Adobe Podcast Transcript (automatically generated):

So when you get a review this lesson for stars, here’s one perspective. One way to look at it that may help take some of the sting out. The review could be coming from someone who doesn’t pay good attention. I’ve had this happen to me in critique groups before, but at least they have the excuse of not having the entire manuscript at their disposal. Nor do they have, you know, categories and reviews from other readers and all that sort of stuff. They don’t have any of those things. They just have the raw material and only slivers of it at that. So this means they can forget earlier scenes, or have missed a session where critical plot beats were introduced.

So forgetting things like what a character looks like or even what genre the book is supposed to be in makes some sense, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen three star reviews for books, and the rating makes zero sense to me because they have noted prominent characteristics of the piece as being reasons that they didn’t like it. So a book listed as a novella or a short story. For example, someone will give it three stars and then write that they gave it three stars because it was short and it’s just like, oh, okay, but you found it in the short story category. It’s got short story in the subtitle. Uh, people have reviewed it and talked about how fast of a read it was. I

mean, there’s just there was at no point any signal that this was going to be like a 2 million word book. So I don’t that’s just bizarre to me. Right. Or I recently saw one. There was a book about an ex-military protagonist, and they were battling an alien invasion. And so, of course, there’s a lot of warlike action and a lot of shooting guns and that sort of thing. Okay. So to see somebody give this book three stars or lower whatever it was, because it had a lot of shooting and warlike action in it, it was just bizarre and fascinating. Right. So and again, just to be clear, these people are specifically noting these book traits in their review and stating that this is why the book got the three star rating. And I don’t understand, like, how is a novelette or novella being short a bad thing? It’s just a characteristic of that particular story. It’s just the length of it.

That’s just a technical aspect. And that characteristic was clearly noted in the category the book was in, as well as the description that was provided on the book sales page. So why then be surprised or upset when the book turns out to be short, as it promised it would be? If a cover of a book shows somebody in military gear holding a gun. Why would you not think that battles are going to take place within that book? And again, in general, what is wrong with having a book have military action in it? Like that’s just that’s a whole niche. So if you didn’t want that, why would you start reading it in the first place? Here’s an example. I’m not a fan of spicy food, but I’m also open to experimentation. So let’s say I hear about a new kind of tea, and it’s supposed to be the spiciest thing on the planet again. I’ve read the reviews.

It’s called something like, you know, the mouth bomb or something like that, something that sounds really hot and terrible for me. I might still try it, right? Because again, that’s just the kind of goofball I am. So if it does turn out to be the spiciest thing I’ve ever consumed and I mean eyes watering, nose running, coughing the whole nine yards, guess what? Rating. I’m going to give that tea a full five stars. It said it was spicy. It ended up being spicy. It 100% delivered. It was what it was supposed to be. I knew going in that I didn’t like spicy stuff, so that was my risk to take. That’s not on the tea or the people that prepared it. Or at least that makes sense to me. Right.

So I would not hold that experience against them. I knew full well what I was walking into. Right. So just keep in mind that some of the three star and lower reviews you receive may be from people who just ignore provided book descriptions, tropes, titles, cover images, categories, all of that, and they don’t read the reviews from other readers. But then for some reason, believe they should blame the writer for their own lack of observational skills in these specific cases. This isn’t a you problem, it’s a them problem. So try not to internalize their inability to pay attention to what they’re about to consume.