2025 Reading Challenge discussion

FYI, the culture of Goodreads is that authors should not ask reviewers to change their reviews, and generally should not interact with negative reviews at all. (I say culture because regardless of Goodreads policy, the userbase is passionately against author interference due to some extremely hamfisted handling by Amazon when they first took over. Witness the extreme reaction to Lauren Hough's criticism of a Goodreads review on her Twitter last year.) Amazon tried enforcing a 'no negative reviews without good reason' type of policy several years ago, and it pretty much failed flat out.

It sounds like this reviewer has provided her perfectly reasonable rationale for why she didn't like your book. Goodreads reviewers aren't professionals; they can rate a book however they like for whatever reason they like. Some people downrate anything that has characters they can't identify with. Some people do the same for sex or violence. It may be frustrating when people judge a book by what seems like arbitrary standards, but it's perfectly allowed according to the Goodreads rules.

Long story short: Try not to take bad reviews too personally, and resist the temptation to interfere with reviewers. Sometimes life just hands you a bad review. It's all part of the book business.

When I rate a book, it’s my personal opinion. An author (or anyone else, for that matter) disagreeing with my rating isn’t going to change anything - if I didn’t like it, I’m not going to suddenly love it just because someone else did. And the other way around.

I usually stick to genres I normally enjoy - although, that doesn’t guarantee a good rating. But sometimes I venture into - to me - lesser known genres, and it might just not be my cup of tea, and I’ll give it a low rating. Even if it were a masterpiece in its field, I would still give my honest opinion, my personal feeling. Otherwise, what would be the point?

Sorry, you got a bad review, but I’m sure all writers do. You can’t please everybody, I guess…

Mark wrote: "I am a first-time author and I have been pleasantly surprised by some nice 5-star reviews on my book

The Meaning of It
Check out this book on Goodreads: The Meaning of It https://www.goodreads.com..."

No, don't ask. Personally, I don't trust books where everyone has given it 4 or 5 stars, and never trust ones that are all 5 stars because that usually means the book is self-published and has been reviewed by friends/family/fellow church members/etc.

Just look at all of the great classics and you'll see that there are usually a wide spread of stars. I will give 1 star to books I don't finish if I hate them or think they are poorly written, but I don't rate them that unless I've really given them a go or the writing is abysmal or very amateur.

I can see by the reviews your book isn't for me, but obviously some people like it.