Reviews and Ratings

Reviews sell books. At least that's what I have heard. But you have to sell books in order to get reviews, in theory. And, do the reviews have to be good?

Most authors I know say they never read their reviews because, while good reviews can be very gratifying, bad ones are heartbreaking. I blogged about this many years ago. In 2013 I published my first book, a memoir. Well, to be exact it was not so much a memoir more a bunch of essays reflecting on my life. I turned it into a book and blogged about why here. I made no effort to sell the book but nonetheless, it did sell a few copies and received some good reviews. Then in 2015 I came across my first bad review and experienced that heartbreak I had heard about.

It took me a few days to recover. and when I did, I wrote another blog post about that. Because I realized someone had bought my book, read it, didn't like it but took the time to review it. I decided I should be grateful for that.

Fast forward to 2024 and the publication of my first novel, Caitlin's Escape Route. Again, at first, I did nothing to promote that book either. It was to be the first in a series and I'd read somewhere to wait until the second book was released before advertising, so that's what I did. The second book, Sally's Story, was published 8 months later. My first ads appeared just before book two was published. Both books sold well and the reviews and ratings started to come in, and looked good. Brenda's Story, book three of the series was published causing an increase in sales and even more reviews. And yes, I do check them from time to time. I try not to, but don't always succeed. 

One day recently I took a look at the reviews and to my horror, there was a really bad one. My original belief still holds, not everyone is going to like my stories, or my writing, that's a given. And I am grateful to anyone who buys my books, and even moreso if they take the time to write a review, irrespective of what it says, if it's honest then so be it. But, after I had rebalanced my perspective one thing about that bad review struck me. The reader wrote about my characters in the story, as though they were real people, criticized their decisions and praised some of their actions. What a huge compliment! She didn't like the story, but saw my characters as real.