FOR contemporary authors, one of the most necessary of evils is Goodreads (owned by Amazon). The book review site for active readers can be a real benefit to writers, particularly those without big publicity machines behind them – which is most authors. On the platform, with a few clicks on the keyboard by enthusiastic audiences, word-of-mouth can translate to potential sales.
Alas, like many such user-powered recommendation engines, it is also easily manipulated – thanks not only to unethical consumers but also to Amazon’s unwillingness to take responsibility for the site’s oversized reach and institute common-sense guardrails.
A key issue at Goodreads, as at counterpart sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Rate Your Music, is “review bombing”. Online groups often target certain books or authors not because of the actual content – which they likely haven’t read – but because of perceived ideological views. The “bombers” will then bombard the work with bad reviews in an effort to sink its average rating. The effects can be seismic and irreversible, creating a perception of widespread rejection. When so many books, films, music and media are vying for our ever-precious attention and leisure time, a quick glance at an aggregate rating or sample critique is often all it takes to dash a potential reader’s interest.
A recent article by Heloise Wood at the Bookseller pinpoints an even more troubling trend on Goodreads: negative feedback that is demonstrably false because the books in question are not even available. The logistics here can be complicated since early copies of books often circulate six months or more before the publication date. These advance reading copies (ARCs), usually available in both physical and electronic form, are used to generate advance reviews, blurbs for marketing and (hopefully) general good buzz.
But the Bookseller has uncovered instances where negative comments appeared on Goodreads before those ARCs were in circulation or even before proofs for copy-editing had been created. In every case detailed in the Bookseller report, the authors reached out to Goodreads about the obviously inaccurate and dishonest reviews, and the site did nothing. One writer, Millie Johnson, said her removal request was refused by the site because “the reviewer had a perfect right to predict if they’d enjoy it or not”; crime writer Jo Furniss only had a false one removed after the publication contacted Goodreads for comment.
Furniss characterised the situation as “a form of online abuse”, and she’s not wrong. But in some ways, it’s worse than our go-to perceptions of disturbing behaviour on social media sites and the like. On X, you can block an abusive party or delete a post that’s prompted harassment, and on Bluesky, you can do the same, as well as detaching a post that’s being quoted to provoke an online swarm. But at Goodreads, such forms of disengagement are not in the target’s hands – they’re up to the site’s administrators, who seem to be dismissive or disinterested in such concerns.
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So, what is the solution? There isn’t an easy one. Once a book is out in the world, it’s all but impossible to determine if an online response to the work is genuine or an act of trolling against an author whom a Goodreads user has deemed worthy of their ire. (There are also, on the opposite side, sites that offer to stuff the virtual ballot box with good reviews for authors who are willing to pay for it.)
One partial solution, which would presumably be simple for Goodreads to deploy, is the use of verification – marking that the reviewer has, at the very least, bought the book in question by verifying the purchase of it on Amazon. Amazon currently uses this system for reviewing products on its own site but, oddly, hasn’t implemented a similar option on Goodreads. (Rotten Tomatoes adopted something similar in 2019, tying critiques to purchases via the site’s partner, Fandango, to delegitimise its review bombers.) This would exclude readers who purchase their books elsewhere, unfortunately, but at least it would provide some sort of baseline for legitimacy.
Of course, such a system could not and would not address the starker issue of review bombing during that lengthy pre-publication period, when reviews from ARCs would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify. But in dealing with the clearer problem of false appraisals of works that are not yet available in any form, Goodreads has to take the more active step of listening to its authors and taking appropriate action. Writers have told stories of reporting critiques obviously posted by people who could not have read the books in question, only to see them fall on deaf ears while the defamatory comments remained online.
This is simply unacceptable. It’s downright irresponsible that the platform won’t take any kind of action to enforce the veracity of such “reviews”. Yes, its users are its customers, in the strictest sense – but Goodreads should treat authors with respect because they’re the reason why anyone is on that site in the first place. BLOOMBERG