On Goodreads

Bloodbath at VampCon is live on Goodreads!

I have a love/hate relationship with Goodreads, to be completely real. First of all, the site and the app are occasionally completely broken. But I've been using the site since 2014, which feels a little nuts. Back then, I reviewed and rated books, sure. But mostly I used Goodreads to keep track of what I read. My memory is truly terrible, so I still need some mechanism to track what I read, otherwise I will never know what to say when asked, "What are you reading lately?"

But.

With the rise of Amazon and the increasingly algorithm-driven world of books and writing, using Goodreads feels different than it used to. It's just one factor in a whole ecosystem in which writers are fighting for their lives for attention and a piece of the profit pie. Amazon takes so much money from authors and has made it so that books are incentivized to be priced as low as possible. This makes it extremely difficult to nigh impossible to make a living on writing quality fiction or non-fiction.

I love seeing what my friends are reading! But I also see reviews that I know might harm an authors' chance at another book publication, or future sales. Not to mention review bombing and targeted harassment! There's also an ecosystem of bookstagrammer/booktok reviewers, who seek social media clout by getting (free) review copies from publishers. If they bomb a book, their followers listen and pile on. When there's a good chance that a reader paid nothing to read a book and their review might financially harm the author...it doesn't feel great.

That stuff, frankly, stinks. At the same time, readers should be able to review their purchases honestly! And I think it's actually a great thing to have a wider set of readers involved in book trends and decision making, so that the New York-focused industry is forced to look outside of its Manhattan-sized bubble.

So, what do we do? The best we can.

I review books on Goodreads when I have something positive or constructive to say -- or, if I simply want to remember an aspect of the book or comic I liked. I hope people will read and review my book honestly! I know how important it is for authors to receive reviews, so I want to contribute to that system as positively as I can while remaining true to my own opinions as a reader.