THE Group for Authors! discussion

Hi All,
My book, Santa Claus vs The Aliens, has 29 ratings so far and all have been solid except two 1-star ratings from the same person. I guess this is possible because I have 2 editions listed, a kindle edition and a print edition. The member did not leave a review.

I am perfectly fine with a person not liking my book, but I guess this raises a general question. There are many books with multiple versions and there does not seem to be any mechanism to stop someone from either posting false positive or negative reviews across all of the editions and swaying the stats.

That's an interesting point. When I look at reviews, I have no interest in knowing whether they read the e-version or hard copy.

It will say at top of the review on same line as reviewer's name if it is of a different edition.

Most likely, the person wanted the Goodreads computers to stop recommending your book because s/he had no interest in it (for whatever reason). That would explain why s/he marked both editions. It need not mean the person disliked your book.

This is not Amazon.com. Star reviews can be indications of interest. Readers know that and discount lone one-star reviews, so don't worry about it. Everyone has them.

James wrote: "... and there does not seem to be any mechanism to stop someone from either posting false positive or negative reviews across all of the editions and swaying the stats. ..."

Actually, there is one "mechanism." Just flag one of them and in the reason box on the flag screen say suspicious activity because all editions were rated.

Rating multiple (or all) editions to skew the ratings or get more than one "vote" on a book is suspicious activity (or at least something for goodreads support to determine). And against site terms of use.

Or multiple edition ratings were the workaround for people trying to track re-reads in the absence of a re-read feature here (not liking if by 1-star they were using a rating scale where 1 was the worst rating or where 1-star was an expression of disinterest; some people explain their rating system on their profiles, some don't, some use goodreads suggested scale which incidentally is not the same as amazon's ...).

Or multiple edition ratings were specifically for different editions -- like people reading more than one translation of a book or different narrators -- which doesn't seem to apply to yours.

There are reasons it's okay and reasons it's suspicious; goodreads support will look at a flag and decide.

(Sorry, I read the OP kind of quickly and missed the "mechanism" bit.)

Ahhh, so this leads to another hole in the goodreads ranking system. A review can definitely be either liked or flagged. However, a rating cannot. Since this individual wrote NO TEXT, there is no way for me to flag it that I can see.

Just put the info (book, reviewer name, ...) in an email to [email protected] or use the contact form at https://www.goodreads.com/about/conta...

(there are some threads running around asking for more actual flag menu choices)

thanks. will do.