My Meandering Journey To a Book Critique Policy

Are Star Ratings Helpful to Readers?

I review books on Goodreads, Amazon, and my own website and have been all over the place regarding book review star ratings. Of late, I’ve thought long and hard and read what other reviewers (Inside the Inkwell, Teyla Rachel Branton, and Rosepoint Publishing all have excellent perspectives on this topic) have said about the process. At last I’m ready to implement what I hope will be a system that makes sense to me and is helpful to readers.

If you shop online for anything at all, you’ve encountered star ratings. The systems (every site has its own, slightly different scale) seem like great tools to quickly sort the millions of products scrambling for the consumer’s attention. But when you drill down a bit and read the comments on the extreme reviews, often the low star rating for the product isn’t actually justified. For example, the delivery person did something weird with the package, or the photograph didn’t show the item’s true color, so the reviewer gave the product one star.

Star Ratings And Marketing

Once upon a time, book reviews were just that—a few paragraphs summarizing the plot and giving an opinion about the literary merit of a new book. Now stars are added to the mix. The book review star ratings have become a key marketing tool for publishers. Some ad markets won’t take a book with a three-star average of reviews (On Amazon, a three-star review is a “bad” review. ) or without a high number of reviews. Amazon’s promotional algorithms consider the numbers of reviews and higher-star reviews in searches and other features. Authors, particularly indie authors, need the essentially free or subsidized promotion that a large number of five-star reviews can bring.

And now I’m an indie author, also hoping for those little stars next to my books’ picture. But I’m also a reader and have sometimes felt mislead into purchasing five-star books that were pretty average, in my opinion. Also, I spent a good portion of my life working with tests and measurements and can get kind of worked up over people lying with statistics. I certainly don’t want to add to the problem.

What Do the Stars Mean?

But are these promotions and ads lying? What does a five-star book review even mean? Well, it depends on the website. Consumers on Amazon rate the books on the same scale as yarn, floor polish, and furniture kits: Did this product met or exceed my expectations based on the product description and a reasonable consumer’s experience with similar products? How do I think other people with a need like mine will react to this product?

The actual key for the Amazon star numbers is:

• One star: Hated it
• Two stars: Didn’t like it
• Three stars: It’s OK
• Four stars: I like it
• Five stars: I love it

Nothing here about literary merit, comparison to the classics, or brave insights into the human condition. 

Goodreads has a different scale, befitting its function as a place to talk about books with other bookcentric people.

• One star: I didn’t like it
• Two stars: It was OK
• Three stars: I liked it
• Four stars: I really liked it
• Five stars: It was amazing

Note the difference in the anchor points for the two scales: Amazon’s “I hated it” is not the same thing as Goodreads’s “I didn’t like it,” and  “I love it” doesn’t mean the same thing as “It was amazing.”

Just Say No to Stars?

So why not bypass the book review star ratings? Couldn’t we just leave a narrative review? Through the years I’ve been back and forth on whether or not to including a star rating with my Goodreads reviews. Of late I have started to skip the star rating and only leave what I hope are thoughtful reviews, helpful to readers as well as the authors. This Bookriot blog makes a number of additional good points about Goodreads and stars.

Amazon is more problematic. One can’t leave an Amazon review without a star. (At least I haven’t figured out a way to do that.) But Amazon is the actual point of sale, so its reviews are the place to really lift up fellow authors and reach the book-buying public. While the Amazon star scale is not a good instrument for measuring book quality, me crabbing about it isn’t going to stop the misuse of the star rating for marketing and promotional purposes. 

My Starry-Eyed Plan

Thus, what I propose to do is not use the stars on my own blog reviews and Goodreads. On Amazon, I will try (this is hard for me!) to consider the books as a product:

• Did the book share the story it set out to tell?
• Did the book’s description accurately advertise the product?
• Did the book perform as expected, given its genre and intended audience?
• Do I think other readers would enjoy it?

I won’t be reviewing books I can’t finish, so that pretty much assures at least a four-star rating from me on Amazon.  The narrative portion will be where my true opinions can be found.  

What Do You Think of Book Review Star Ratings?

How much are you guided by the star ratings? How do you rate and review the books you read? 

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