Monday 5 November 2012

Self-Publishing and Reviews

Over the last few weeks I have begun to self-publish a few of my short stories on Amazon for Kindle. During this period I have also been reading quite a few self-published novels to try and ascertain the general quality of the work on offer. Like many would be customers of Kindle books I like to read the reviews of the work that I'm considering paying for before making my purchase. Yesterday I decided to buy four books all of which had 5 Star reviews, and all of these reviews painted a picture of these books as being something of a literary masterpiece, up there with the likes of Crime and Punishment and Oliver Twist. Sadly I must report that all four books fell well short of greatness, in fact they appeared to have been written by people who have never heard of punctuation, or with any ability whatsoever to tell a story.
I do realise that there is a huge temptation on the part of authors to get family and friends to write glowing reviews of their work, but if this practice becomes widespread and uncontrolled, it could turn the whole business of self-publishing into a joke in the eyes of the general public, and jeopardise the very future of this wonderful new outlet for would be writers. 

8 comments:

  1. Oh, I couldn't agree more. I think, that a 5* review sometimes occurs because some people don't know what a well written book IS, and because the person has been friendly to them on Twitter/FB/Goodreads, too.

    For me to give a 5 star review a book has to have been unputdownable, and make me go, F**k, I'm enjoying this, several times during it. This has only ever happened once when there were punctuation and grammatical errors in a book - usually I abandon these ones.

    You can usually tell when the reviews are just from mates/family - there are about 3 - 6 as soon as it's published, then no more. Also, check the reviewers other reviews; if they've mostly only reviewed that person's books, it's likely that it's a mate/mum. However (speaking as someone who has a few of those dotted around, as indeed we all have) what we independent authors do is, when someone says "Read your book - I loved it!" we ask them if they'd be so kind as to right a review. The majority of the population don't think of writing reviews. They read, maybe discuss on the odd forum/FB group, and go on to the next. Which is sometimes why our book is the only one they've reviewed!

    Best way, Gary, is to read the 'click to look inside' bit first. I know, I know, I tend to presume everyone else can write good English, too (or why the hell would they be publishing their work for all to see?), but I've been stung, as well!!

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    1. Thanks for the comment Terry. You make some very valid points. I think the main problem with some authors abusing the review system is that it WILL affect all self-published authors, as readers once bitten will be most definitely twice shy.

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  2. ps, please excuse badly edited comment with punctuations errors. Pre-first coffee. Gimme an opportunity to redraft before you review, right?

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  3. Agree, agree, agree. Will 5 star reviews soon be seen as something that mean very little? Whenever I see someone tweet their book by calling it a 'five star read' (which is pretty ghastly, anyway), I want to say, listen, love, everyone's got at least one 5 star review, cos we've all got mates, right?!

    Recently someone I know in real life gave a good (though only 4 star) review to a writer friend's book that I had abandoned because I'd abandoned because it was badly written. I was surprised my friend had enjoyed it. I asked her if she really had liked it and she said "No, but *** seems so nice on Facebook that I didn't like to say I hadn't enjoyed her book." I rest my case!

    I am in a closed Kindle User group on FB which comprises some 200 readers rather than writers. When recommending books they always give the amount of stars over reviews. A few say that it annoys them when they read badly written rubbish that's been given glowing reviews. It makes them feel angry that they wasted their time on it - which, in turn, explains why some bad reviews are almost vicious.

    It's a problem, but one that, I think, will level itself out. The good will always rise to the top whilst the bad will sink eventually - or is that me being optimistic??!


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  4. Possibly optimistic. I think that eventually Amazon will have very little choice but to remove the review option from self-published books. Complaints from duped readers will bring all this to a head.

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  5. Indie books need a completely unbiased website of reviews, kind of like RottenTomatoes.com does movies. I have had bad luck with purchasing a lot of indie works as well, but I have learned to click on the sample before I buy--pretty much all the indie books I know of on Amazon have a sample you can read before purchasing. You can get a good feel for the writing in those samples and can save yourself a lot of time and money.

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    1. I am in total agreement with you C.J. I'm quite passionate about this issue and I'm a little saddened by the lack of concern shown by some of the independent writing community. We do not want these ludicrous 5 Star reviews turning self-publishing into a joke industry.

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  6. On the whole, I'd say just go for the books with a lot of reviews - many of these will be written by readers with whom the author has no connection (as are, ahem, many of mine). Or look on Goodreads - the overall star ratings tend to be less on there, as more are written by readers who don't know the author, because they joined that site through their interest in reading.

    As CJ said, best to just 'click to look inside', as offered by the Amazon page. Like you, I can't believe the amount of shite that some people find unputdownable. Also, you can learn to read between the lines with reviews.

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Thanks for your comment.