The best advice I’ve received as a first-time author is that reviews are for readers, not for me. It is none of my business what people think about my book, especially if they aren’t professional critics or industry professionals. Once my writing is published, it belongs to the world at large and readers are allowed to do with it what they will.
There is no good reason for me to interact with the GoodReads page for my novel. If I were smart, I would block my web browser from loading it at all.
But we all know I’m not that smart.
As a culture critic and an internet gossip fiend, I always marveled at authors who nuked their careers over GoodReads. For those of you who don’t follow publishing drama, this happens surprisingly often. Most recently, debut author Cait Corrain created a bunch of fake accounts to “review bomb” books by people of color who she saw as her competition. When called out on leaving so many unwarranted 1-star reviews, she first claimed an acquaintance in the Star Wars fandom (don’t ask) had done it, not her. Eventually she fessed up and attributed her actions to her mental health. Corrain’s publisher and agent dropped her. Career over, big oops.
If you don’t work in the publishing industry, it’s easy to wonder why GoodReads has so much power. It’s a janky, under-resourced website that most readers don’t use. There is no way to verify that a person has even read a book before they rate it.
As book critic Maris Kreizman explains in a new episode of Anne Helen Petersen’s podcast Culture Study, GoodReads has taken on new significance as traditional book criticism disappears. Due to the ongoing collapse of the media industry, publications and magazines have scaled back on or completely eliminated their book coverage. There are fewer places to discover and discuss books, with much of the conversation shifting to Instagram and TikTok. GoodReads remains the reigning book-based social platform despite new sites like Storygraph coming for its throne.
GoodReads also has the almighty star rating, averaging all of the ratings submitted by users (again, who may or may not have read the book). It’s hard to tell if that rating has an actual impact on sales, but it looms large in the minds of authors. To artists, it is difficult to see your creative work given a big numerical score.
That score can become taunting, even infuriating, when you learn just how subjective and inconsistent those crowd-sourced reviews can be. GoodReads users post reviews and star-ratings however makes the most sense for them: as a reading log, as a space to emotionally process a book, as an opportunity to flex their criticism muscles, or as a social media platform to connect and entertain their followers. Everyone has a different system for determining a book’s star rating, and some folks don’t give ratings at all.
This leads to messy and argumentative review sections for widely-read books. For example, the runaway success Yellowface by R.F. Kuang has 464,073 ratings and 63,519 reviews on GoodReads. It came out only a year ago in May 2023. The average rating? 3.79 stars.
Only 1% of readers gave Yellowface one star. That’s still 5,831 one-star ratings. That is bonkers! If 5,831 people said my book was garbage, I’d buy a rowboat and peddle into the Atlantic Ocean never to return.
Ella Dawson 
This really opened my eyes. As a reader, I never realized how stressful Goodreads could be from the author’s perspective. It’s such a powerful tool for discovery, but I can totally see how the lack of context in reviews or the early ratings can feel overwhelming. Appreciate this honest look behind the scenes!