Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Are any other authors experiencing vanishing ratings?

I had 489 ratings yesterday, and today only 342.

147 ratings disappeared overnight.

Most of the ratings that disappeared were 5 and 4 stars.

Seems very suspicious.

You're not alone. My ratings have just dropped by nearly 100.

I'm not an author. I'm a paid beta reader but I keep up with about 30 discussion groups. I don't know if these are related, but in the past week or so I have seen posts on one moderator disappearing without a trace, books gone missing from peoples' bookshelves (the first person noticing this attributed it to new GR policy on what constitutes a book) and I feel like there was something else but it doesn't come to mind. I think I heard something about a lot of changes in the site, but didn't pay that much attention.
If a GR member who has written reviews and rated books is deleted from membership for some reason, would that delete their reviews/ratings? Even if so, 147 overnight sounds like a purge of some sort.

I heard from someone today that he had 30 disappear overnight.

This is just more GR crap. They allow numerous scams but remove ratings they find inadequate? It looks to me like, that if GR wanted to do something to improve their site, they would target the scammers, not the authors. Once again, GR cares zip, zilch, zero about authors. Our only recourse is to stay off the platform. I have remained on so that people can see what as joke GR is for authors. But, this is the last book I will put on this platform. I simply don't have time to be the scam police for Amazon/GR.

I found this in the GR Review Guidelines:

"Goodreads reserves the right to remove a review at any time for any reason. It is at our sole discretion and no one else's, that we decide when a review is against our guidelines."

They also say they want to "promote" the most "thought provoking reviews (positive and negative)", which sounds a bit subjective to me.

Julie wrote: "This is just more GR crap. They allow numerous scams but remove ratings they find inadequate? It looks to me like, that if GR wanted to do something to improve their site, they would target the sca..."

GR is getting worse and worse, it seems. I heard of another similar site, but can't remember the name of it. But I think it charges, and I can't afford to pay for such a site. If there's anything else similar for no charge, I think I'd go. I've never found Goodreads an easy site to use, anyway, and now, with scams and disappearing ratings I wonder if it's worth continuing here.

Arent you jumping ahead of yourselves?

You have no idea what the reason is, but it is instantly GRs fault? - Based on what, a need to point the finger or actual proof?

I do know one person that had all their reviews disappear, and GR did pull them because it was the same review endlessly with a promotion on psychic healing. Complete scammer and so it was pulled.

Lynessa, you have 343 reviews stated but in fact you have 431 if you tot them up, Admin screw up? Or merely software bump?

Douglas wrote: "Arent you jumping ahead of yourselves?

You have no idea what the reason is, but it is instantly GRs fault? - Based on what, a need to point the finger or actual proof?

I do know one person that h..."

Oh, not really. If you had suffered through as many scams on this joke of a website as I have, you might change your tune. I, along with many other authors got hundreds of phony, 1-star reviews with horrid, vitriolic language, all from "private" accounts, all using the same verbiage, all within minutes of each other. Then, we got offers to "fix" the reviews for a fee. In other words, GR was allowing an extortion scheme. We all had to contact GR over and over to get the phony reviews taken down. I have also had numerous phony offers to "review" my books, if I will just send a copy, but not through any legitimate channels . I have left the 10, yes count them, 10 offers I got from the same person on the same day on my author page so people could see what we put up with. You can read about these debacles on other chains referencing scams. GR simply is not concerned about us authors. So, please don't try to defend GR to me. They have degraded over the past few years to the point that I trust nothing on their site. I don't think the GR staff is qualified to be the arbiter of the "quality" of anything. Perhaps they should spend their time trying to rid it of scammers instead of setting themselves up as judges of quality based on whatever criteria a particular employee of theirs chooses to use. As I said, GR is a joke.

There are unscroupulous scammers eager to take advantage of novice authors aggressively requesting and monitoring ratings and reviews.,

Ratings and reviews are merely personal, and therefore subjective, opinions. One reader's Best book ever! may very well be another reader's Worst book ever! which is why most astute avid readers do not allow a rating or review to influence their purchasing choice one way or the other.

All books, periodical articles, classes, and seminars written or conducted by well-established, commercially successful authors and publishers emphasize the fact that sales drive reviews, not the other way around. Focus upon striving to continuously improve upon technical writing, promotional, and marketing knowledge and skills and sales will increase. Reviews will follow.

Very few authors ever achieve notoriety or commercial success within this extremely competitive field. That said; some have. There is no reason why you may not eventually become one of them. I wish you success.

And here is Jim with his canned advice. He says the same thing every time this issue arises. He has never gotten the point and, clearly, doesn't understand today's world of scammers. Jim, this is not about reviews. This is about disappearing reviews. Perhaps you could read what has been said. And, maybe write something new instead of just copying and pasting the same thing, ad infinitum.

I also saw a good part of the ratings and reviews on my ebooks disappear today. This morning, I had 306 ratings. Tonight, I have 246 left. And no, Jim, I never asked or requested reviews from readers or from anybody else, so your argument is completely off. This is not a case about scammers, but rather another proof of incompetence and uncaring from Goodreads towards the authors using this site.

I have just had something similar, but only from the author average rating. About 26 ratings disappeared from that, but remain on the individual books.

Looks like it is some sort of glitch.

S.D. wrote: "I have just had something similar, but only from the author average rating. About 26 ratings disappeared from that, but remain on the individual books.

Looks like it is some sort of glitch."

Douglas wrote: "Arent you jumping ahead of yourselves?

You have no idea what the reason is, but it is instantly GRs fault? - Based on what, a need to point the finger or actual proof?

I do know one person that h..."

Goodreads admitted fault in an email response to my filed complaint. So, yes, I DO know it's their fault. Now, they need to make every writer whole who's been affected by retrieving the ratings and reinstating them.

Thanks for making an assumption.

It's happening to me as well. Yesterday I had 181 ratings and I now have 104. One book has plummeted from 4.75 to 3.86 yet when I click on that book the five-star ratings it had haven't been removed.

Goodreads are completely indifferent to such problems. I'm sure if we could remove our books from this tawdry site many of us would have already left.

Jim wrote: "There are unscroupulous scammers eager to take advantage of novice authors aggressively requesting and monitoring ratings and reviews.,

Ratings and reviews are merely personal, and therefore subj..."

Hi Jim, I'm also becoming perturbed by the fact you post the same thing over and over again and fail to address the subject. I notice you have authored one book which has a 4.24 rating with only 17 ratings. If I decided to swamp your book (which I could today if I wanted) with 50 1-stars, how would you feel about it? Would you feel that my reviews were authentic, even though I didn't read your book? Do you think people are more likely to stick around and give your book a chance with a 4.24 rating or a 2.21 rating?

Jim wrote: "There are unscroupulous scammers eager to take advantage of novice authors aggressively requesting and monitoring ratings and reviews.,

Ratings and reviews are merely personal, and therefore subj..."

This is just insulting. You assume wer're idiots. We're not. If you actually READ the posted issue, you wouldn't have just lost all credibility.

Sue wrote: "I'm not an author. I'm a paid beta reader but I keep up with about 30 discussion groups. I don't know if these are related, but in the past week or so I have seen posts on one moderator disappearin..."

The email response to my complaint was a ho-hum we have a problem we're working on fixing. No specifics or promise to restore ratings. Most of the 147 ratings purged from my account were 5-stars. I whole-heartedly accept ALL HONEST reviews and ratings. If all 1 and 2-star ratings vanished, I'd still be upset. I just want GR to quit destroying indies. We are the vast majority of 'clients' that make up GR very existence. Who craps on someone's head and tells them it's a crown?

I don't think GR sees us indies as an asset. More like too much of a bother to listen to our issues. Perhaps they would like to go back to the days of elitist publishing houses controlling everything. Back to the good-ole-days when, unless you were already published, and if you didn't go to the right college, you would never be published. I can tell the folks at GR that, if you don't keep up, you get left behind. Indies are here to stay and, as Lynessa says, we are a large and ever-growing group. I have heard from many authors who are choosing not to use GR, as I will the next time. I have also had discussions with marketing firms who tell me that their readers pay no attention to GR and look only to Amazon and other sites ratings. Amazon has much stricter criteria for reviews and seems to prevent scammers. Why, since GR is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon, can't they do the same? My conclusion is, they don't care. So, why not just spin off the GR company instead of letting it languish until all credibility is lost. GR is headed that way fast.

Julie: Hey. Any idea where you would go if you decided to leave GR? As I said in an earlier post, I'm a paid beta reader, not an author. Our work is dependent on yours, so I think we have a dog in this fight, and will probably need to follow you guys wherever/whenever/if ever you go. Whether you use free or paid betas, it is best for you all to have access to a large concentration to choose from. Scattering to the four winds might not be to your best interest.

I just contacted GR this morning about this. On my Kindle GR app, I still have the same number of ratings. On web browser, 30 have disappeared. My rating graphic has also changed, with more 4 star than 5 star now but the average is still the same. Sorry but glad to see that others are having the same problem. It must be their system.

Sue wrote: "Julie: Hey. Any idea where you would go if you decided to leave GR? As I said in an earlier post, I'm a paid beta reader, not an author. Our work is dependent on yours, so I think we have a dog in ..."

Binge Books is a free up and comer. I have a page there and they have lots of books listed already but I haven't used it much yet. Book Bub is another site that could do more with readers.

Bookbub in all the time I have dealt with them have been useless. New books are never updated. There are few reviews and so forth.

Bing Books I have never used but it has to be better than BB

Sue wrote: "Julie: Hey. Any idea where you would go if you decided to leave GR? As I said in an earlier post, I'm a paid beta reader, not an author. Our work is dependent on yours, so I think we have a dog in ..."
No, I have not researched it. My plan is to stick with Amazon, the behemoth in the field, and market my book on ad sites with good plans. Reedsy has a list of advertising firms, listed by ROI. If you learn about something else that works, let me know.

Has anyone found out why the ratings we had disappeared? Once again, Goodreads doesn't seem too bothered in addressing the issue.

It's not on Goodreads' list of known issues so please report the matter here: https://www.goodreads.com/about/conta...

Lynessa wrote: "Are any other authors experiencing vanishing ratings?

I had 489 ratings yesterday, and today only 342.

147 ratings disappeared overnight.

Most of the ratings that disappeared were 5 and 4 stars...."

It is very odd. I can understand if the site is having some technical bumps. But over the years I have found the site attracts more negative reviews than positive. My mum wonders why people take so much time to post rants under a negative review. But she is from an older generation who simply stopped reading a book if they didn't like it. The weirdest thing is that so many 4 and 5 star ratings disappear, but the 1 and 2 stars seem to avoid being purged. I have no problem getting 1 or 2 star ratings as an author, but it should be fair. I used to like this site a lot but I think it has lost its way over the years. A shame.

I contacted Goodreads' help and had this reply:

Hi there,

Thanks for writing in! I just refreshed your book rating stats. Our book pages are cached to improve overall site performance, so it can sometimes take a few extra days for the page to fully update. You can try clearing your browser's cache and checking back on the page. If this doesn't help, I'd suggest visiting the page in another day or two. In the meantime, the rating count and graph at the top of the book page should always be completely up-to-date.

Please let me know if the issue persists. If you have any additional concerns, please don't hesitate to let me know. I can also recommend visiting Goodreads Help for answers to many other commonly asked questions!

Have a lovely rest of your week.

Best,
Justine

Unfortunately, Justine didn't explain why this has happened to a number of us now when it's not happened before, nor has her refreshing the page fixed it (and I even took her advice and emptied my browser's cache to see if that helped)

I have four published books, and one of them has seemingly "lost" 18 ratings. When counted manually, all of the ratings are still there.

I reported it today as a bug.

I sent Goodreads the url to to this thread and have received this response:

Thank you for taking the time to write in about this!

Our developers are aware of this issue and are working on fixing it. While there’s no confirmed fix date yet to share, this bug is prioritized in our development team’s backlog – we hope to fix this soon. Your report has been added to the developer ticket.

If there’s anything else I can help you with, please feel free to reach out! You might also find it useful to visit Goodreads Help, where you’ll find updated information about the site, as well as answers to commonly asked questions.

A bug, huh? I'd say an infestation!

About three and a half years ago my ratings were off by about 10 or 20. After spending a full year sending messages to GR support, to which I kept receiving standard "we're working on it" replies similar to those other Goodreaders have posted above, I gave up, and it's never been rectified.

Now, in addition to the first 100 ratings that disappeared a few days ago, another 100 ratings have gone, leaving me with circa 400 ratings instead of 600. A third of my ratings gone just like that!

Yeah, Goodreads don't care, and unfortunately, I wouldn't hold your breath that the issue will be fixed.

I really feel for all you authors, because I know only too well how much hard work goes into getting honest ratings and reviews over the years.

That's what we get for using a bloody Amazon-owned site I guess!

They fixed this problem back in July and returned most of my reviews and ratings to where they were before after this post. However, the weekend of Oct 23, I lost nearly a whopping 500 ratings/reviews in one weekend, most positive. Emailed three times with no response over the next three weeks. I then posted on the help forum to see if I could get any responses. By then I'd lost 100 more. The forum told me to hit the contact button and send another email even though I'd already done so three previous times. I did it again. No response until Dec 6th where I fell into the 800s. Here I sit, 2 days later on the 8th having now lost almost a thousand. I was at 1590 reviews/ratings at the end of September, sent them screenshots to prove it, now I'm in the 600s. Dec 6th I got the most generic email saying thanks for contacting them and they'll look into the matter. I was promoting GR for ratings and reviews, updating my page, using it as a social platform for readers and writers more than any of my others and now I am losing all faith, not just from a writer's standpoint, but as an avid reader it breaks my heart to know now that the reading world I love is so messy. Not sure what happened to GRs response time or customer service. I had really polite reps the last time once I established a dialog with them back in June. This time it's horrible. Maybe this is what I get for speaking up? Dunno. I can't explain this massive hemorrhage. If the bleeding doesn't stop, I'll be back at 100 before I finish typing this.

I've lost 1,667 ratings on one book between December 2021 and January 2022, whist GAINING 69 reviews on the same book...

https://twitter.com/Mark__Lawrence/st...

I noticed the same thing on Amazon. I lost 3 ratings and I don't know why.
https://youtu.be/vuYCm15SLtg

https://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Brother...