Last week, I did a post about how people’s relationship with reading has evolved or, more accurately, devolved. How college professors are seeing more and more students incapable of completing a reading assignment, and how people on BookTok declare with pride that they skip huge chunks of every book they read.
This week, I’m looking at another aspect of the degradation in how people interact with books: book reviews.
The Struggle Is Real…
There’s a lot of advice out there for indie authors about how to sell books. I’ve tried for a very long time to figure out the perfect combination of things that will finally get my books enough attention to translate to sales. A lot of the advice is maddeningly circular:
Sigh.
Well, I’ve figured out the mailing list, I get a tiny bit of traffic to my site, and I do have a very small ARC Team. But reviews…
Reviews are a tricky, tricky thing for a lot of reasons. A big one is Amazon. Amazon is adamant that all reviews be 100% genuine, and some of their standards can be very difficult to meet. (Also frustrating, when you look at the obviously bogus reviews and shady seller practices on non-book products, but that’s another rant for another day…) Your friends can’t review your book. Your fellow authors can review your book but, once they have, you can never review one of theirs, lest it appear you made a deal to trade positive reviews. Can’t circumvent this with three people, either—they’ll catch on.
You can’t pay people to review your book. You can give away free books to potential reviewers, but only in the “hope” they’ll leave a review—you can’t require them to commit to a review, because that makes the free book “compensation” for the review.
So What’s An Author To Do?
One big way people seek reviews is through websites that focus on sharing your free books (ARCs, Advanced Reader Copies) with readers who like to review books. There are several such sites, and I’ve tried a few of them. I’ve been disappointed every time.
On the surface, these sites seem like the perfect workaround for Amazon’s “no compensation” rule. These sites are 100% free to the reader. They sign up and pick the books they want. They then, hopefully, they:
- read the book
- post a review on one or more websites, such as Amazon and Goodreads
- drop the links to those reviews into the review website so the author can find the reviews.
Unlike the readers, the author does pay for this service. You’re paying the website to distribute your book to readers, to send them “reminder” emails to write their review, and to provide you with the review links—you are not paying for the review, since the reader is getting the book for free and the only requirement is putting up with you saying “pretty please” and the website sending them a reminder email or two.
This sounds great, and it should be. But my experience says otherwise.
The first one of these I tried had ZERO transparency—I couldn’t even tell where their readers came from. The site was outdated and poorly maintained, so I had no idea whether any of the numbers they claimed were current. The deal was a flat fee for up to a certain number of “claims” of the book, which I paid upfront, with an additional charge per book if more than the initial number of people claimed the book.
The day before my book was scheduled to be offered to their readers, I got a grumpy email saying “not many” people claimed my book so there wouldn’t be an additional charge. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they ran my promo a day early vs. just saying “nobody wanted it,” I replied to ask how many is “not many,” amazed they didn’t think to share that. I got an even grumpier response; I forget the number now, but it was single-digits. The implication was clearly that this was because my book sucked, though how would anybody know whether or not the book sucks if they aren’t reading it? Ultimately, the grumpy guy said they were “still growing” my genre.
If you’re “still growing” the Urban Fantasy genre in 2026… fuck off.
For my next attempt, the website was much better, but the experience was equally terrible. This one had plenty of transparency, but I believe it’s too flooded with books for anyone to get much attention unless you bring your own, large, ARC team. For this one, I had to pay $19 a month throughout my campaign, including the time waiting for people to post reviews. The grumpy guy’s site I paid a flat $20 total; this one I paid for 3 months so $57 total. I managed to get 3 sign ups for each of 2 books, one of which came from my own ARC team, so really 5 sign ups total. One of them ultimately withdrew.
The rest?
Time for me to switch gears and talk about book reviewing as a skill.
Reviews of Bad Books Vs. Bad Book Reviews
Let me start by saying this is absolutely not a criticism of honestly critical reviews. If you didn’t like my book then, by all means, leave as scathing a review as you feel appropriate. There are reviews of bad books, and then there are bad reviews…
When you’re in the fourth grade and have to write a book report, a big part of your job is to prove you read the book. You need to share the names of the main characters, the key plot elements, the overall theme. You might have tried to do this without having read the book by reading the back cover, flipping through and skimming a page here and there, or even reading things other people have said online about that book.
Two things: First, your fourth grade teacher absolutely knew you didn’t read the book. And second, a book review isn’t a book report.
If you’re choosing to write a book review, we should feel safe in assuming you read the book: you don’t have to prove it to us. You don’t need to rehash the story. You don’t need to give the names of the characters or summarize the plot. That’s what the blurb on the back of the book is for. A book review can be one of two things: a critical analysis of the writing, or a recommendation (or counter-recommendation) of the book to other readers.
A critical analysis means doing a deep dive into the quality of the writing, as well as an exploration of plot, theme, etc. This is the sort of thing you might do for your own review website, or when submitting a review to a magazine or other publication. This type of review is an article about the book. And, while it’s nice to get a review like that from time to time, it is absolutely not necessary.
The point of leaving a review on Goodreads or a bookseller’s website is to help other people decide whether or not they might enjoy the book. You can write a perfectly workable book review in 1-2 sentences, without any plot rehash or character naming at all.
“This was a great book—if you like fantasy blended with mystery, this is probably for you!”
“I didn’t love this, because I’m not a big fan of friends-to-lovers romance. YMMV.”
This is not the sort of reviews people are leaving.
I’m not going to share or link any actual reviews here—you can go look at my books on Amazon and/or Goodreads if you want to see them for yourself. But they’re things like “Sofia went to school and things happened. Cabot was there too. There’s magic, and I guess people are psychic, too?”
Almost every single person spells “Sofia” as “Sophia.” I know that’s the more common spelling for most English speakers, but if you just read a 500 page book with a main character named Sofia, you might have noticed the spelling? One person called her “Sophie.”
The above is a paraphrase, but it is not an exaggeration. This is what they’re like: listing characters, naming the location, stating the barest bones of the plot, usually in a way that proves the person read only the back of the book and maybe bounced through and skimmed a couple of random pages.
It’s Not Hoarding If It’s Books
So, at this point, you might be asking me “But, why, Sara? Why are people signing up to review books if they don’t want to read and review books?”
Because… free books.
The first review I got through the seemingly more professional review site was five stars paired with an absolute trashing of my book. Called it immature, shallow, you name it—worst review I’ve ever gotten, written like I’d stepped on their puppy. Twice. But five stars. I looked at that person’s other reviews and they’d posted nine reviews that day. And they were all like that. All five stars, all beginning with “I really wanted to love this but…” The only good reviews they’d left were all for one author who, suspiciously, had some similarities with the reviewer’s username.
My paid account was going to renew 2 days before two still-pending reviews were due. I didn’t really want to pay another $20 for the next month in the hope of maybe getting 1-2 more terribly-written reviews, so I looked up the two reviewers I was waiting on, to see what their reviews looked like.
One of them was posting an average of two reviews a day. They were all short, all of the “Sophie went to school and met a boy” variety. This was the better of the two.
The other one had posted eleven reviews that day. That was a Friday; looking backwards, they had a few more from earlier in the week. The week before they had well over twenty. Their overall total reviews was more than seven thousand.
This person is not reading twenty books a week; they’re claiming more books than they can actually read, then blasting out half-assed reviews at the last minute. I read several of their reviews for other people’s books, and it’s not just me. Generic descriptions, lists of character names, and other nonsense, all riddled with typos and misspellings.
This person is labeled as a “top reviewer.”
The alternative to this is paying a fortune for a spot on a site like NetGalley, where even a shared spot in a co-op is more than someone not yet selling any books can afford. Word is those are better reviews, but the sky-high price tag makes it a no-go for me.
I guess actually reading books is no longer cool. They take too long to finish and people who want to be influencers need a steady stream of fresh content. What is cool, apparently, is sharing pictures of stacks of new books. Also cool is posting massive reading goals on Goodreads, along with huge “books read” lists at the end of the year. Talking about books in an abstract way on TikTok? Also very cool.
But most “book reviewers” out there can’t actually be bothered to read the book. And their reviews show it.
Maybe Just… Don’t?
I don’t like sports. At all. Like, I literally don’t even know the full rules to any sport. And you know what I don’t do? I don’t seek out free tickets to sportsball games. I don’t like Chinese food, thus I don’t look for coupons or gift cards to Chinese restaurants. I’m a cat person, and I don’t hang out at the dog park.
I do not understand why people who don’t like to read want to hoard free books. It’s an issue with the reviewers, but it’s not just them. I have three different books I give away via various promos as a “sign up for my newsletter” bonus. I don’t mind giving them away or I wouldn’t do it, but I see the same people showing up on my new subscribers lists over and over and over, meaning they’re just grabbing every free book that comes across their screen, without recognizing they’ve already claimed that same book numerous times.
I will admit to having fallen down the free-books-email rabbit hole. I have a gazillion books in my Kindle library I’ll never get to. But I don’t write fake reviews for them, and I didn’t download them with the promise to write one. I don’t lie about having read them. And I don’t keep trying to re-download the same ones time and time again.
I just don’t get it.
