GoodReads: Overrated?

The conventional wisdom among "book people" these days goes something like this: "You can't trust Amazon for reviews. Too many wackos on there, too many people with bad taste and too many people who aren't serious readers. For a better sense of what real readers are reading, and to hear their opinions, which are much worthier than the opinions of those who post on Amazon, go to Goodreads."

All I can say is: Don't believe the hype.

There's a lot of buzz in the office, among the younger professionals, regarding how to harness Goodreads as a marketing tool. Frankly, I don't think that's a good idea and I've been discouraging it - but then I get lectured along the lines of "Agatho, you must be more open to social media, you must be willing to try something new, you must meet readers where they congregate." Yes, all right - I concede the point.

I really haven't spent much time on Goodreads, as I usually look to Amazon for a sense of what's resonating and why. Of course, reviews have to hit a critical mass on Amazon for me to parse public reaction, figuring out what worked and for whom, and what didn't work and why. Somehow I've come up with the number 50. Up to 35 or so reviews, authors can get friends/family/colleagues to stack the deck in their favor. When you hit 50 reviews, though, you can be sure there will be some 1- and 2- star reviews in there ... and I think there's an interesting phenomenon on Amazon, too: People who don't like a book seem much more willing to say something negative about when others have already done so.

I'll admit that I've sometimes scratched my head over Amazon reviews, marveling (not in a good way) at some of the things people have said. So, going over to Goodreads, I expect the level of discourse to be somewhat different. And it IS different, but not necessarily, I think, in a good way.

Here's what I'm thinking after spending a few hours on Goodreads. I'm going to generalize here, so please keep that in mind before you jump down my throat. I think the Goodreads community sees itself as the Kirkus of the Internet. As self-defined "serious readers," they seem to subscribe to belief that a book is bad until proven otherwise. So, yes, it seems that the overall ranking of a book on Goodreads tends to be lower than the overall ranking on Amazon. (I chose ten books at random, from different publishers and with varying degrees of success/public awareness, and this was true for all ten of them.)

There's another problem, too. You can't rate a book on Amazon without saying something about it, no matter how short. But Goodreads is filled with rankings and no accompanying explanations. Not good.

Of course, I am most interested in how my own company's books have fared on Goodreads. Overall, I don't think the quality of the reviews is any better than the quality of the reviews on Amazon. First off, I counted six reviews in which reviews said something completely wrong. Not misleading, not slightly off the mark, but downright wrong. And I don't mean subjectively wrong - I mean objectively, proveably wrong. One said she doesn't like books written in the present tense: The book she was reviewing is NOT written in present tense. One said that she prefers a first-person narrator, and the book would have been better if the lead character had told the story. The point of view in that particular book IS first-person.  One of the reviews gave away some key plot twists (one would think that self-appointed "good readers" would know better), and another recounted plot "events" that do not happen in the book that is being reviewed.

I really believe, when all is said and done, when the reading public has spoken, that just about every worthy book published today will end up with a 3-star ranking. That's as it should be - It's impossible to publish a book everyone likes. (For example, I find the Harry Potters so incredibly tiresome and would have rejected the first book by page 50. Fortunately, I can't kick myself over this because I've never worked in that market and never saw the manuscript.) However - and I can speak only for myself and my own acquisitions and publishing philosophy - I'm not looking to publish books for the elite. You know what I mean: the books that get reviewed in the New York Times and talked up on NPR; the books that people like to buy, leave on their coffee tables, and then place on a shelf, unread, a few months hence. I'm looking for manuscripts that the "average person" will enjoy and recommend to friends - because I am looking for commercial success (i.e., a lot of books sold). So maybe the good folks who review for Goodreads are not my target audience. 

What I *do* like about Goodreads is this: As far as I can tell, it hasn't yet been overrun by self-marketers, the way DorothyL has and, to a certain extent, the way Amazon has. (I'm sure many of you have heard about the "scandals" in which people promise to post a review on Amazon in exchange for monetary compensation.) But my assistant subscribes to some Yahoo groups in which the vanity-published are actively talking about ways to get their work known via Goodreads, so a flank attack may indeed be in the works...

 

Comments

[Maxine]

I'm on Goodreads purely as a way to track my reading, so I am one of those "bad" people you mention who ranks the books but does not post a review. However, I review all the books I read on my blog (unless they were truly dreadful/DNF) and I have a sentence to that effect in my Goodreads profile.

I agree with you that many reviews and discussion at Goodreads is terrible, riddled with illiterately expressed sentiments. There are some relatively good reviews/comments, but not enough to make me sift through all the dross.

By Amazon I assume you refer to US Amazon? I use UK Amazon and review for them, or post short versions of my blog reviews there for some books. I'd say on UK Amazon there is a sort of 50/50 ratio of well written reviews with intelligence, to reviews that are not worth reading. I don't think that's bad for user-generated content. I sometimes find the reviews useful in deciding whether to read a book. I also like the fact that awful reviews (eg swear words throughout) can be reported to Amazon and I have seen them remove some, eg the ones that gave away the ending of the latest Jo Nesbo book.

[Bernadette]

To be honest I don't use either Amazon or Good Reads any longer but when I did need a general source of reviews/thoughts I preferred Good Reads for a couple of reasons

1) that you never got the kind of negative review that is all about hating Amazon or some problem with the delivery of the order as can happen on Amazon (sometimes to an extreme).

2) the reviews seem to be from a broader cross section of humanity than just the US (or UK if you're using Amazon.co.uk) - as a non-American it is nice to occasionally be able to find a comment or review that is written by another non-American

3) sort of related to the second point but of course on Amazon you can only find reviews of books sold by Amazon - quite a lot of Australian books are not sold there - or not for a year after they are released here (there's that pesky geographic restrictions nonsense again) - being a vendor-independent place at least on GR I can find reviews of books I see in my own local book store's shelves

Other than that I find them both about the same in terms of usefulness, accuracy of content (there are some whopper errors in Amazon reviews too), childishness, dodgy practices by authors and their fans in gaming the system and all the rest. Which is why I've chosen other means of finding book recommendations. Though I realise that doesn't help you as a publisher as there are still plenty of people using both sites for that purpose.

[Laura K Curtis]

I have to say, I am surprised anyone thinks GR is better than Amazon for quality of reviews. The number of books that the authors themselves say they haven't even finished revising yet that are already reviewed on GR is simply astounding. ("Oh, it's a Chelsea Cain, I know I will love that, so I will give it 5 stars!")

Not that it doesn't happen that way on Amazon, I just don't see it nearly as much. I am not a huge fan of Amazon reviews, either, I just don't think GR is any better.

And the spam I get from GR...goodness. You'd think everyone in the WORLD wants to be my friend, when in fact all they want to do is sell me their book.

I use LibraryThing to catalog my books, and I will occasionally look there for reviews, though even those aren't always substantive. (Too many "another wonderful book by James Patterson!" reviews, but at least they're easy enough to skim.)

Honestly, I am not sure people actually buy from reviews anyway. At least not from AZ or GR reviews. They're more apt to make me NOT buy because of something I learn about the book (oh, look, it focuses on child murders...think I will skip this one) than anything else. In that respect, the incorrect reviews would make me crazy.

Just my two bits.