The Weight of a Negative Rating:
The universe is vast, but sometimes small things seem big.
by Thio Isobel Moss
I’ve been honest about my negative reviews/ratings. They exist; they weren’t fun to receive, although they motivated me to make my marketing materials establish up front that Blind Spot: The Covenant’s Forfeit is told through multiple POVs. The author of the most recent 2-star review even wrote that she would like to read a book written by me with a single POV.
K.M. – I’m afraid I can’t find your email address in the data I received from NetGalley, but if you request Bump, I’ll approve you to read it. Thank you for your honest and thoughtful review. It was helpful.
Now, back to our regular programming.
Recently, I received a one-star rating on Amazon with no review. I’m putting this out there, not to call that person out, but because something funny/amazing/wild/insert-your-own-descriptor happened.
Blind Spot is available globally through IngramSpark and Draft2Digital; I have a small but real international presence. Recently, enough data became available that I started showing up in the Amazon.co.uk ranks.
On March 1st, I had a sale in the UK. Why is that significant?
The only review/rating that I have visible there is that one-star rating with no review.
Now, I had a bit of a perfect storm going. I’d recently completely redone my Amazon Ads structure, ripping out all the history I had gathered in the algorithm. If you are a new author on Amazon Ads, three things: they work, don’t bid against yourself (I did), and go slow and carefully. Build with a concrete, long-term plan in mind. Test before making things permanent.
I’m glad I fixed things now rather than years into my writing career, but having my two best weeks in KU pages read and a reasonably successful discounted promo afterward, followed by eleven days of zero sales and 1 KU page read, was tough — although that one page moved me up 1,000 places in the ranks. It must have been a hard day for a lot of authors.
With personal losses, stresses, and problems that I made, a week with a negative review on NetGalley and a negative rating posted to both Goodreads and Amazon felt like the end of the world.
Spoiler: It wasn’t.
Even with my 3.2-star average on Amazon (US-side of the pond), my ads are starting to work again. I’m getting pages read, and on Sunday, someone (thank you!) bought my book with only that one-star rating to help judge the description and cover by.
My book is niche. It is dense. It has a broad cast of characters. It has multiple POVs, and it is complex. For this type of book, reviews are glacially slow to arrive. I have multiple 5’s, 4’s, and two-star ratings, and the lone 1-star rating across several platforms. No threes. Blind Spot is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of book.
But it has proof of life.
And soon, a sibling! Bump is in editing!
The point is that, dear readers, reviews are the lifeblood of a book. Please review and do so honestly. Even a negative review can guide the author’s marketing and signal who will appreciate the book and who won’t.
For aspiring writers (or writers who need a reminder), an early negative review is not the end of the line. It’s painful. It’s scary. It’s challenging, and there will be more of them to come, but don’t attach more meaning to it than it has earned.
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