Yesterday in the comments to my blog I ran into a familiar confusion.
Someone in the comments — hi Mary — suggested the best you can do for a writer is to leave a review or even a rating (but preferably a review) even if the review is “I really liked this book. I particularly like it where John stubs his toe and calls the rock a bad name.”
Someone else answered by pointing out that she couldn’t do that, because she’s been informed that giving a book a three or four star review is not good, and when that’s what she wants to give, she just doesn’t review.
Long, suffering sigh.
Once upon a time I was a professional translator, so this is the sort of situation I specialized in. Or in other words, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Look, I even understand the confusion. Amazon has five stars after all. Therefore you should be able to choose precisely how you feel about the book. And the most common of those would be 3 with 2 not being so bad. Because, seriously, most books we read we feel like “okay, that was a book” or at least that’s true for most people who read a couple of books a day, right? I mean unless something knocks our socks out which happens maybe once a month it’s a “Okay, that’s a three.” And if something is really amazing, but we know that they should have taken more time with the ending, or cut out a scene that makes no sense whatsoever, you give it a four, and you feel generous.
Unfortunately you’re speaking the reader language, the language in which you would talk to your friends about a book when you’re saying “Oh, yeah this is good” or “Oh, that was cool, it’s about a three. Nice to read by the fire on a winter night.”
Amazon, possibly because the programing was easier, or possibly because it makes sense to have a binary thing for stuff like, uh, teakettles and pens, and because Amazon hates itself for selling books, has written its algorithm so it has two ratings: five star and one star. Or if you prefer it: ice cream of death.
Unfortunately it doesn’t interpret anything that’s not one star as five stars. no. They interpret everything that’s not five star as one star, and therefore death.
And if you’re going to leave reviews, you have to speak the algorithm language and crack the cold equations.
If it helps, imagine a drunken little elf behind the Amazon front page, and it’s doing all these calculations in a drunken little elf way. The minute you get a one star review the drunken little elf panics and goes “oh, no. Oh No. This product is obviously death. It’s going to kill dozens of people.” And then it hides your book forever, so you don’t claim another victim of bad prose.
I do appreciate that you’re sitting there going “but some books are only a four, or a three.” But what you sound like is my mom, screaming louder and louder in Portuguese at my kids, in the belief that if she spoke loud enough the kids will get the one true language.
There might be some site, perhaps, somewhere, where you can perhaps put up a true review.
But that site is not Amazon.
On Amazon you’re either saying “yep this is a book” which is what a five star amounts to or “This book will kill anyone who reads it, run away, run away.”
Okay so “but I don’t want to lie”. That’s fine, though you’re not lying. You’re speaking the algorithm’s language. If you want to clarify how you really feel about the book, you then leave a review to go with the five stars.
Sorry. I know I sound a little aggressive, but put yourself in my shoes for a moment.
You see, the problem is that we, the algorithm also thinks the minimum number of reviews a halfway decent book that should get promoted has is 1000, not you know, 100.
And they’re perfectly willing to accept the fake reviews from trad pub, who buy them by the batch load. But Indies? Gah. They’ll even take away reviews on the suspicion that you must have somehow bought them even though they can’t prove it.
So have some mercy on us indies, will you? Throw us a five star. tell the little drunk elf that our books will not in fact kill innocent bystanders who open them.
And don’t worry. no one actually cares if you gave it a five when it should really, in a platonic ideal system, have been a four. No one will ever know.
Except the little Drunken Elf might — keep in mind — MIGHT not bury our book never to be discovered again.
Mad Genius Club 
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