THE Group for Authors! discussion

I'm a little perplexed. According to the Goodreads page for my book The Revenge of Rose Grubb, someone has recently given me a four star text review - but I can't see the review anywhere. Am I simply looking in the wrong place?

If it helps, it's not just you. While I also cannot see the review, I do see where the book's rating details indicate a four star review should b visible.

Possibly a cache issue? (Different areas of goodrwads take 10 minutes to 72+ hours to update.). Until staff respond, maybe authors can still refresh ratings (which might or might not display the review but if someone or staff has since deleted their review the ratings and book details would stop counting it). Authors used to have a "refresh ratings" option to click -- when editing a book, look in righthand column, midway down next to where you set the default/primary/featured edition and you should see the option if still there (not an author so I cannot tell if still available).

Thanks, I've just pressed 'Default: Newest First' and it's appeared. Good to know I wasn't imagining things!

FYI, it's a review for your book. Not your review.

Could the owner of the review have made it private in some way? Or posted, then deleted it?

Rachael wrote: "Thanks, I've just pressed 'Default: Newest First' and it's appeared. Good to know I wasn't imagining things!"

That's a cache thing. It'll eventually show up.

I'm also seeing the review echoed on some other review sites if that helps.

Iola wrote: "FYI, it's a review for your book. Not your review."

I want to like this 1,000 times!

A review is of a product, not of the author. It's an important distinction.

A.W. wrote: "I want to like this 1,000 times! "

Me too!

Respectfully, I think the discussion has gone a wee tad astray.

I don't read Rachel's initial post as literally claiming ownership of the words used by the reviewer. She was simply using the phrase "my review" in a colloquial sense.

I'm a writer and every review of my books is "mine" because each one is about me in my capacity as a writer, my abilities, and the quality of my writing in each particular instance. Do I own the reviews? Have a right to delete/alter them? Of course not. But I still consider them my reviews. Perhaps along the lines of Gollum and his precious?

And with equal respect, I don't think you can separate the author from the product when you're reviewing a book, for the reasons stated above.

One of Rachel's reviews did a little Bo Peep lost sheep bit, but was eventually found, wagging its little tail eagerly on reaching home again. >teasing smile< And that's all this is really about.

Just my USD .02.

Eric-who-isn't-intending-to-offend

I also didn't think Rachael was meaning anything other than trying to figure out why her book page said there was a text review but it wasn't showing. "Mine" just in the sense of "my book page."

At any rate, I see the review on the book page now so it all seems to have worked out (likely cache issue).

I'm one usually suspicious of a lot of author posts and behaviors. Not, however, over anyone reporting site behavior that might be a bug--bugs and potential bugs should be reported for the sake of all members. I also symoathize it would be frustrating to have your book stats say there was a very good review (the first text review to date) only to have it not show.

That happened to me. There was no name and no review. I don't think that's fair.

Wally wrote: "That happened to me. There was no name and no review. I don't think that's fair."

Once upon a time on goodreads, authors and others would never see there was an undisplayed review. Goodreads did change the caching so ratings and stats on book page refreshed "real time." Wasn't uncommon that your book could have changed star rating average from a ★☆☆☆☆ to a ★★★★★ because of new ratings and never see that for more than 72 hours.

Presumably at author request (or to diminish the number of author queries/complaints and requests for refreshes to librarians), the stats were changed to quickly update.

Now someone thinks that's unfair. Go figure. Do you want goodreads to go back to taking several days and sometimes weeks or months to refresh stats when a heavy demand on server resources?

Well, fair or not, goodreads uses some servers and programming languages/applications (including Ruby on Rails I believe) that need to do some caching to handle the data! activity and traffic of a billion book database and 25+ million members.

Almost every website on the internet does some caching. I think it's pretty good that new books and book edits usually show up within 1-10 minutes here. I think it's quite fair that goodreads gives authors an option to refresh their book stuff if cache not fast enough (or appearing bug-y) for them. 72+ hours is a long cache to me, fair or not, but it's usually the heavy resource sections that take that long (for example, the series thumbnails heavy with graphics and s rioting like display order, placing on author page, on series page, search results, etc.)

Fair or not, I think caching is just a common practice and pretty necessary on larger sites. Considering how often members quickly correct typos, tweak dates or other ratings, etc. on reviews (or how often flagged for spoilers and over issues)--I'm not that upset that reviews take a few minutes to a few hours to go live.

I'm slightly taken aback by the response. Perhaps I could have phrased it differently, but all I meant was to find out if there was something wrong with my page. I wasn't claiming to own the review, only to get to the bottom of why it wasn't showing.

Rachael - please don't worry about it. There is a "thing" of people getting possessive about "their" reviews. I'm sure you didn't mean it in that way, but sometimes folk can't help responding to something that means something to them.

If it helps, I've found that there is a delay between someone posting a review and it showing up so you can read it. We get all excited because the number of reviews has gone up by one, but we can't see it straight away.

It's a techie issue, I think. The Goodreads website takes a while to post the reviews. If you wait a couple of days the missing review ought to turn up.

It did puzzle me the first time it happened, so you are most definitely not alone in this!

Will wrote: "... If you wait a couple of days the missing review ought to turn up...."

I'm pretty sure the review is showing to everyone now. And that Rachael was just trying to report or figure out a bug :)

Will wrote: "Rachael - please don't worry about it. There is a "thing" of people getting possessive about "their" reviews. I'm sure you didn't mean it in that way, but sometimes folk can't help responding to so..."

My page also states that there is one review and has done for about three weeks, but it never shows.

D.A. - Um ... I was talking about the generality of Goodreads reviews taking a while to show up, not the specifics of this particular case.

Rachael told us that she found her missing review in post #3.

Jill wrote: "Will wrote: "Rachael - please don't worry about it. There is a "thing" of people getting possessive about "their" reviews. I'm sure you didn't mean it in that way, but sometimes folk can't help res..."

I don't know what book you're talking about, but one of your books seems to be listed twice on your profile. That might be a source of the problem.

No reviews seen yet for my book.

Neeta wrote: "No reviews seen yet for my book."

I see one review dated January 4.

I am an author. I have also author page on Goodread.
I am interested to see reviews on my book
How can I get reviews from readers .I want to increase visibility of my book " Your memories are now my treasure "
I dont want any paid service from Goodread
Without paid service can I increase my book visibility?
At least tell how I get more reviews from readers for my book.

Neeta wrote: "I am an author. I have also author page on Goodread.
I am interested to see reviews on my book
How can I get reviews from readers .I want to increase visibility of my book " Your memories are now ..."

See this thread, it has a lot of advice about marketing books.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...