The fire station down the road from me often has a message on their sign saying things like, "1082 Runs to Date." And it always makes me think, "Is that good or bad?" Without any data to compare it to, you really don't know. I mean 1082 Runs could be up by 100 over that point last year or it could be down by 100. Without the context it's just a random number.
It's kind of the same thing since Amazon started to let people just give ratings for books without typing anything. Without any context it's just random. Someone, somewhere gave my book 1 star. Or someone, somewhere gave my book 5 stars. Either way it doesn't tell me a lot. Someone liked it or someone didn't like it.
There have been more ratings of some books, mostly the free or low cost ones. One Day As a Bimbo went from 2 reviews to 13, probably because it's free. Chance of a Lifetime went from 50 to 60 reviews/ratings. The problem then is you have no idea if the ratings you're getting are good or bad because of the stupid way Amazon weighs ratings instead of just telling you how many there are of each. So really I have no idea if these people are liking the book or not. Which from a business standpoint it's always nice to know if people are liking your product or not.
Though to be honest it's not like people who wrote reviews usually told you much most of the time. I mean some of them were barely comprehensible. Others would just say "OK" or whatever. Really what I want to know is what you liked and didn't like. I don't need you to rehash the plot or say "Ok" or dumb shit like that. What was good and what was bad? That's what's useful.
Anyway, context is important. Numbers with no context don't really SAY anything.
1 comment:
Maybe they're trying to be like other sites. Barnes and Noble and others allow just a rating. I had an incident recently where I asked Alexa to read my notifications, and right after she did, she asked me to rate something I bought. I was like whoa...Alexa is prompting for ratings? Then I didn't because I was just about to go somewhere. These days if you want feedback, you have to find someone who writes reviews. Ideally someone who also likes your genre. There have been times I've just asked on multiple Goodread groups and any reader group I could find, giving out free copies. It's working getting a thoughtful review.
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