I got a five-star review on a book the other day. It was very nice, to think that someone out there in the wide world read my book and liked it that much. The critical word in that last sentence, though, was “think.”
Although the implication is that somebody thought my book was top-notch, I have no way of knowing for sure, because there’s no accompanying review. Was it the characters, the action, the prose? If it were ranked 1 – 10 (instead of 1 – 5), would I have only gotten a 9, and if so, why? I don’t even know that this person read the book; they could as easily have purchased it, filed it, and posted a five-star rating pro forma. Doesn’t sound likely…and yet that same book has a 1-star rating attached as well, and I will bet you my bottom dollar (what does that even mean?) that whoever gave me that rating did not read the book. I don’t have an inflated sense of my own skills, but I do not write 1-star books.
And if they did read the book, what were they trying to say? Was the premise totally implausible? Did the dialogue rattle like an old pick-up on a dirt road? Did the protagonist remind them of a despised junior high school teacher?
You see the problem: It’s easy to despise an unexplained 1-star complaint, but it’s hard to understand it, and impossible to know if it’s valid (and that doesn’t just hurt the writer, it undermines the entire purpose of ratings). But I have a solution: It would not be difficult for Amazon to require that all one-star ratings include a review of say, 60 characters minimum. That’s about ten words. That book is someone’s dream. If you hate it enough to sink it single-handedly in the Amazon ratings (and that’s exactly what you’re doing), surely you can come up with ten words to explain why. Otherwise, you’re just a troll. And to make it fair, the same should be required for all five-star ratings. Let the author know why you loved his book! How else do you expect the next one to be as good? How else will anyone know if he should read it?
So if anyone out there has a connection to Jeff Bezos, do us all a favor and ask him to implement this little change to his program. It wouldn’t take much, but it would mean a lot to us as both readers and writers…you know, the people who pay to keep your company afloat…
Graffiti on the Walls of Time 