GOODREADS FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE | Goodreads Author Secrets

hello everyone alexa dunn here and today i am going to be spilling some secrets of what it is really like being an author on goodreads slash what to authors really think about goodreads how does it work for authors the secrets perhaps you do not know yes this is inspired by some current conversations and let's get out of the way at the beginning long established on my channel and other places as my opinion reviews are for readers do not like author nonsense when it comes to authors and reviewers and goodreads and replying and all that but i was on a live stream on amara's channel books like well highly recommend we'll link to down below and we were having a grand old time in the chat talking about ancient goodreads history and like lots of different dramas and i was just like hey y'all want to know in the chat like why authors are like that sometimes with goodreads or how this works for authors and everyone was like tell us more so here i am most of these are really low stakes things but it could be really interesting to you that like essentially i want to let you into the psyche of like the slightly tortured sometimes a little too sensitive author and why thing certain things on goodreads like give us feelings that we should never act out on on twitter publicly anywhere mind you can't kind of let authors off the hook for their own personal responsibility but maybe you'll be curious to hear just some of these funny things that just aren't as obvious until you are an author on goodreads which is actually where i want to start something that i think makes goodreads really messy that came up on mars stream is that goodreads is a very weird space it's partly like you track what you're reading but you review books and a lot of bloggers use it as an essential platform for growing their own kind of spaces because they cross-post their reviews it's also a social media site or is they they want it to work like that because authors can have blogs and you can like have your ratings and reading progress like auto shared to different sites there's really active networks of forums where people do book clubs and there's the whole ecosystem of librarians on goodreads which is a whole other thing but across the board it's also just very poorly moderated almost on purpose like goodreads basically wants to leave you to your own devices and do your thing and they they basically let it be the wild wild west of books and on top of that it has all sorts of really poor ui user interface experience design which we all have problems with so i can tell you that authors have the same problems as readers have on goodreads because the the thing to understand is we're also using goodreads as readers which gets very complicated and in most cases we have goodreads accounts before we become authors and what happens is when you get a book deal as long as someone has created a page for your book which librarians will do you can always ask one to do do it for you when your deal announcement is made is you claim your author page so a book has to be on the system with your name then you click on it and you have to prove that you are who you are and then all of a sudden your goodreads account will be converted to an author account and from there you have the ability to edit your book information when you write more books you can create your own book pages you won't need a librarian for that going forward and you get a dashboard in the back end that basically when you log in you get your author dashboard and it gives you your top line stats here are your books here how many people have added them to read here are how many ratings you have here's your average rating across all your books here's your average rating for each book there are like little clickable links you can see who's currently reading and so those are that's a snapshot of the author tools that you get when you become an author account on top of that um you get i i'm pretty sure blogging is a function that only authors get so you can blog if you want uh beyond that a lot of the tools are exactly what readers have i i logged out of my author account to see to remind myself what it looked like when you're just you have a regular reader account so like the status updates and like the stats anyone can see those but you basically had a dashboard and the thing is like goodreads encourages authors to be on goodreads they encourage you to use your account actively they want author participation you get this like welcome post and it does encourage you not to reply to reviews i'm pretty sure that's in it but otherwise it's like you should blog and you should answer questions and you should engage with the goodreads community as an author and like i think we get like a little check mark like they incentivize authors creating their author accounts on goodreads they want authors in the space which i think is important so what happens most often is you're a reader first you already had a goodreads account because like almost all of us are on goodreads and then all of a sudden you have an author account and things get really weird so now you're engaging with goodreads as an author you have a book on there and you start to watch it you start to like obsessively like click on your link refresh the page because you want to see what your dashboard looks like and you're like oh my gosh i have a hundred to read ads and my book just went live and you watch it over time and you compare yourself to other people so this this is part one of like how authors use goodreads and part of our psyche and that is just like obsessively refreshing your dashboard and checking your stats and tracking your stats and there's always this kind of well so first of all important to know that you're always gonna start well you start off with zero stars and zero ratings unless you or someone you know rate your book and inevitably the first people to rate your book whether it's you or not and we'll talk about that your agent your cps uh friends family and so most books way ahead of their arcs coming out just like you have that five-star rating based on very little and you just kind of sit there and then it's always bracing yourself for that moment when the real reader responses start coming in with arcs though asterisk we're not gonna talk about trolls too and why authors maybe go a little bonkers sometimes and but meaning from there it's literally inevitable and maybe some authors don't realize this and this is why they lose their minds but it's literally just math averages goodreads uses averages and the star rating system is flawed and they don't allow half star stars or partial ratings it's all aggregate from one two three four or five stars and everything's always pulling toward the middle because that's what an average is and your rating is going to fall inevitably so about star rating your own book this is just like the author secret of that this is a social norm that has really changed but it ebbs and flows and it's different for every person don't judge an author who five stars their books especially in the past because it legit used to be the norm like in debut groups like that is what you did that you five-starred your own book to just give it that extra little push for from when inevitably real reviews rolled in you know you give that one extra five star rating to try to buoy it up and it's a social norm and i see debuts still do it i have chosen not to do it going forward from the first book it's something i did on my debut but i say like let like go easy on authors it's not because they're egomaniacs i promise you it's because you see your ratings start to fall and the only thing that really raises a rating is a five star review if you want to like know why we get so like nitty gritty on it anything lower than a five usually brings a rating down even if infinitesimally but over time the only thing that's really gonna raise it is enough five stars to like nudge it up and so it's like every five star review counts and also this is another kind of secret that you might already know like it's just author bro code okay if you're friends with an author like actually friends with them if you're a regular reviewer speak your truth you five star their book that that is just like author norms because it's a nice thing that you can do for a fellow author and then you are expected to also five-star their their book should you read it asterisks some authors will just drop fives when they haven't read the book i don't do that but just so you know like that's like author bro code and that's why you five star your family friends author friends books which is also why you as the reader this is part of the secret look at who is leaving five star reviews in the long run yes but also just in the beginning because really you can't trust them and like we know that you can't trust them and like a smart author wants there to be a real spread of reviews but just like fyi so when i see a buzzy upcoming book and i see that all of the like most liked five-star reviews toward the top of the page are by people who i know are authors slash their friends i'm like they followed off their code but their reviews are meaningless basically just it's part of the ecosystem so let's actually talk about liking reviews on the main page this is the other secret this is a thing that came up in the live chat where i was like fyi because someone's like authors should just filter their pages so that they can't see their negative reviews they don't see them they can't lose their and i was like well that only goes so far because the thing about goodreads i mean you might have noticed this as a reader they have a like a they basically glue reviews to the top that are the most liked reviews and that is the default view on any book page on goodreads and so if the most liked review is a one star pan that is gonna be sitting at the top in default view and default view resets every time you visit the page if only goodreads ever edited their ui to make it a better experience for everyone involved and imagine if they did actually give authors the ability to have like a default my view to their book page imagine how much better the world might be but no it's there's a universal default page and so as an author at a certain point i'll tell you personally i just don't go on certainly my debut page i haven't looked at my second book page in such a long time because don't tempt fate that i don't know what the top pinned review is essentially but in my debut it's a one star review a comedic one star review and even to like navigate to the page to look at the filters to only look at positive reviews just like hide the low star ones for myself it's not possible because the first thing i see when i even go to do that filtering is that one star review which automatically like triggers this like sick feeling of like because you relive the experience of reading that really scathing comedic one star review and then you feel your feelings privately mind you and you don't like do anything about it but like i choose not to experience that deja vu so i literally can't even go on the page so just fyi to readers some authors that's that's the problem it's not even just like we'll only read your good reviews the bad ones are right there in front of your face and so you as a reader as a fan if you actually if you like a book the best thing you could do is like the positive reviews like the ones you want to be glued to the top of a book's page but here humans humans and i've done this as a reader too we're entertained by negative reviews and we just have to accept that that is part of the ecosystem of goodreads and that we create that ecosystem we reward the book reviewers who hate almost everything they read and they put funny gifts in their reviews though that does feel like an era that is slightly faded from its heyday in like 20 2012 to 2015 but it's still like a thing and you have to take responsibility like we the readers who like those funny reviews funny mean reviews we put them right in front of the author's face should they choose to navigate to their book page so at a certain point i personally find the answer is an author can't even look at their book page they can't scroll past like the top part because you're going to see it so just like a fun fact just if you didn't know giveaways actually cost money um they didn't always cost money but goodreads needed to monetize that platform so they've cost money for the last like two or three years so if you see a book that has a giveaway someone is paying for that usually the publisher but sometimes the author so just fyi um that that is that is something that costs money to get that kind of exposure on goodreads and so as an author just picture some of us behind the scenes with the fomo of my publisher doesn't love me enough to pay for a giveaway or i am too cheap to pay for a giveaway so just bear that in mind just a fun fact oh another just like fun fact of what it's like to be an author on goodreads what it feels like you will inevitably get private messages from people and this is just a general thing i hate about goodreads this is reader or author i hate how you have to physically go into a message for it to be mark red otherwise that red flag haunts you forever on the top bar and i'm like an inbox zero person like seeing a notification that's not marked as red drives me bonkers but goodreads just has a terrible ui so you have to click into it so you're actually gonna have to look at these messages which kind of sucks uh you will inevitably get a wide variety of messages from people demanding free copies of your book sometimes they'll like nag your book or like neg you if you don't respond to give your free copy you get those like give me a free copy of your book for exposure i've literally gotten those after the book is on sale and it's like that's really not how it works why and uh so just like fyi you'd be amazed what messages people will send authors by and large it's okay i don't mean it's not like a massive problem but it does happen oh so this is another secret that came up on the live stream that is related to that so another thing you get when you become an author on goodreads is uh people can submit anonymous questions q a on your books and you can do that by the way on any of the books that you're on but i find by and large the average book and especially when you're a newer author readers don't really use that function on goodreads that much but here's the double-edged sword as an author the goodreads algorithm preferences people who use that function who answer those questions it's considered engagement and anytime an author answers a question on their book page or sometimes on their because you can also ask it on author profiles like generic questions it's gonna bump them on the algorithm so their answer is gonna appear in feeds on dashboards i know this because i've seen this from when i've seen authors answering questions and so my secret is i'll tell you at least in my experience unless you're a big popular book readers just don't submit that many questions it's just not that common like you might get a stray like with the ivs finally i got like a straight one or two but even though i have a decent platform i'm decent on youtube um i've never gotten that many questions on goodreads and certainly not ones that were answerable i've gotten almost like private questions that should have been pm'd to me asked in my q a box and i can't really answer them because it makes them public and they're like weird questions that aren't appropriate to answer so my secret is trust me when you see anyone who's a new author like a debut author and so on who just they seem to have like really incisive thoughtful questions ask on their page and they get to answer them and it bumps them up in the algorithm those authors are very likely having their friends ask them those questions that's just kind of my secret like and that's my conspiracy theory because like i i'm pretty sure that's the only way they're getting that volume of perfectly asked questions that enable the author to basically reply with a marketing and promo message that that magically appears in people's feeds and is on the book page so the next thing just so you get a glimpse of things that drive authors bunker on goodreads and you're like doesn't matter and i'm like doesn't matter but then i'm like it matters i guess to me lists the the frustration of lists which also brings up the ui we all know this the search function on goodreads effing sucks generally speaking but also this means that i find certainly as a reader and so i assume other readers are similar the lists that people curate on goodreads and on which books appear can actually be important in terms of promotional tools because readers may browse some of those lists to be like oh so what are the mysteries and thrillers coming out in 2021 i browsed one of those recently in order to create a list for a video i'm going to do of upcoming releases and so those lists matter and your placement on those lists matter because a lot of people will only look at the first page of results for a list and so you get into you're just gonna be like wow authors are so neurotic and weird but i'm gonna tell you about the the experiences you have related to goodreads list so first of all an author cannot add their own book to a goodreads list you have to get someone else to do it so step one is that feeling a shame that washes over you when you have to beg one of your friends to put your book on a list that's step one step two is the deep well of shame of trying to get enough votes on your book on any given list so that it appears in a good spot on the list so you're not number 257 on the list of best y18 thrillers or sci-fi books or retellings or what have you these are clearly personal examples but it is it is something that i hate doing and i know i'm not the only person so the secret here is legitimately the only way to get enough votes to do well on lists like that so always bear this in mind when you were looking at any debut books lists buzzy books lists upcoming books best books the only way to really move the needle there if you're not already popular with a ton of fans so like sarah j maas is never gonna have a problem being at the top of a list because her fans use goodreads and they're very engaged in the goodreads ecosystem so they upvote that book all the freaking time the rest of us just don't have that kind of fan base power on goodreads so we have to beg other people to do it for us and so this honestly this comes down to how bold you're feeling pushing down your shame and embarrassment having to ask friends to do this how many friends you have who you know actively use goodreads but the real secret is that there are authors who are just very very good they are in slacks or discords or what have you with large groups of authors this happens in debut groups too and they basically do like a vote for vote and not always but sometimes in author communities at least but it's like it's how many people they know how popular they are and how willing they are to ask a large group of people to basically vote bomb their book to get it to the top people authors of street teams are at an advantage here too because they can literally get their street teams every single member of their street team to vote their book up so bear that in mind that there are authors such as myself who don't like doing that i don't feel comfortable doing that um who you know maybe i'm number 11 on a list and the book that's number one is number one because that author has a street team so that's just a secret for you and it sounds so stupid and yet you really want to be one of the i think it's the four thumbnails that appear uh the first four book covers of a list that's always a big boost but generally you want to be on the first page top 10 top 20 is even better because of how far someone's realistically going to scroll to look through a list to get recs and ideas so yeah there's the politics of goodreads lists and it can drive you barmy so again if you have an author slash a book that you really really like the best thing you can do in terms of supporting them on goodreads is like reviews that you think are good three stars and up ish of their book on their page so that it's more likely to get sticky toward the top of the default page and vote for their book um list add their book to list and vote for them uh that that is just like a nice little thing you can do okay so let's talk about ratings some more and why they're a hot freaking mess and like we all know this also as readers because if you are a reader and you have an account on goodreads and like it's always like well what is a three star to me what is a four star do i give two stars like it's this whole ass mess and the half star roundup round down it can sometimes just be how you're feeling that day it's always tricky but yeah ratings on goodreads are a whole ass mess and what gets really sticky for authors this is again your view into the author's psyche as i already kind of mentioned inevitably it's always the slow march downward of your average goodreads rating and you're like why does that matter and i'm like i know right and why it matters is that it matters to some people i have legit had people make comments to me well you're clear your books clearly just aren't that good because they're under an average four star rating on goodreads and that's when i start to pull out my hair because it's like a lot of books that a lot of people like are under four stars on goodreads do you know how easy it is to fall below an average four stars on goodreads incredibly easy it just means that a large tuck in the audience uh gave it three stars three stars four stars so they liked it but they didn't like absolutely love it you don't have a ton of five stars but very often like yeah you might be a little lower but it doesn't mean like oh it's below because people really don't like this book no it just means most people liked it okay but didn't like absolutely love it and that's pretty normal but that is to say just digging into reading so that's just like the top line of it but the other thing is that a lot of people take ratings at face value far too easily so this is just getting into like the nitty gritty of author frustrations that i know i have but i know other people have too and that is that people pay attention to the wrong thing they look at that average rating to determine how good a book is they're like oh well the average star rating of this book coming out is like 4.5 that must mean it's really good yeah or it means that they're really buzzy and a lot of people like the author may not have even read the book and so they they were bombed with five stars you can be review bombed on either end by the way lots of one stars which is always messy but i've also seen buzzy books review bombed with five stars by people who clearly didn't read it but want to support the author which is a really lovely gesture but really misleading on the book so what i urge you to pay attention is not simply the average rating but actual reviews written reviews are usually the best sign that someone read the book and really that you shouldn't rely on star ratings period you should actually read the reviews because the other phenomenon i've seen it's always like maddening and you feel gaslit by goodreads where you read say a five-star review on a book and you're reading it and you're like this this isn't a five-star review this is not actually that glowing this reads like a three star review but they didn't want to give it three stars i've also read some classic three star reviews so three star reviews are actually my favorite reviews to read as a reader kind of as an author like you always wish it was a four star review if it's a three but like as a reader i find three star reviews really useful to read um because it gives you like a little bit of both ends and you i find that three star reviewers are more likely to give you lots of context about like what they liked and didn't like about a book so the phenomenon of reading a three star review where you're reading it and you're like this is a one star review it's just it's not even balanced it's like they clearly didn't like it but they'll throw in one line about how like oh but you know i appreciate what the author was trying to do three stars which more power to them they are allowed to do that but i caution you to actually read reviews because i have seen books with inflated ratings where if you actually read the reviews they're either so fluff positive to the point that you're not sure they read it or they don't leave a review at all but you read the three and four star reviews and you just feel gaslit because you're like these don't sound like three and four star reviews if three and four stars means that you really enjoyed a book a lot and so this i mean it's basically every reviewer has a different rating system some reviewers are more generous than others and people have lots of different reasons for rating a book what they rate it and it's not always just the book itself people will sometimes rate higher or lower depending on the author depending on whether they're an author i already told you that nine times out of ten i mean there's bro code author bro code so i mean how honest can an author this this gets the how honest are my reviews i mean they're honest but i and i disclaim this i am more generous with star readings than i would be if i weren't an author sometimes but i always try to provide context about what i thought about the book and how i arrived where i arrived so that is honest so generally my advice is to actually read the reviews on a book to get an aggregate of what people really think about it rather than go by that average rating but that average rating is something that drives authors a little barmy if you couldn't tell because reviewing is just so subjective though this all comes down to the fact that reviews aren't for authors they're for readers but i'm also just telling you this contextually as a reader you should be reading reviews critically as a reader i do when i'm reading reviews as a reader to find books to read so you can just look for those patterns because what i'm saying is there's just a lot of that goes on on goodreads in both directions like we've all seen a book where we're pretty sure their reading is inflated but we've also all seen a book that we thought was pretty decent but it's a very divisive book it's a love or hate book and so there's a lot more lower ratings on that book and we feel well if it were us that would have a higher average rating so it really runs the gamut uh and the last thing i want to bring your attention to here that is very important is ratios this is another thing a lot of people don't pay attention to on goodreads that authors pay attention to partly because our dashboard shows us this data and once you see goodreads data like that in the dashboard all of a sudden you're forensically accounting other books in a way that you never did as a reader so this is another secret it's never simply just this is the average rating based on everyone who has rated or reviewed the book you should actually look at the numbers because the numbers are important as i already mentioned it's easy to have a really highly rated book if you don't have that many reviews and most of the people who have reviewed it already like you you're going to have a higher rating sometimes a really high rating if you look at the ratio of people who have added it to their shelves specifically the red shelf and either reviewed or rated it which is also separate systems like anyone can rate a book but i also like to pay attention to number of actual written reviews because that gives you a much better metric of how many people are actually reading a book and of course what they think about it but sometimes a really highly rated book that only has let's say 40 ratings and 15 reviews it hasn't hit a critical mass yet not enough people have actually read it and reviewed or rated it for that to be a real critical consensus if that makes sense so something else to pay attention to so i mentioned the review thing as i said so another thing that can be maddening on goodreads when you play the comparison game which i know you shouldn't play but the whole point of this is author secrets and some of the things that some of us do and that is there are juggernauts on goodreads that have so many ads and so many people put them on their shelves and they're really buzzy but if you actually compare them to other books it can be fascinating sometimes the disparity and it's the question is it a tree falls in the wood kind of question what's better having farmer people know about your book and buy your book and you'd argue yeah that one because you get more sales or people who actually reading your book and liking your book because the phenomenon i have observed personally is yeah that book is huge and sold a ton of copies but if you track the goodreads stats on some titles it doesn't seem like people are actually reading the books and you can tell because they don't ever rate or review it but especially review it because remember i mentioned anyone can rate a book including as like a goodwill like hey supporting this book i'm i'm there's there's almost like a social cachet in reading certain books and like proving that like you're you love that popular book essentially but it's a totally different story actually reading it and reviewing it and so again basically i encourage you not to look at top line stats but to actually see how many reviews the book has and what do they actually say that is more substantive and important and these are the stupid things that drive authors a little mad but but well actually let's talk about 4 stars and 4.5 stars and then we'll circle back to why ultimately this all comes down to authors not being nonsense um so this is just like another author secret that isn't a secret and it's completely irrational but i'm just telling you to a lot of authors of four star is a bad review and i know that that's insane i don't feel that way would i always prefer to have a five star if i get a four star yeah obviously remember what i mentioned how basic anything but a five star inevitably is gonna drag your rating down and that's just it's like gravity it's like you there's like lead weights attached to your book and it's just sinking and sinking but a five star is like a buoy it's a buoy but i love four star reviews because like you if you think rationally three star reviews two you go rationally that means they liked the book but authors aren't rational so so that is why some authors and i don't condone this lose their if they get anything less than a five star review anything less than a five star review like harm because it does technically drag your rating down it's all very stupid so i'm telling you that this is an irrational feeling that a lot of authors have but ultimately really not your problem but just so you know why some authors hmm but reviews aren't for authors and you should never respond so people go well you shouldn't be on goodreads so so this brings me to my conclusion i feel like that the that's the oh i haven't talked about trolls okay okay i'll talk about trolls and then i'll talk about why some authors can't leave good reads but should honestly should so troll reviews are real so this is another kind of behind the scenes thing that can contribute to authors seemingly being just very sensitive irrational creatures but it's very real troll readings are real troll reviews are real but especially ratings um inevitably you're gonna end up in a position where someone just dislikes you enough to review bomb to rating bomb your book it's like you've arrived honestly and what sucks about goodreads because again goodreads doesn't moderate anything and they don't really have guidelines they follow or they follow them like giant hypocrites because i'll tell you about removing these reviews and so this is also like a psychological warfare thing that's happening for authors i i think like it's fair to say real people are going to read your book and they're going to have a variety of opinions and they're allowed to have those opinions but then you get the reviews where they didn't read the book and they just want to mess with you so they're gonna give it one star i have literally because because you can poke around there have literally been accounts created like you can i can see their creation date and i can see that they've only ever rated two books and they did it in the last week and they're mine and they gave them one star i'm not stupid i know you hate me from youtube now you gotta get used to that but trust me especially the first time it happens it really blows i've also gotten really sassy reviews that are just like essentially i don't like her on youtube this this was i didn't like this one star or what have you uh but meaning like you have to get used to that they're going to be people who are going to basically weaponize goodreads that they're going to weaponize low star ratings or reviews on goodreads just to mess with authors i've had friends this has happened to there's one particular friend literally they've rejected someone in author mentor match and this person went on a crusade to dunk them on goodreads get create multiple stock accounts just to one star their book on goodreads so now we get into reporting they literally titled their account like that they hated the author and goodreads still wouldn't remove those reviews i had a situation where i could tell like i could prove i'm like this is someone who doesn't like me from youtube and specifically created their account just to one star my books this isn't this isn't a real review obviously and the only i honestly had let it go and the only reason i reached out to goodreads is because a different friend of mine had had troll reviews ratings successfully removed from her book pre-release so she was like you should email goodreads help they helped me yeah they ignored my email it's completely arbitrary so we're hearing that people are review bombing the this this lauren huff the author who's the top du jour well they don't do that most of the time good good for her that they're removing her review bombs but goodreads is just incredibly arbitrary so the perspective of an author is like goodreads is it's it's a it can be a really awful space and so so now we're now we get into so why are you in good reads like you shouldn't be on goodreads leave goodreads i think it's complicated as i mentioned um a lot of us were readers on goodreads first or still are also readers on goodreads goodreads encourages authors to create accounts and encourages them to engage on their platform goodreads wants authors on their platform it's really messed up three but yeah we should honestly just leave goodreads we shouldn't be on goodreads like my my advice generally that i've given before to authors is if you can't handle this get the heck off goodreads a lot of publishers will indeed advise their authors just to stay off goodreads it's better that way and i do agree with that but now you just have a perspective of how it feels once you're an author on goodreads it's mostly like the maddeningness of like looking at your dashboard and like analyzing numbers and looking at other pages and conspiracy theories about basically how like goodreads gaslights you and and it's all a little maddening but at the end of the day this is this is all it is still even though authors are encouraged to be on there it's a reviewer space it is a space that belongs to reviewers and readers that's that's the spirit in which it was started it's how i joined goodreads and it really is on the author to back the f away like talk to your private group chat about how maddening that troll review was or like look i got this is another aspect of trolls like this has happened to me where you get a one star rating and literally no one has the book it's literally not possible for them to have read the book and that was the one that i had reached out to goodreads about that they didn't care about i'm like literally there are no copies of this book available for a single soul to read other than my critique partners this is not a real rating goodreads doesn't care and people do that all the time it's arbitrary and so just like yeah as readers we should put less stock in the whole average rating thing i still think it's a good tool i like actually reading reviews but every like every dif every book is gonna have like a different barometer of how useful the reviews are because it depends on how kind of the aggregate reviewer space has decided to approach this book some books just they get ragged on more some books they get a free pass for various things it it depends so goodreads is a really maddening space um but i do the double-edged sword i think is like as an author because they give you control over your book information you are the only person otherwise you're at the mercy of librarians who can put the most accurate information about your books on the books goodread goodreads page books need good read pages like it's good to have that aggregate reader space because it is for readers and goodreads can be a really good tool so i guess it's it's i say have your goodreads but go on in as little as humanly possible i still refresh that page more than i should oh another random thing that hadn't really come up until my new book but just another thing you can conceptualize that authors like have to deal with and it's a little maddening um i'm now at the point where i've gotten negative reviews based on how other people have shelved my book and so it's like this aspect that's out of your control like all it takes is one blogger on goodreads to shelve your book of something because they they think your book is that way or they have a shelf with that title so they put your book on it for whatever reason and then other readers will look at other people's shelves and how people shelve books to it's a discoverability thing to find other things to read so if you are on a shelf and someone then reads your book and is like it didn't live up to my expectations because it was shelved here yeah that's all just it's like a long list of all the things that are out of your control and like and then they blame the author and it's like i never said the book was that thing so just now you know all of the all of these author author feelings i feel like this is a interesting topic let's let's talk about it down below in the comments like goodreads man horrible ui but really the best solution for it and i know that people floated alternatives to goodreads and i just can't be arsed to join any of them because i'm so like many of us deeply entrenched in goodreads if only they cared more about their ui but they don't they're owned by amazon which also isn't bad and they don't they don't care that their dinosaur website has a lot of problems oh give this video a thumbs up if you like it i will make more discussion style videos about topics in writing and publishing and if you're not are subscribed to the channel go ahead and do that as always guys thank you so much for watching and happy writing and if you're an author stay off of good reads as much as humanly possible

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 17,337

Rating: 4.9133334 out of 5

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, authors on goodreads, goodreads, goodreads drama

Id: bDlejJqrcDs

Length: 40min 42sec (2442 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021