extraneous misplaced bad review.
Not so for many less established authors. For them, it looks to me like that 1 star review can be quite a bad thing.
I’ve had that happen. In 2011 someone left a one-star review on my Ubuntu book that seriously slowed sales for a few months. This past summer someone left a one-star review on CLOAK GAMES: OMNIBUS one the day before a Bookbub that really slowed it down.
In any case, since you have no control over reviews, why fret? It won’t help any.
I’m a nice guy and would never do this, but I have to admit it’s tempting to give terrible reviews to all of the books in your series that I don’t read in order to get people not to read them in the hope that you’d focus more on the series I like.
But I think one of your readers did just that with the following 1 star review of Frost Fever:
“I loved the Frostborn, but this plot was thin and stretched my willing suspension of disbelief. It was poor at best.”
Maybe that’s sincere or maybe that’s malicious in an effort to get you to focus on Frostborn and its follow ons. I think it’s the latter because he wrote that review for the 2nd book in your series which happens to be the first non-free book. And why even mention Frostborn?
Chronologically, his is the 3rd review and instantly brought it down from 5 stars to 3.6 stars. So now people who read the first free book (Thief Trap) and were on the fence about continuing saw 3.6 stars and decided not to continue. Even today, without his review, Frost Fever would be 4.2 instead of 4.0 and that 5th star would be partly colored in and I bet that still has a small effect on sales not only for Frost Fever but all of the downstream books.
I’ll bet the lower sales discouraged you and you did indeed put a lot more focus on Frostborn, right? So even if not intentionally malicious, that reviewer got what he wanted – you putting more effort on the series he happened to like to the detriment of the rest of us. Fortunately, at least you decided to stick it out and finish the series. And even have a follow on (hopefully).
That would only work to a point. It’s not uncommon for only about 40% of FROST FEVER’s sales to be on Amazon on any given month. And I can see the actual sales data, which is why I continued the series.
I think I have a slightly different take on the value of reviews. As a reader I pay less attention to the overall ratings a book receives than the actually number of total reviews and how this compares to how long since it was first published. For example I am more likely to read a 3star book in circulation for 4 months with 80 reviews, than I am to read a 5 star book with only 20 reviews a year after publication.
It was the totally negative three star review that thought for some reason dragons were just fine but witches were beyond the pale that baffled me.
It’s not like giant flying lizards violate suspension of disbelief or anything. 🙂
It was not the suspension of disbelief, it was in moral terms:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1WBBSQFILC9AL/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00ROOOXKS