Reviews, Honest and Otherwise

            One of the people I follow on Twitter put up a post recently asking why it’s easier to get people to shell out money to buy your book than it is to get them to review it if they get it free. I feel her pain.

            Probably the great delusion of every self-published author is that once the book is out, a couple dozen friends will quickly post positive reviews on Amazon. Hah! A lot of them won’t even download the book on a free promotion day, and half the friends who actually do buy the book will insist on getting a hard copy from you directly. That means, of course, that Amazon has no record of the sale and won’t let them do a review, even if they wanted to. Which they usually don’t.

            On the plus side, that means the reviews of the book pretty quickly get honest, which means the author has at least a marginally real idea of how his or her work is being received.

4.7 Out of 5 Stars

            My first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, is currently averaging 4.1 out of 5 stars, with the overwhelming percentage of reviewers now being strangers. What mattered most to me about the reviews was that no one gave it fewer than three stars. That said to me that, whatever they might have felt about the book’s strengths and weaknesses, the reviewers at least conceded it a fundamental level of writing competence. That helped me have the confidence to write the second one.

            The second book, Wash Her Guilt Away, came out less than a year ago. Fewer friends reviewed it than reviewed the first, so nearly all the reviews are from strangers. When I put the book up on Amazon, I held my breath. I had tried to build tension and interest at the beginning through character development and atmosphere, rather than action and bloodshed, and had no idea how that would play. When the first three reviews from strangers came in at five stars, I heaved a sigh of relief.

            By the way, the second book is now averaging 4.7 out of five stars. I feel it’s a more fully realized work than the first one, and it’s good to see that, so far at least, readers are agreeing.

Who Writes Reviews, Anyway?

            Even so, it seems to me that my books aren’t getting as many reviews as the sales numbers indicate they should. Part of that might be that the readership probably skews older, and older readers are a bit less self-absorbed and inclined to think the world is waiting for their opinion.

            Which got me to wondering what kind of reviews an undisputed classic gets. So I checked the Constance Garnett translation of Anna Karenina on Amazon and found that it had been reviewed by more than 1,200 people. I wonder why any of them thought, at this point, that anyone would care about what they had to say.

            Another interesting thing was that Anna Karenina averaged 4.1 out of 5 stars in its reviews — same as my first trashy mystery and lower than the second. So much for the idea that the crowd generally gets it right. And you have to feel a bit sorry for poor Tolstoy. His book went up on Amazon after all his friends were dead and couldn’t help him out with a positive review.

At Least Somebody's Paying Attention

When I published my first Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, on Amazon a bit less than two years ago, it went out there on its own. It was the first book by an unknown author, so there was no other book in the series, no reviews, and no recommendations from other writers. The first few thousand people who bought it, and who didn’t know me, were taking a leap of faith.

            The second novel in the series, Wash Her Guilt Away, went up on Amazon last week, and it had some things going for it that the first one didn’t. The first book has already established whatever level of credibility I might have with readers and provided a small base audience for the second one. For example, one reader, who found and read the first book months after it was published, snapped up the second one within 15 minutes of when I posted a link on Facebook, and “liked” it as well.

            But perhaps the best thing going for Wash Her Guilt Away now is the reviews that the first book now has under its belt on Kindle.

The Crowd Paints a Picture

            In past blog posts, I’ve expressed some skepticism about online reviews, and I still believe they have to be read intelligently. A scathing Yelp review of a restaurant, for example, might owe something to the fact that the review’s author was dumped by his girlfriend after dinner there. And of course there are people out there who will do bogus reviews for a fee

            Assuming the reviews are legit, though, once there are enough of them, the crowd has painted a picture that a discerning viewer can interpret. In the case of a book by a hitherto unknown author, I’d put the base number of credible reviews at ten. Contrary to what some people might think, it’s next to impossible to get ten friends to review your book. In fact, it’s hard to get that many even to buy it and read it.

            So hitting a double-digit number of reviews is an indicator that some strangers out there are buying the book; that it was good enough that they read it all the way through; and that they had enough of a feeling about it to put up a public response. Even if the response isn’t entirely positive, those are good things.

Going by the Numbers

            There are 16 reviews of The McHenry Inheritance as of this writing. The average review was 4.1 out of 5 stars, and nobody gave it less than three. If it’s somebody else’s book and I’m the buyer, going by those numbers, I’d be willing to risk $2.99 on a something that sounds good from the dust-jacket blurb.

            Plus those reviews can be used for promotional purposes. The second book has a page of review excerpts (honest, I might add) for the first book on Kindle. Now  the ordinary reader doesn’t know Mountain Mom, Bob from Salt Lake City, or the other four reviewers I quoted. On the other hand, the average reader doesn’t know anything about the book reviewers for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Indianapolis Star or the Orlando Sentinel, whose comments are liberally quoted in the books you see at the book stores.

            More important than who, exactly, is doing the commenting is, as I said earlier, that the book is being read and the comments are there. And if people say the characters are likable, the plot and atmosphere well done, then that’s another bit of reassurance to the customer swiping $2.99 on the credit card. If not, wait for a free-promotion day.