Do book reviews matter?
This is an important question for all authors (for readers, see below). Another one is: Who writes reviews? The two questions are linked, of course, and both need to be answered.
I’ve always offered a free ebook in exchange for an honest review (print books are costly, especially for outside the US), and I thank all those good people who respond to that offer, whether directly or via NetGalley. But do those reviewers get more out of it than I do? That’s not a question reflecting a selfish quid-pro-quo philosophy. It’s only an admission that I don’t have any metrics. How do we measure whether reviews matter?
Sales figures aren’t real measures because of the time delays involved. Moreover, I’ve never seen any proof that reviews help improve them. Marketing gurus make unsubstantiated claims like, “Reviews sell books.” Huh? No, online and brick-and-mortar bookstores sell books. One can’t even say, “Reviews help sell books.” I have yet to read or hear one guru offer direct proof of that. Most books sell by word-of-mouth (person X tells family member or friend Y that some book is a great read) or at book events where the author meets and talks to readers.
And all a review does is give one person’s opinion. Most of the ones on Amazon, which is that only online bookstore many authors and marketing gurus think about, to their detriment, a little more than an unqualified thumb-up or down. Amazon has devalued their reviews so much that they ask would-be reviewers to indicate their star-ranking before even writing the review! Think about it: You rank the book and then scramble to justify that ranking in the review you write. Completely backwards!
While I’m tempted to be a bit more complete in my own reviews, I usually don’t go into how an author handles the key writing skills. I’m certainly qualified to do so. My reviews are still usually longer than other reviewers’, especially those on Amazon, so I suspect the average reader would get bored with all the details even if I added them. (It used to be that Amazon knee-capped me at five hundred words, but I’ve slipped some reviews by that are more verbose.) But do reviews matter?
I suppose I’m not an average reader because I read many kinds of books and many of them. But I don’t know if I’m average in another sense: I don’t pay much attention to book reviews when I buy books, neither the number nor the praise. I mostly use the blurb and “peek inside” (effectively browsing, either online or in a bookstore or library). Reviews just don’t matter much when I’m choosing books to read. (The number of reviews might…negatively. I’m generally suspicious of the bandwagon effect: “popular books” can turn me off. Gone Girl is an example. After using my browsing technique, I thought it might be horrible, and the movie seemed to confirm that I was right. Of course, that might just be due to lousy screenwriters.)
Of course, I read reviews of my own books from time to time. In rare cases, I’ve learned from them, if only that readers’ appreciations of a book are very subjective. And I occasionally use selections from a review for marketing purposes. That seems to imply that I think reviews matter at least for those purposes, but I don’t really know. Like most marketing suggestions, I use reviews just in case reviews help. Who wrote the review might matter too for that purpose.
As an ex-scientist, I like data. Gook luck in getting that from Amazon or any other bookstore, or from a marketing guru, for that matter. Actually both Amazon and Smashwords provide data for sales figures (often delayed so much they’re useless for planning marketing campaigns). But those are sales figures! Authors still won’t know if their book’s reviews made any difference.
I’m a bit snarky about all this. When a fellow author says, “My book had a lot of good reviews,” I’m inclined to say, “But is your book really any good.” Or when the author says, “I’ve sold a lot of copies because I have good reviews,” I’m inclined to say, “Prove to me those reviews led to the sales.” They can’t, of course. And the only way I know if a book is good is to read it myself. If it is, I might even review it! Even though it probably won’t lead to sales for the author.
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Comments are always welcome.
Short fiction anthologies and collections. While I give away most of my short fiction now (see the list on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), some of it can be found in anthologies and collections. Detective Castilblanco’s first homicide case can be found in the anthology World Enough and Crime (Donna and Alex Carrick, eds.), and a sci-fi crime story is included in Howling at the Moon (#WolfPackAuthors, eds.—the crimes take place on the moon!). Other Chen & Castilblanco stories can be found in the collection Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java, and more speculative fiction in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape (Vols. 2 and 3 are give-aways—see the list). All these stories are a good way to try my fiction without investing time in a novel. Of course, I’d be a happy camper if you read both (all my novels are reasonably priced).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
