Wednesday 20 March 2013

Should you leave a bad review?


This is a subject that has been used in many blog posts that I have read recently.

Most people say that they wouldn’t leave a review under 3 stars and I have always agreed with them.

Is this the right thing to do?

I have come across a lot of badly written e-books since I bought my kindle last year. Most of them were free or very cheap so I wasn’t particularly ripped off but I feel strongly that it is the responsibility of the Author to make sure that what they produce is good enough to justify asking people for money for. Even if it has been given away for free you are still asking people to give up their time to read your work.

Maybe we should leave bad reviews.

I am not suggesting that we should be spiteful or bitchy, but maybe we should let potential readers know that they shouldn’t waste their time or money on a particular book.

I have heard people say that what one person hates another might love and this is true. I have seen 1 star reviews for books that I have loved, sometimes I feel like there are people out there who just get off on leaving nasty reviews. I am sure that if a book is genuinely good the positive reviews will far outweigh the negative.

We all have different tastes and I am not saying that I would leave a bad review on a book because it was not quite my kind of thing, but I think we should leave low star reviews on books that are poorly written or not edited properly.

I know of people who have left bad reviews and have suffered abuse from the Author or their families. This is childish behaviour. I have also seen Authors react positively to bad reviews and take on board the comments. It must be painful receiving bad remarks about something you have put so many hours into, but that is part of the job description.

Authors have to be tough!

2 comments:

  1. Hello Kari, yes, that's fair enough, but on the other hand anyone can dload a free sample of a book and if they hate it leave it, so no time or money waste. For my first book Rock'n'Roll Suicide, I have 16, 5* rvws, one 4* and one 2*. This last is a 3 line effort that is patently ridicuoous, peppered with exclamation marks and makes no sense. Yet because amazon want a critical rvw to compare with a good one, it's the first thing that anyone sees, and there's nothing I can do. That's why ill considered bad reviews, in my view should be taken down

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    1. Thankyou for reading! I agree with what you say and it is annoying when people leave stupid reviews. On the other hand though I think that we have to credit the reader with enough intelligence to know the difference between a genuine review and one that is not. The excessive exclamation marks would send out warning signs to me. I do always load samples first.

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