Tag: reading

This is one of those practical posts I have to do from time to time.

I’m not going to cover everything, so there might be a guest post on this later.

First, before you start, will the gentleman in the back stop chewing gum quite so loudly? please note the pinned post at the top of the blog. The books on sale have rolled over. And yes, as of right now there’s only one, but two more will join on the 9th.

Thank you. Now, let’s resume our unscheduled insanity explanation of rating and reviews, particularly for books, not that anyone is hinting at anything ever, but also for things like etsy, ebay, etc.

Many years ago, before we moved from the house downtown, older son and I opened a “bookshop” on Amazon. You see, we had a lot of used/second hand/lightly used because someone had given them to me and I didn’t care enough about them, books that I was never ever going to use. A lot of them were reference books, accumulated over 20 years. And I was never likely to use them again.

For explanation, I used to accumulate a lot of tangential historical and such references, because as a pro I was likely to get called to do a story for an anthology on “Cats in Egypt” or something equally off the wall, and the defense was to have a lot of references, so I could check quickly and go “Oh, yeah, I can do that.”

But research for short stories, as opposed to novels, is the sort of thing that can now — and could by 2013 — be done with a quick scramble through the web, if you know how to cull good information from bad. So, I had a lot of reference books I could get rid of, because the chances of my writing a novel set, say, in Mexico before the Spaniards arrived was very very low. (But a short story might be requested.)

There were various reasons the endeavor failed after about 6 months, and we ended up having to donate something like 4000 books. (Yes, you read that right, hence the attempt to sell them, and donating them when that failed. We still moved over 5k for things I intend to work in again. What the kids will do with all that after I’m gone is a puzzle.)

One was that after about three months the market fell out from under the books. We were positioned at just that point when people seemed to be giving up on paper books. (Judging by the amount of FREE bookshelves on craigslist too.) That’s just our luck, okay? And there seems to be a come back in those, from the reader side, but I suspect that’s a dead cat bounce, related to preparedness for a possible fall of civilization. When the turmoil doesn’t work that way, it will go away again.

But before that we’d run into problems that made the whole thing onerous. One was that there were (perhaps there still are?) a lot of scammers, that do things to the book, or claim the book arrived destroyed, and are you going to refund it. I immediately made it a point of asking for pictures. Never came. The person would vanish. But complaints affected your rating.

The other thing that affected your rating was stars. And because we were just a woman and a young man, not a bookstore staff, and we didn’t frankly have much margin (probably priced too low, but we wanted to sell) we shipped media mail. Which could get interesting. So we started getting three stars because the book was too slow to arrive, or the packaging was torn, or — things we had no control over.

Note there was nothing substantive and negative, just piddly stuff. But our rating dropped, and our appearance in searches dropped, until we were selling almost nothing, the books needed to be got out of the house, and we spent a couple of weeks just boxing and donating, after closing the shop.

Now I’m 99% sure the people who gave three star ratings didn’t mean for that to happen. And the ones where the book took a long time had a right to do that, because, well… been there too. And the ones where the packaging was torn probably thought they were giving us valuable information. But the ones — and there were more than a few — who rated with three stars and said something like “It’s a book. It got here on time. it’s as described. What more can I say?” Those are the ones that made me pull my hair out.

They are up there with the people who leave reviews for fiction that say something like “I liked this book. It was perfectly enjoyable.” And give three stars. I know some of these people. heck, some are friends. And if you ask them why they say “Well, three stars is for a normal book I liked,” “Four is for something extraordinary that I’m going to hand sell to all my friends.” “Five is for one of those rare perfect books that I’ll re-read twice a year and will stay with me for the rest of my life.”

Look, you’re right. I’m not disputing that you’re right. THAT’s what the rating SHOULD be.

The problem is that this is not what the rating means, from the POV of the corporation that is creating algorithms that allows people to find my book, or, alternately, decides it’s a defective product and buries it so deeply even people looking by name and author can’t find it.

Because you see, the problem is you’re thinking of a grading system for BOOKS. And in a grading system for “How good do I think this book is?” the middle — 3 — is what most books WILL be. And it will mean “perfectly enjoyable. Would read more like it.” And four is better than that and five is just about perfect. Right? I get it.

As book readers, we would appreciate that system, because it would tell us something like “Most people found this book enjoyable. That means it’s okay for an afternoon.” Or “wow, it’s nothing but five stars. Let me read the comments to see if it’s some insanely partisan thing. No? Wow. I have to read this.”

That would be great, if it worked like that, and save me a ton of time wading through insanity in hip boots trying to find something I won’t wall in five minutes.

UNFORTUNATELY THIS IS NOT A RATING SYSTEM FOR BOOKS.

Yes, Amazon applies it to books. But it’s not a rating system for books. Or, for etsy and such, a rating system that applies or should apply to any small business with handmade product.

What it is is a rating system for widgets, which are shipped out from a factory by dedicated personnel.

Your order a banana cutter, say, and if it doesn’t arrive when it said it would, you deduct a star because it was a day late. Or you give it three stars because it arrived a day late, and the box was smooched. Below that it’s serious problems.

Note, this is not a matter of taste, or “there’s a small problem on x, so two stars.”

When you order a widget, it should arrive on time and perform as described. That’s it. If it does that, it’s five stars.

So if it’s less than five stars, Amazon — and ebay, and etsy, and etc — penalizes you. Because you’re not performing as you should.

Of course, as illustrated above, there are always *ssholes, even when rating shipping and products, but this is particularly pronounced in books and readers, because well… it shouldn’t be that way.

How the book looks or is delivered, or if it matches the description, has nothing to do with whether an individual reader enjoys it. My husband and I share, among other things, a library, and our tastes run fairly close, but even there they’re not the same. He liked one particularly “witchy mystery” series which I forbid him from even mentioning scenes from. He thought the scenes were adorable, but they read to me as twee and talking down to the reader, and I could feel IQ points dropping off my ears every time he talked about it. So his review of those books would probably be 5 stars, and mine 1. Okay, mine would probably be 3 for “it’s okay but get this off my face, already.” If either of us had reviewed, which we don’t because we’re both authors, and Amazon has issues with authors reviewing books. (Don’t ask. It’s stupid, is what it is. But I also understand why. Sometimes the only way to stop mega-scams, usually not in-country is a stupid rule.)

So, while the “real” star rating as it should be for books, would indeed be a wondrous thing and save us a lot of trouble, that’s not what we have. And given how Amazon approaches business, your doing it your way isn’t going to convince them either.

What it’s going to do is hurt the writer (or crafter, or small seller.)

Because if my rating is something like 4 stars overall, Amazon will assume the books kind of stink on ice, and just disappoint everyone, and so will shuffle me to the end of the pack.

Also putting in a three star review because “there’s a typo on page seven” is what’s known as a “dick move” because frankly, everything has a typo somewhere, even trad pub that has a lot more readers and copyeditors. Yes, it’s a quality issue, but in the realm of books it’s like saying “It exists.” Or “this carafe is a terrible tool to dig in my flowerbeds with.”

Oh, yeah, also because trad pub buys reviews from services (no, seriously) and doesn’t get penalized, which indies do and can get kicked out for, you also get penalized for having less than a gazillion reviews.

I’m not telling you whether or how to review. That’s between you and your conscience. I’m just going to say this is one of those things that has consequences you probably don’t intend when holding your purist view.

And I’m going to say the star rating isn’t a private “In my mind” thing, but a means of communicating.

Like, in Portugal, grading went from 1 to 20 with 9.5 being passing. But in fact the grading didn’t exist above 14 because anything above was “superhumanly good” by common accord. This was fine in Portugal where university, grad schools and employers looking at an average of 14 realized it was an A, but when I transferred over as an exchange student, the school wanted to know why I’d failed almost all my classes, and did I need remedial?

This is exactly the same thing: in your mind and the minds of purists, and frankly in “how it should be” a book with a 3 star rating is pretty good and you want the next in the series.

But what Amazon sees in that rating is “What an utter pile of cr*p, please don’t show me books by this loser again. In fact, don’t show them to ANYONE.”

So, again, not telling you what to do. But if you like a book or a series, and would like to see more of that or by the author, I’m sorry, but you have to rate it 5. In fact, even if that book wasn’t your fave by the author, but it was okay, and you don’t want to hurt the author, rate it a 5.

I have so far — I can’t review, but I do rate on my kindle — rated a book two stars ONCE. I’ve had many books not to my taste, but that one was not only chock full of typos and grammatical errors, to the point it looked like it was written by a non-english-speaking AI, but it had glaring historical errors in the first four pages, which is as far as I got.

BUT note, that’s one book, in… good lord. Probably tens of thousands. I haven’t counted recently.

The rest? Well, if I don’t hate either the book or the author, I give five stars.

And while I can’t give reviews, because I’m an author, if I could I would. Because there are some amazing books being ignored for not having 100 or 200 or 500 reviews. Again, that is something the Amazon algorithm likes.

I often get told “but I don’t know what to write in a review.”

You really don’t need to write much. “I loved this book” is enough, though it won’t get you “most helpful” status. But it still counts.

If you have a little more time, and it’s not a spoiler you can say the part you liked best. Like “I loved this book. I particularly liked it when the Great Sky Dragon interrupted the wedding” Or whatever. Or “I particularly like that the people all wore purple at the same time without planning.” Anything like that is catnip to the author who likes knowing their little jokes or cute scenes were appreciated.

If you really are bucking for “most valuable” you usually give a little synopsis. So, for Draw One in the Dark and touting my own horn, mostly because I don’t want to offend anyone by doing theirs and doing it wrong (Blanket mice were hunted at six am, okay?):

“This is an urban fantasy but not quite in the ordinary way. To begin with it takes place in the diner, and to continue, it involves a group of young friends who are just discovering they are shape shifters, and what this means.

All this while a mysterious series of deaths has the town on edge, and the dragon triad is looking for a thief.

It’s exciting and interesting, but even the shape shifting doesn’t involve a magical element, which makes it unusual.”

Something like that will be helpful to other readers, and bump the book, because it’s a review. Oh, if you give it five stars, of course.

Unless, of course, you want indie authors to starve.

No pressure.

<Exits stage left, pursued by a reading bear.