This isn’t a slam against Goodreads reviewers. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion and some people love my books—some hate them.
This is about a Goodreads’ glitch that I’ve experienced, and it seems I’m not alone. I just heard from an author friend who has had a similar problem.
If you skim book covers to read over at Goodreads and move past those that show a low rating average, you may be overlooking books Goodreads reviewers enjoyed. The star tally might be screwed up.
Take for example the second book in my Haunting Danielle series. As I write this, only one person has left a Goodreads rating on the book, a five star. Yet, had you looked at the book’s average last week, you’d see a different picture. Check the above screen shot I took last week. According to that, minus 2 people left a four star rating—and overall only 33% of the reviewers liked the book. Fact was, only one person had rated the book and they gave it five stars.
Kudos to Goodreads for fixing the glitch after I contacted them (twice). Yet, this has also happened several times on the first book in the series. I have no idea if my other book ratings are accurate over there. These just jumped out at me because they were new releases with only a few ratings.
The problem as I see it—how often does this happen? If an author doesn’t contact Goodreads to point out the problem, how many of these erroneous star averages are misleading the Goodreads community? I have a number of author friends who NEVER go to Goodreads and check out their books. The reason they don’t is another story that I won’t get into now. But the point being, without the author reporting the error to Goodreads (or some other concerned Goodreads Citizen) then perhaps those Goodreads rating averages you see with the book covers are totally useless.