Authors vs. Goodreads by Zoe Desh
unstarred: 
i assume this book was written solely to get a reaction out of people; to prove some sort of point about how naughty goodreaders will gang up and troll-attack a problematic book with “nonreviews” and “abuse,” and it certainly has had caused a stir. however, there is just so much misinformation in this book, and it is so insulting to goodreaders – to people who have long used this place as a little booknerd refuge where they can make friends and talk books and do their own thing without bullshit, that i feel obligated to address some of the accusations and assumptions not as a “pampered reader,” as desh claims we are, but purely as someone confronted with inaccurate information setting the facts straight for anyone foolish enough to consider this book in any way a fair assessment of what goodreads is and how it functions.
here’s some stuff about me: i do not work for goodreads, but i have been an active member since 2007 when goodreads launched. i write reviews, i am a goodreads librarian, and i have had many interactions on here with authors, 99% of which have been positive. i have seen goodreads go through many waves. i have seen bad behavior from authors and reviewers alike. i have generally opted to stay out of the fray when it occurs because i just don’t have time for conflict, but i have certainly observed it from the sidelines. and yet somehow i made the stgr bullies page because of a single one-star review i wrote that pissed someone off. considering i have 3562 ratings, and written 1850 reviews, where only 19 of them have been one-star reviews, giving me an average rating of 3.79, it’s pretty clear that i am not a bully or a troll; i am just a person who didn’t like a book. but i don’t hold goodreads responsible. they aren’t to blame for one person being a dick. and they aren’t responsible for many of the conflicts that have occurred on here. i’m not stating all this to pat myself on the back for being such a good person, just to illustrate that sometimes, shit just happens. and you deal with it. this book reads like someone who had a negative experience on goodreads and decided to go off on an uninformed tear about something they don’t quite understand, fueled by emotional outrage and wounded pride. and that’s fine – that is one way to respond to life’s setbacks, but arguments are weakened by specious claims, and that’s where i come in.
since i am permitted by the book itself to use brief quotations embodied in critical reviews, i will take advantage of this. “brief” is a matter of opinion.
this booklet makes a lot of broad statements that may be accurate in terms of the author’s own experiences here, of which i do not know the specifics, but they are certainly not representative of the general climate of goodreads that i have witnessed firsthand for years. for example:
All authors should realize their relationship with Goodreads is adversarial.
this is one of those provocative statements of which desh is so fond but do not hold up under any kind of scrutiny. many authors have used goodreads to develop positive relationships with their readers. i know this for a fact because some of those relationships have been with me.
Every published author should understand their works will end up in the Goodreads database whether they want them there or not. Once in the database, Goodreads members can ‘review’ them along with a rating, or without, or rate them without a review; there is no requirement to touch the book.
yes. this is true. your book will end up on goodreads if you write it and offer it publicly for people to read – for sale or for free. goodreads is a social cataloging website and the objects it catalogs are books. the other part is trickier. yes, people can “review” a book before they have read it, which has caused uproar in many corners, not just from authors. some people use that space to express excitement that a book is coming out that they are looking forward to. or to put a link to a professional review or a booklist that the book is on as a note-to-self about why they were interested in it. or for whatever purpose they choose, within the goodreads TOS: https://www.goodreads.com/review/guid…, most specifically:
Some of the best reviews on Goodreads use the book as inspiration for a personal essay or other piece of creative writing. As long as they don’t go against our guidelines in other ways, these reviews are welcome and encouraged!
no one is getting paid to write reviews on goodreads. members have historically thought of the review space as “theirs” to decorate any way they see fit. but there have been plenty of review-deletions – sometimes appropriately and sometimes overzealously. desh seems to think that the review space is this inviolable place where reviewers go to ruin lives, and that’s just not true.
they will create a Book Description page with whatever you wrote as the book description at the outlet where they found it. They will not make any attempt to contact you.
yes. because that’s what a book cataloging site does. it catalogs books. why on earth would they contact every author for every book they add? shakespeare doesn’t have the time to answer emails every time a new edition of Hamlet is published. desh also has a tendency to refer to librarians as “they,” as though librarians are working in tandem or have any idea what other librarians are doing at any time. this not entirely accurate. i am a librarian, but i never go to the librarian group or have any contact with other librarians. if i see something that needs fixing, i fix it. there’s not some secret cabal where librarians gang up to screw over indie authors. that i know of.
desh cites a single example of a librarian error:
…for some unfathomable reason they chose to place Mr. Cox’s erotica on the book list of Brian Cox, particle physicist and university professor who is apparently rather famous in England. He has a gargantuan following on Twitter. He is author or co-author of more than a dozen scientific books, has appeared on radio and TV in the United Kingdom and is a musician. So, out of all of the authors on Goodreads with the name Brian Cox, they chose this particular Brian Cox to add an erotica genre book onto his list? Why didn’t they put it under on a new author page? If I was a betting person, I’d say there’s some payback going on.
i will take you up on that bet. and i will win. if a book is incorrectly attributed to an author, it is the work of one individual, and it is easy enough to fix (and apparently has been fixed in this case). there’s no agenda there – it’s an accident. it happens.
It’s obvious Brian Cox, physicist, doesn’t monitor his Goodreads page. I wonder if he even knows he has one? He has no Goodreads ‘friends’ and you can’t contact him through Goodreads. All you can do is become a fan. My guess is his publisher put up the page without telling him and barely maintains it
every author has an author page. it’s so you can see all of the works by the author in one place, and get some brief autobiographical information about them. it does not have to be set up by a publisher or maintained by an author. brian cox does have an author page. so does herman melville. so does mary shelley. and i guarantee you, they do not know. there is a difference between an author page and a goodreads author page. goodreads authors maintain their own pages. authors without the goodreads author badge do not.
the author is very paranoid about amazon, and this leads to even more incorrect assertions. it’s no secret that i work for barnes and noble, so there’s no love lost between me and amazon, but there is some real tinfoil hat talk here. desh warns against giving too much information on your author page here on goodreads because
You are feeding Amazon’s insatiable quest for book information and domination as a book seller.
but if your book isn’t available on amazon, as this author’s is not, what possible sinister purpose can they achieve by having the information? and even if it is available on amazon – what’s the harm of their having information that you yourself control? this is how publishing works for a self-pubbed author: you write a book. you choose a cover. you write up the book description. you try to sell it – on amazon, on barnes and noble, on smashwords. wherever. what you write in the description is what potential readers see, and what the site selling your book see. amazon and other retail outlets offer the book for sale, hoping to make money. goodreads adds the book to their database for readers to discover. there’s nothing diabolical here, and even though i know amazon has not always treated its authors carefully, there is nothing dangerous to them having the very basic information you have supplied. they cannot sell something you have not made available to sell.
Oddly, there is no reference on the Goodreads web site to this business relationship that I can find.
well, except for HERE, in the goodreads feedback group:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/…
yes, amazon bought goodreads in 2013. they also own audible, shelfari, toby press, zappo, etc etc etc. they have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. but they haven’t taken over the site, they way many people feared back when the announcement was made. the goodreads staff is still its own thing, apart from the monster staff of amazon. but that is lost on him as he rants about goodreads and amazon as though they are the same beast.
What’s ironic is that sometimes features are fixed, then changed and broken again.
i turn that back on the author – what IS ironic about this?? i take the subway train to work every day. and frequently, something is fixed and then – you know what?? it breaks again. this is not ironic, it is just the price of living in the world.
Rather odd considering Goodreads is an Amazon company and Amazon’s computer infrastructure is renowned.
the goodreads staff can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/about/team
there are 87 of ’em. and there are thirty million members. you do the math. sometimes things are going to be bumpy.
the paranoia continues.
All members at Goodreads are equal, but some are More Equal. (Apologies to George Orwell.) Goodreads is primarily a site for readers to flock together and network with one another and talk books. Goodreads emphasizes it is a service for readers and puts their needs first. Authors should always keep this foremost in their minds, the readers come first.
yes. this site was set up as a site for readers. their “about us:”
Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations. Our mission is to help people find and share books they love.
author involvement can be a nice perk, but this has always been first and foremost a haven for readers.
Goodreads needs authors to sign up and give them free information about their books that Amazon couldn’t otherwise capture, and sell them on the notion that Goodreads is a great place to advertise and market their books.
free information?? why should goodreads pay authors for information about their books?? as an author you should be grateful for the FREE EXPOSURE goodreads offers. it gets your book in front of potentially thirty million readers. and again, if you aren’t selling your book on amazon, why would they give a shit about your information? i have, just from living in the world, acquired a lot of free information about kim kardashian’s butt. but i can’t do anything with that information. i can’t sell her butt because she has not made her butt available to me. you see?
…here is a quote from Otis Chandler, founder of Goodreads which distills the bottom line objective:
“We sell book launch packages to authors and publishers and really help accelerate, build that early buzz that a book needs to succeed when it paunches and accelerate that growth through ads on the site.”
Rather straight forward profit motive. What’s shocking though is that it’s so author centric and not the reader centric public persona of the site.
how is that shocking? this is a service they offer to authors that readers who do not write have no use for. it’s author-centric because it is a service for authors. it has no negative impact on a reader, so it doesn’t go against the “public persona.” it’s just something else they do in addition to being a place for readers .
However, the truth of the matter is, authors are at the very bottom of the food chain and are treated with contempt, merely a necessary nuisance. There is even open hostility from many readers who would prefer if there were no authors on Goodreads. Some groups are openly hostile to authors, saying up front they would prefer authors not to join their group because the group is for readers only. As if authors weren’t readers too.
this is not necessarily contempt. it might just be caution. some people aren’t comfortable writing about books with the author peering over their shoulder and i don’t think that’s a bad thing. it’s difficult to speak freely when you have to worry that an author will get their feelings hurt if someone didn’t like the book. and some authors get aggressive or passive-aggressive, which is worse, and it’s just a headache some people want to avoid. an unwillingness to invite conflict shouldn’t be interpreted as hostile. i have had many authors comment on my reviews and it has nearly always been pleasant, but others have not been so fortunate.
desh keeps going on about how bad the goodreads librarians are. this author clearly had a negative experience with a single librarian, and has translated this experience into some sort of site-wide phenomenon blown all out of proportion.
…there is one particular volunteer above all other volunteers that wields enormous power on the Goodreads web site, the Librarian. As an author, you must understand the power of the Librarian.
well, this oughtta be good. i would love to know what kind of power i have. incidentally, the goodreads librarian group is not some hidden elite portal. it can be visited by any member, even if they are not themselves a librarian:
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/…
here is the hierarchy at Goodreads: Librarian, readers, then authors, most of whom are beneath contempt.
this is a touch hyperbolic. also, i would venture that paid staff trumps librarians. again, i need to emphasize that nearly all of my dealings with authors have been positive. like attracts like: if you behave like an asshole, you will be treated like an asshole. i have had way more bullshit from other users than from authors.
but back to librarians.
librarians have absolute, dictatorial control over each of your Book Description pages and a direct line to Goodreads personnel.
we DO? like a bat signal?? i’m pretty sure that every member of goodreads has access to the goodreads feedback group, or can email most of the staff members. and yes, edits can be made to the book description page, but i have never seen any evidence of librarians going buckwild, adding incorrect descriptions just for giggles. and if it does happen, you better believe some sour-faced librarian will correct it and administer a scolding. librarians don’t mess around.
Next in the membership hierarchy are their readers. They are pampered because they are the engine that keeps Goodreads alive by writing reviews or merely rating a book. It is their review information Amazon wants to collect in order to find out what books are hot and why. They are given authority to write reviews that are not reviews and abuse authors in almost any manner they see fit. You are never to question their reviews, or non-reviews that appear to be reviews, or the laughable, useless ratings they may deign to put on your book.
incorrect on a number of levels.
again, it must be stressed that amazon only acquired goodreads in 2013. the mission statement that the site is for readers predates that arrangement. and reviewers have reviews removed ALL THE TIME. you gotta visit that feedback group more, friend, read some complaints from reviewers. reviewers are always complaining about being treated unfairly. perspective – it’s all about where you’re standing.
At the bottom of the food chain are authors. They are only to be tolerated in the hopes they will give Amazon copious amounts of information about their books, perhaps even a heads up about a new book, along with purchasing a launch package. They will also be urged to shower copious amounts of fundage on Goodreads for advertisements, and participate in other promotional adventures, especially ones that will give their books away free making it easier for Amazon trolls to pounce on
again, if your books aren’t for sale on amazon, which you have previously stated, they can’t profit from your information, so why fret? and what benefit does amazon receive from trolls?? because your wording makes it sound like the reason they offer free books is so trolls can have them. and GASP – goodreads offers advertising space in return for money?? THOSE MONSTERS!!
again – this is how the world works. you think highway billboards are free?
As an author, it’s imperative you understand what you are handing over to Goodreads when you create an Author Profile and load your book information on Goodreads. When loading your profile, give Goodreads and Goodreads’ trolls the minimum amount of information possible. Remember, Goodreads allows readers to make their profile private, so you are not on an even footing from the get-go. This fact alone should raise your suspicion. If a reader is allowed to exclude their information from you, you best make as little information about yourself available to them because author profiles are always public.
this is called internet safety 101. there is no incentive to readers in giving out personal information. a goodreads author is able to tailor their profile page in a way that will let potential readers know who they are, and a sort of glimpse into what they can expect from their work. it’s basically more advertising space – to attract readers. regular users aren’t selling anything, so they don’t have to share any personal information.
It is surprising how many readers only give their name and country or make their profile private. That should cause you to carefully consider what information about yourself you provide to Goodreads. Less is better.
is it surprising?? that people don’t want strangers pawing through their information?? privacy settings are pretty standard, no matter what site you’re talking about. not everyone wants to let stranger-danger in. this is just sensible practice. there are so many different reasons people use goodreads, and not all of them involve socializing. goodreads is an excellent resource to find books, and to track your own reading. and no one needs to know about you if you’re only here for your own private archiving. there are about 50 valid reasons for making your profile private or limiting the amount of information you give out, as a reader. for an author, who is essentially selling themselves, providing personal background is useful, and in traditional publishing situations, is one to which an entire department is assigned.
The simple fact is, you can’t be a Librarian until you publish at least 50 reviews of your own and apply and get accepted by the Librarian guild. Most Librarians that I was aware of were not authors, so I wondered why they were given authority over author data in the Book Description pages. Would have thought that was a Goodreads staff function. Except there is almost no Goodreads staff.
right. and librarians do this shit for free, so you’re welcome. the people who opt to become librarians on this site aren’t drunken yahoos. they are generally detail-oriented and intelligent and just want things to be tidy. it is no hardship to write fifty reviews. as far as standards for inclusion go, those are pretty modest. it’s a minimal commitment and just shows you are somewhat invested in the site and its workings.
Unfortunately, I would argue that it is unethical to give power to readers over what is in an authors Book Description pages, when those readers can review authors and call on their trolls to harass an author that gets uppity with them
this is conflating users and librarians. librarians aren’t the ones organizing troll armies. and this whole idea that there IS an organized troll army has been trotted around time and time again in various articles and blogs and is just bonkers. and why on earth should people tolerate authors getting “uppity” with them?? just because they wrote a book? this is a community, and if you attack someone, their friends are going to bite back. that’s not trolling, that’s loyalty and self-defense.
You’re a successful new author who has signed a book deal with a publisher. You’ve never joined Goodreads, perhaps never heard of them. Would you be surprised to learn that you are a member on Goodreads with an author’s page, more than 30 Goodreads friends and your books have been loaded with covers, for which you own the copyright, and members have reviewed your books and rated them.
You might want to check your contract with your publisher very closely. I don’t know how often this happens but I am aware of an author who has three books published who had no idea they were a member of Goodreads, had an author’s page and friends. It appears their publisher, who they have since parted ways with, set up the author page, loaded their books, added Book Description pages and even accepted ‘friend’ requests in the author’s name without informing them.
which makes your quarrel with your publisher, not with goodreads.
As an author, you should know that you cannot prevent Goodreads from cataloging your books in their database and letting their members review and rate them without your knowledge.
that’s what happens when you publish a book. how is this not making sense to you? you don’t publish a book so that no one will ever see it. that’s called a diary. this is a book site, which compiles information about books that have been published. if you write a book, you get an isbn, and you make it available for sale, you put that book into the world where people will read it, and they will have opinions. and you don’t need to become a goodreads author, but if you do, and you want to avoid trolls and bullshit, there is a simple way to avoid conflict – don’t be an asshole. i don’t see goodreaders going out of their way to pick on people that weren’t putting themselves in a position that invited criticism. sometimes there is conflict, and “bullying.” well, yes. there are gonna be bad apples. this is the internet, after all. and in the comments section of any op-ed piece, youtube video, facebook page, you can see things get out of hand when users take advantage of the relative anonymity of the interweb. some people are jerks. that’s just the way things are.
The Goodreads review system is the most flawed book review system on the planet.
really? what is the best? i am genuinely curious.
It you’re joining Goodreads in the hopes that a bunch of good reviews and a high review average will help market you’re works, don’t join.
if your book is good, and you don’t go out of your way to attack readers, your ratings will probably reflect that. but authors need to be able to accept valid criticism – that’s part of the job.
here’s a review of this book by an author:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1170577339?book_show_action=false&page=1
and a wonderful essay by an author – one who has proven himself time and time again to be a really classy guy who also happens to be an excellent author. and, it should be noted, an author i met through goodreads.
What’s shocking is that some members use the rating system to catalog books on their shelves, using 1* to indicate some meaning to them, usually that that book is more important on their ‘to-read’ shelf than a book on a shelf with no rating.
i don’t even know what this means, much less why it is deemed shocking.
If the overall review average is to have any validity, the rating only system needs to be abolished, or at least, the ratings should not contribute to the overall average. You’re probably asking yourself, why would Goodreads have a rating only system along with a review system? Because many readers don’t like to express themselves in public and don’t want to waste time writing reviews. But Amazon wants as much free feedback data as it can gather in order to know what books are hot. While that may be a valid reason at Netflix, where a person might put some stock in the popularity of a movie with 4*, it is meaningless in a rigorous book review system.
again – reviewing and rating-without-reviewing predates the amazon purchase of goodreads by many many years. and forgive me if i am being obtuse, but why are the ratings on netflix more valid than the ones here? i would expect that being given the room to talk about why the rating (if a reader so chooses) makes it more valid. if a user is writing a “nonreview” because of some personal problem with the author, that is usually pretty clear, and any savvy person consulting the review will take that into consideration when determining whether to read it. give your readers some credit. whereas on netflix, you have no idea why the rating is what it is, so it falls into the “taste is subjective” category. for example, i love every single coen brothers movie ever. except the big lebowski. which is strange, right? but i hate that movie, even though it is probably their most popular (and i’m not some hipster asshole who doesn’t like popular things. i just do not like that movie) star ratings are completely subjective, and even in my own ratings, there are anomalies. what’s the difference between a three and a four?? who the hell knows? it’s subject to when i read it and what else was going on at the time, and i am glad to have the review space to work out my own feelings about a book and people reading my reviews can make up their minds based on what i say and can decide if they think they will respond the same as i did. my background is in readers’ advisory (as a person with a library science degree, and not just a goodreads librarian), and i can testify that readers are not so sheeplike that they choose their books by a goodreaders star-rating alone.
Nowhere in the review does there need to be an indication that the member read the book. The reviewer may or may not give the review a rating. Sometimes reviewers don’t make a rating, they just want to make a statement about the book, almost 100% of the time a negative or derogatory statement with a cutesy full motion .gif.
incorrect. when you read a book, you mark it as “read.” it’s not obligatory, but there is a place where it is indicated. and yes- i am not star-rating this book – i am just addressing the inaccuracies. and i read this three times.
There is also an ego stroking addition for the reviewer that doesn’t show up on a rating only. It is the like button.
no longer correct. you can like any old thing now.
The other advantage for a full fledged non-review review is the Comment section where you and your friends can gossip about your outstanding review.
you can do this on any book. whether it is reviewed, rated, recommended, or just added to a shelf. and you can “gossip” about anything, not just about the outstanding review, that’s kind of the point of goodreads – book discussions. or conversations.
Strangely enough, the like button does provide one bit of embarrassing feedback for the reviewer. When there is a troll attack, most of the attackers like one or more of the critical non-review reviews. The troll attack becomes so blatantly obvious when a bunch of the ‘Likers’ 1* rate a book all on the same day or day after the non-review review. It’s so glaringly obvious that you would think Goodreads would take some action to stop this nonsense.
and they have. so many times.
New Indie authors should be aware that there are quite a number of readers on Goodreads who will not read any book by an Indie author. I was a bit surprised by this narrow minded attitude when I joined several groups. But some readers are quite adamant and vocal about it. Don’t be surprised if you get some barbs thrown your way in some groups, especially those that discuss writing style or editing.
i don’t think you should be so surprised. some people are very sensitive to poorly-edited books. and some people have had negative interactions with authors who, without the benefit of publisher backing and advice, do not seem to know how to comport themselves appropriately. no one wants to invite drama. i personally don’t have a problem reading indie authors or poorly edited/proofread books, but i can completely understand why some do. it can be very distracting.
it doesn’t take much to be the #1 reviewer and best reviewer in your country. Especially a country where the majority of the population can ill afford books, computer equipment and eReaders in order to be a member of Goodreads.
you don’t need an e-reader to be a member, and libraries exist. this is weird xenophobic nonsense that is wonderfully addressed here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1176048968?book_show_action=false&page=1
Those reviewers that have too many 5* ratings or too many 1* ratings in proportion to the 2-4* ratings are probably going to be viewed with suspicion. But, not to worry it’s very easy to skew the ratings. Let’s say you need a few more 1* ratings to keep the curve looking authentic. Find some insignificant Indie author nobody has ever heard of, in a niche genre few read. Select one of their free short stories and shred it with invective, including derogatory, meaningless .gifs making the review almost as long as the story itself. Your job is done and it’s doubtful anyone will ever notice the review out of the more than 700 you’ve done, especially considering nobody reads this author and the fool hasn’t sold a book in months.
this is just laughable. who cares about the “authenticity” of their curve? some people don’t rate or review books they didn’t like because they don’t want to invite trolls, which will skew their ratings high. some have bad streaks where they read several disappointing books, which will skew them low. but i don’t know anyone who gives their curve a moment’s thought.
Review bullying, and rating attacks by bands of trolls is a nationally famous pastime at Goodreads.
internationally. i mean – it’s still not true – “review bullying” is really a drop in the bucket of 30 million users but let’s not forget that goodreads is bigger than your nation.
Pick a book, perhaps the most reviewed book of an unknown author nobody has every heard of in a niche genre nobody cares about. This will work just as well on a major author’s new book that doesn’t have many reviews yet, because it will have an obvious affect on their average rating and make it appear the new book is a critical dud. If it’s on an already acclaimed book with thousands of reviews, the troll attack won’t work well because it won’t make a statistical dent in the rating average
why would someone waste their time doing this? what do you think reviewers do?? do you honestly think people go out of their way just to pick on people?? or that people would avoid a “dud” by a major author because of a couple of low star-ratings? that is incredibly cynical and proves that desh knows nothing about real readers.
and this “advice” is just madness:
If anyone, especially authors and those readers who take reviews seriously, wants to fix the fatally flawed ‘review’ system at Goodreads, I suggest we adopt the system used by the marauding troll packs that the website is nationally* famous for.
When an author is carpet bombed with 1* ratings and reviews that aren’t reviews, PM me.
I will buy your book and leave a glowing 5* review of your book. At least my review will have a semblance of being legitimate because I will have at least opened your book and read your Table Of Contents, although that isn’t necessary according the the Goodreads Review Guidelines. Then we will let interested GR members know that you’re being trolled. Perhaps, we would start with all of your Goodreads friends. Or perhaps we could develop a list of people who would like the abuse to stop, possibly from some of the author’s forums. If they’re interested in fighting the troll attack, they can ‘Like’ my review and add your book to their “Love To Read This Obviously Excellent Book” shelf with a 5* rating
yeah, that will fix it. great plan.
I’ll bet I could pay twenty foreigners, from say Malaysia, to set up 100 bogus accounts for a very small sum of money. I would tell them to add a particular book to their “wouldn’t-pee-on-it-if-it-was-on-fire” shelf and 1* it at approximately the same time. I’d also provide a few of them with canned 1* trash non-review reviews with cutesy derogatory dancing .gifs to post. Considering Goodreads’ censors don’t consider such an attack as suspicious when five people do it on a single day, how would they justify removing the attack. After all, not one of these people violated the Review Guidelines. Imagine what the media would do with a story like this? Especially since Goodreads touts their reviews as “… the best and most authentic in the world”
i am not even going to bother pointing out how ridiculous that is. it speaks for itself.
more helpful suggestions:
For any rating only, if they are kept, or review, add three buttons that always appear: Read Book, DNF (Did Not Finish) or Didn’t Read Book. Anyone proven to have put Read Book or DNF, when they didn’t read the book should have all of their reviews removed. In many cases it would be easy to prove from the author’s sales figures, except for those books purchased at Amazon that are immediately returned, which is a good reason not to market your titles through Amazon. (This is the primary reason I no longer market my titles on Amazon.)
wow. so the staff of goodreads, whom you have criticized for not keeping the site in good working order, is going to – what? spy on its thirty million members to make sure they are turning pages appropriately? savoring every word? and the punishment for ONE supposed infraction is to have ALL their reviews removed? that sounds fair. and sales figures? you have to be kidding me. books can be lent, taken out of the library, bought at used bookstores, found on the street etc etc. this “idea” would maybe work for authors who sell three books a year, but that is not a situation worth spending any manpower on, considering how jacked up you claim the site is already.
Anyone who indicated Didn’t Read Book should not be allowed to give the book a rating and their avatar should not show up in the mosh pit of members thinking about reading the book.
it’s like he has never heard of lying.
Remove the Comments section along with the like button from reviews. If Goodreads is going to treat the ‘Review’ as a literary work worthy of its own review, there should have been a Dislike button. Another reason the Comments section should be abolished is because it is only there for the people who ‘like’ the review, especially considering the author dare not say anything to a reviewer. Not sure why reviews are considered worthy of review. They should stand by themselves. The comments appear to be there for stroking the ego of the reviewer and posting gossip between the reviewer and their myriad of ‘friends’
the comments section is absolutely not only there for the people who “like” a review. anyone can comment there, with or without clicking the “like” button. trust me – i have had plenty of people on my comments section that were certainly not there to stroke my ego. even the most casual goodreads user knows this to be untrue.
If Goodreads were to implement these suggestions, the troll attacks would be minimized because the 1* rating-only would no longer affect the average. People who didn’t read the book would have no impact on the rating average and their non-review reviews would be obvious for what they are, harassment.
believe me, it is obvious when people 1-star a book out of spite. i would disagree that it is harassment since it isn’t directly affecting the author one way or another – seriously, don’t make me go dig up the stats on how negative reviews actually increase sales.
It would also behoove Goodreads to investigate more than two or three 1* ratings on a given day on a book that gets maybe one review a month as a vindictive troll attack, especially when all of the perpetrators ‘like’ each others’ reviews
which, since you have already said they are understaffed should be done by… the librarians?
Goodreads should remove the troll reviews with a warning to the perps.
they have done
If they continue doing that sort of thing, put a permanent red star on their profile, so other members know what kind of people they are. It is useless to excommunicate them because they just come back under another name. It is ridiculously easy to become a Goodreads member. Getting caught should be their ‘Scarlet Letter’
ooh, or maybe one like this:
by the way, desh uses the word “excommunicate” to describe this 7 times, which is another example of how hyperbolic and frenzied this entire screed is.
and – since by your own claims, it is ridiculously easy to become a goodreads member, what is to stop someone with a red star to delete the starred profile and open a new account, just as they would if they were “excommunicated.” a child could poke holes in your plan, man.
desh also takes disproportionate umbrage at the advice goodreads gives its authors:
Don’t engage with people who give you negative reviews. We cannot stress this enough. The number one mistake new authors make is to respond to negative reviews. Engaging with people who don’t like your book is not likely to win you any new readers and could lead to members deciding not to read your book. Remember Goodreads is not private; other readers will see a reaction from the author and interpret it as hostile regardless of how carefully the response was crafted. A single negative interaction is often enough to turn a reader off an author permanently.
this is sound advice, right? nope!
Are you getting the picture that Goodreads is a rather adversarial environment. As an author, just bend over and take whatever abuse is heaped on you. Silently. Because you are supposed to have a thick skin.
no. this is not what that says. that is there to prevent adversarial situations from occurring and is very good advice. goodreads offers something completely new – the opportunity for an author to interact with their readers on a massive scale. but there are dangers inherent in this arrangement. it’s like prometheus saying “here, i’ll give you fire, but try not to burn the whole place down, okay?” successful authors don’t contact michiko kakutani when she writes a negative review, and she writes a lot of negative reviews. she also has a much wider readership than your average goodreads reviewer. a professional doesn’t confront the reviewer. ever. all that advice is reminding you is – be professional. bad reviews are part of any business. movies, books, restaurants, you can even rate your doctors online. and when you have a public meltdown over a negative critique, it makes you look weak and unappealing.
As far as I know, they will always side with the reviewer, especially if the reviewer is also a Librarian.
exactly. as far as you know. and since you couldn’t even find the goodreads feedback group somehow, you have already indicated that you don’t really know your way around goodreads. and this is just patently untrue. there are literally hundreds of examples of goodreads not taking the reviewers side, which led to a mass exodus (to continue with the religious terminology) a few years back. do your research.
then there’s a lot of obsolete but uninteresting information, but i just want to point one thing out because it kind of illuminates just how much of the functionality of goodreads is being misunderstood.
To begin with, the underlying feature is poorly implemented. It obviously favors Amazon, since there is usually a separate button for Amazon and the middle button is for all other vendors … most of the time. I’ve seen some books where the first button is Barnes & Noble and Amazon is in the list of vendors on the ‘online stores’ middle button. Makes no difference, the design and the whole vendor linking is poorly implemented and counterintuitive.
that is because the vendors that show up in the drop down menu are customizable by the users – so they can give priority to vendors they actually buy from and remove the ones that are irrelevant to them.
There is another, more serious problem with the ‘online stores’ button. It has a long list of online vendors and Goodreads knows about hundreds of vendors, but only a few are listed as default. If you pick one of my books, AllRomance will not show up since it is not among the defaults. For some unfathomable reason, each member can edit the ‘online stores’ button. This makes no sense. How is a member to know which vendors an author uses to distribute their books? I contend the author should have the option to insert the proper link to each of their books behind the ‘online stores’ button.
this is because you don’t customize the drop down menu on a book-by-book basis. so you don’t need to know which vendors each author uses – you just need to know which vendors you use. we are readers – if we want a book, we will find the book. and you can add a link to ANY VENDOR YOU WANT, provided it falls under the single guideline: For a book link to be accepted it must be at a public website (ie no sign-in to see a book page) that supports search by ISBN and has a large book catalogue.
basic, basic.
But, as of 12/2014 there was no ‘official URL’ field on the Book Description page.
incorrect. there is still a field to add the url in the book’s description page when you are adding a book. maybe it’s not frequently implemented, but the option is still there.
However, there is a ‘website’ field on the ‘Author profile’ page. Quite frankly, that’s not good enough. If you have multiple books, you want a link to point directly to each book on your website book page, which the old ‘official URL’ field could have done.
why is that not good enough?? how poorly-designed is your website that it isn’t intuitive to the average visitor how to find your books?
Note (01/07/2014): Goodreads is changing the functionality of the ‘online stores’ button. The drop-down list no longer appears.
incorrect as of 1/23/15, and probably was also true on 1/7/2015 (i just noticed that later, on 1/9/15 desh says it is back. but then complains about the ads. which i never see because i have an adblocker.) so ignore this.
Clicking on the button gets you the bizarre ‘search by’ list that used to be the default drop-down list. It can be customized by the user, although, I doubt many users know that. After all there are only 745 different places a user could look for a book. How would they know which vendor the author used?
again – this is not a book-by-book feature, and since you are so appalled by how bad the functionality of goodreads is, do you really think they would be able to implement this for every individual author? and since most authors do not maintain an active presence on goodreads, this wouldn’t even work. any child knows how to use google well enough to type in the name of the book and the word “buy.” it’s not complicated. passionate readers are neither lazy nor stupid. they want a book, they’ll find the book.
in conclusion – there’s just a lot of misinformation in this book and it’s only 26 pages long. clearly this is written by someone with a very superficial understanding of how goodreads works and they caused enough drama on the site to gain a reputation for being difficult and got “excommunicated.” it is bitter and ill-informed. the takeaway here is simple and applies to all aspects of life: don’t be an asshole. there are ways to communicate with people to get what you want. clearly, the way this person was going about it was wrong. and this book is just a whiny rant with no usable advice for indie authors.
bottom line – goodreads is neither evil nor benevolent. like the weather, it just IS. and like the weather, sometimes it breaks or does things you don’t want it to do or spoils your day or mood.
it’s just books, man.
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as a goodreads librarian, i just took the liberty of correcting the typos in this book’s description. in other words i CONTROLLED the INFORMATION!!!
i just made your book’s alarmist statements come true.
“your” welcome.
