I put a taquiera on the roof, It was well-reviewed,
Four stars out of five, And that's unheard of.
Arctic Monkeys.
A TikTok author went viral recently for using her platform to publicly attack a Goodreads reviewer of her book. Was this a scathing 1-star review that insulted or mocked the author's work? No. Contrarily, the author is upset about a very complementary 4-star review.
4 stars out of 5? 8 out of 10? Publicly attack? Yes, really.
The reviewer praises the book's intricacy, but includes a reservation that it was too predictable. The author doesn't find this acceptable, as it pulled down her otherwise perfect 5-star score on Goodreads. Thankfully, it seems the author is in the minority when it comes to such ungrateful thinking, and at the backlash to this video, she has backtracked, claiming she was joking.
(hmm, questionable).
As at 11th June 2023.
People have since piled on and the author's book now sits at barely above a 1-star rating on Goodreads, a harsh and I think somewhat unjustified form of herd mentality that is just as ugly as the author's initial video. She's also apparently been dropped from her publisher. Not a mistake/joke I imagine she'll make twice!
Outside of a crushing cancellation, this reminds me of the kind of thing that is recurring in writing/reading discourse I've noticed recently and part of a wider question of what is the correct rating to give some piece of media you have consumed.
This is something that should be really simple. You like a thing? Great! Rate it positively. You don't like it? Unfortunate, but then you rate it negatively. But it is more complicated than that, as you aren't just dealing with personal subjectivity on the content, but also personal subjectivity on rating systems. Not to mention inherently imperfect rating systems.
I. What does it mean to give less than 5 stars?
This author represents a fringe but by no means uncommon stance: that high ratings means you enjoyed it, and less-than-glowing reviews are a mean-spirited way to put authors down. A more common view is that 3-star reviews are unnecessarily harsh, and I've seen people argue that if you're going to give less than 4, then don't give a rating at all.
The rationale behind this ultimately comes from good intentions; there are so many self-published books out there that negative reviews can hurt your chances of being picked up, but I think this
1) is not a problem that really needs to be resolved, and
2) not even solving the problem.
I'm both a reader and a writer, and while I appreciate I have never attempted to self-publish a book, I have decided on what books to buy. According to UNESCO, there are over 2 million new books published every year. Not even the most accomplished readers are going to scratch the surface, so they have to pick and choose.
Some people (myself included) pick and choose based on recommendations. They find someone whose opinion they trust, or a hive-mind of suggestions from loads of strangers and go for something that people generally like.
Some people pick and choose based on the blurb or the premise, regardless of whether they have previously heard of it, or even the book cover.
But I think everyone -- to an extent -- relies on ratings and reviews. If someone hates a book for its content and you think you'll hate it for similar reasons why should you waste your precious time on it? If someone found a book mediocre but kind of okay, you might be tempted to skip it in favour of something more highly rated.
Less than 5-star reviews are necessary and provide a function. Of course, disingenuous reviews are annoying and can hurt, but critical 3-star, 2-star or even 1-star reviews are helpful. Please don't throw vitriol at people just because they didn't love your book! In most cases, it isn't about you, it's about the reader!
And wouldn't it feel so much better to see your book given a 4-star rating if this wasn't the norm?
Doing this doesn't protect the author from being skipped, anyway. It shifts the goalposts. It makes star ratings meaningless. This is most evident on Goodreads.
II. 3 stars is the new 1-star.
Goodreads as a ratings website is an abyss. It's functionally useless. I use it to log the books I read and to write reviews, and its annual reading challenges are fun, but there is no sane way you can use it to find recommendations.
Why? Because everything is rated incredibly highly. You will rarely find a book with an average score below 4, and never below 3. What this means in practise is that you can't take the scores at face value. If something is below 4 then you know there's something people take umbrage with, but otherwise you can't use the rating as an indicator of quality.
This is in stark contrast to Letterboxd, a similar website upon which you can log and review films. Unlike Goodreads, I can use Letterboxd to see whether a film is any good before watching it. The star-system has meaning. In contrast to Goodreads, people often give 3-stars to films they think were just "fine".
I am begging people to do the same for the books they read, but there are reasons for why they don't that are valid.
Aside from the "anti-negativity" thing described above, to do with avoiding hurting authors' feelings / chances of being picked up, there is a fundamental difference between films and books. And that's the length of time it takes to consume one.
Letterboxd logo
You are, for the most part, only losing 2 hours of your time to watch a bad film. A lot of books can take five to ten times longer to get through, and people are a lot more likely to DNF, i.e., give up on a book than a film. And some people naturally feel uncomfortable with rating things they haven't finished (myself included).
This pumps the ratings artificially high, as those who hated the book the most didn't leave a rating, but there seems an easy solution to this... have a function where you can mark something as DNF that shows up for other readers. Alongside, incorporated or otherwise complementing the existing score system, I think this could be a great improvement.
Tangentially related to this is it feels easier to hate a film on a public forum, because unlike books, you aren't attacking just one person for its quality, you're spreading it out across an entire team. Good actors can star in bad films. Good directors can be stifled by a bad script. Books are so intimate with their author's thoughts that ratings can easily feel like personal attacks.
For everyone's mental health and sanity, you simply have to separate your art from your self.
III. Your 5 stars is different to my 5 stars.
The final point I want to make is about subjectivity. No person's 5 stars is the same. I wonder if the TikTok author's view is shaped by ratings of other types of product -- taxis etc, where less than 5 star reviews do feel a lot more negative. (I've never seen an Uber driver with a score less than a 4.9).
You might have quite a strict criteria for issuing a 5 star -- and I think I err more on the critical side, though I have been dishing out more 5 stars to books lately (maybe I've been reading better books?) -- you might give everything you liked 5-stars, and I'm not really here to tell you to stop if that's what makes you happy.
But I think all readers need to embrace the negative review every now and again, even if your criteria is different from mine. [Even if you DNF! ;)]
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