Your review matters

Your review matters

I know we have talked about this before, but it has been a while.  Do you leave reviews on the books you read?  I know that I didn’t for a long time.  It’s why I am going back and re-reading my favorite books, not that it is a real hardship.  It was hard to get into the habit of leaving reviews once I switched from reading mostly physical books to using the Kindle app on my IPad mini 4.

Now, I wouldn’t think of reading a book without leaving a review.  I mean most of the books I read cost me little to nothing, it is the least I can do for the author to tell them my honest opinion of their work.  It is so easy to leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon, I just have to keep going until the screen pops up and then leave my review.  Of course, I do go that extra step forward and leave my review on BookBub as well.  It is not that hard, I just copy my review that I already posted and paste it on the BookBub page.

I know a lot of people do not leave reviews for authors because they do not know what to say or they just feel it will take too long, or they didn’t particularly like the book.  I think you should ask yourself several questions when thinking about leaving a review:

•        What would happen if the author had stopped when they didn’t know what to say?
•        Wouldn’t you like to know what someone thought of your book if you had taken the time to write it?
•       It only takes 20 words to leave a review.  Do you use more than 20 words when having a conversation?

I used to think that every review was a good review for the author.  I mean to me it is because they are getting my honest opinion of their work.  But apparently that is not really the case. 

Per CD Gorri’s most recent blog “The stars actually matter as they add or deduct points from the overall rating of the book and author. If you like an author's work well enough to read it but consistently give 3-4 stars, you could be bringing that author's ratings down. I've actually been told that 3 stars is now seen as a negative/bad thing on a certain internet book selling giant...  “

Yikes, that means you really need to think about what you are reviewing and how you are rating it.  Here is a Rubric that may help you to leave a review that truly reflects your thoughts on the books you are reading.

I kind of use my own rating system for the stars:

5-star – I will go back and read these books again and again

4-star – Most of mine probably fall into this area, I may go back and re-read a few of them, but for the most part this book has been a generally pleasant experience and kept me interested until the very end

3-star – I will not go back and re-read these books.  It was either too slow or I lost interest, or the plot was boring.  I find that on these books I often feel the need to go to the last chapter to see if the book at least has a happy ending and it is worth continuing to the end

2-star – I have never actually given a 2-star review, but I would use this for a book that was a real struggle to finish, reading the last chapter was a necessity and gave me no help what-so-ever and I just did not like it at all

1-star – Obviously I have never used this one either, I would only use this review if I just could not finish the book no matter what the last chapter said.  If there were a lot of grammatical and spelling errors and if it was just really offensive to me in general

Here is a picture of a common rating scale:

I think another common misconception, when leaving a review, is that it must be a book review like you used to write in high school.  That is not the case!  The author already has a blurb written about the book, it must not have been too bad as you yourself picked the book to read, the reader just wants to know how you felt about the book.  It doesn’t hurt to mention the main characters, but there is no reason to re-state the plot.  That’s not to say you can’t, but do it in such a way that you are using the information as a tool to state why you did or didn’t like the book.  I also like to add a line at the end of my review stating if I intend to read the rest of the books in the series or more from the author.  This is a pretty good indicator of how I really felt.  Sometimes I will give a book a 3-star review, but state that I am going to read the next book or another from the author because I have already read previous material from the author that I liked.

No matter how you go about it, authors need your reviews for their own peace of mind and for better exposure to future readers.  You never know, your review might make an author’s day.  Think about that next time you have the opportunity to leave a review.  For another take on leaving a review, click on the pictures above to go to CD Gorri’s blog post on reviews.

Happy Reading

Sydney