← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
A Review of Goodreads
00:16:49
It's the time of year when many people set new reading goals on Goodreads, the website and mobile app that lets you track and review your books.
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This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. If you're a big reader, there's a good chance that when we flipped over to 2024, you headed over to Goodreads to set your reading goal for the new year. For those who don't know, Goodreads is a website originally independent, now owned by Amazon, that allows users to track and rate books they read. Anyone can post a review, which sounds democratic, but as Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis writes, quote, the terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. That's because you don't have to have read a book in order to write a negative review. And one viral video about why a book is problematic can lead to a cascade of one star ratings. You might remember the story about best selling author Elizabeth Gilbert delaying the publication of her new novel set in Soviet Russia after Goodreads users claimed the story glorified the Russian government long before the book was even published. Or maybe you saw in the news that last month that a debut author had her publication date canceled after it was revealed that she had made up multiple fake Goodreads accounts to post negative reviews about other books. Helen Lewis joins me now to break down how Goodreads has changed the publishing industry. She's the author of the piece the Wrath of Goodreads. Authors are at the mercy of people who don't bother reading their work. Helen, welcome to the show.
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Thank you very much listeners.
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We want to hear from you. Are you a Goodreads user? What do you like about the site? What do you dislike? How much stock do you take in user reviews? Or maybe you're a published author. What has your relationship with Goodreads been like? Do you read the reviews of your book on Goodreads? Give us a call. 2124-3396-9221-2433-WNYC. You can call in or text to that number. Social media is available as well@olivet WNYC. We're discussing Goodreads for the rest show you right. The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. So what's the secret and why is it an open one?
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D
Well, the secret is that it's not, as you say, a kind of democratic grassroots site. Or you know, it can turn out to not be, particularly if you're writing about one of the kind of hot button issues in American politics, like race or gender, for example. And actually it seems particularly if you're writing those as a woman or a person of color. There is a, a phenomenon known as review bombing, which is when somebody usually starts somewhere like TikTok on Instagram says, you know, puts up the bat signal saying, there's a problem with this book, there's a problem with this author. You know, this is bad. These people are bad people. And then people will dutifully trot over to Goodreads and bombard that page for a book that hasn't even been released yet with one star reviews. And sometimes they're really explicit about the fact that they haven't read the book. They said, you know, all I've seen is the synopsis of this book, but I know that it's trash. One star. And there is no kind of taboo on this idea that, you know, this old fashioned idea that you actually have to have consumed the media before passing judgment on it. People are just going off vibes. And Goodreads functionally has no real way to crack down on this. Occasionally, if it gains sufficient amount of traction, someone will step in. But lots of the time it really doesn't, you know, these. And that's happened with Elizabeth Gill. But sometimes authors just go, I don't think this book, I think this book has been kind of strangled at birth. I don't think we'll ever succeed now. So there's what's the point of me publishing it?
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You spoke to an author who, her debut launch was affected by negative reviews. The debut novel was titled Everything's Fine. Would you tell us what happened with this author.
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Yeah, so that's Cecilia Rabbis, who wrote a book which is a romance story, and it's about a black woman who falls in love with a white Trump supporter and comes to the conclusion that despite his flaws and them, despite them being quite different politically, you know, this is still a kind of a love story that can work. And this, as you can imagine, really upset some people. Some people who think that Trump supporters are, you know, signing off on white nationalism and fascism said, I don't want to see, you know, the kind of cute story about how someone gets over someone else's racism and bombarded her page with these reviews. Cecilia herself is black. She's written about race issues for a while and she wanted to explore the idea that, you know, in an America that can feel very polarized, actually, people have often quite complicated and difficult personal feelings and personal relationships with people who don't agree with them. You know, something that is a great staple of literature throughout the ages. But for a sort of small cadre of people who heard about that book, you know, woman Falls in Love with Trump Supporter was just. That was it. It was beyond the pale. They didn't think that this book should even be published and they went straight over to Goodreads to make their feel. At the same time, there were also people who had legitimately read advanced reading copies and also didn't like it, which I would always defend. You know, I've written some pretty stinking reviews of my time too. Sometimes the book is bad and you just have to say so. So people don't waste their money. But the Goodreads seems to have no ability to restrain back from these, these campaigns, almost sort of semi orchestrated campaigns or ones that have been kind of initiated by one big name person that just, you know, can just feel to a debut author like everybody in the world is not even giving them a chance to not even hear out. Basically just one line is all they hear about their book and that's it. They're kind of condemned.
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We have a really interesting caller. Amelia has called in from the Upper west side with this is Wild. Amelia, you're on the air.
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Hi. Thank you.
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I want to hear all about. Yeah. What you've done.
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Yeah. So I've been a lifelong reader and user of Goodreads and over the past several years I've just been really disappointed by kind of their lack of response to readers and authors and also the fact that they're owned by Amazon. So I am a developer and I built something better originally Just for myself. It's called Bookworm Reads. It's now in the App Store and Google Play Store. It's super fun, super friendly and it's all about community. And it's really just based on the fact that readers deserve better than what Amazon and Goodreads are giving us. We're community owned. Yeah, it's a really good time and I think like proof that we deserve better and we can have better. You just kind of need to care which Amazon and Goodreads does it.
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Amelia, Amazingly, somebody just texted us. I switched from Goodreads to Bookworm Reads two years ago and have never been happier. It's a startup reading app that's inclusive and community minded. I don't think you can text to us and call from the phone, so I'm pretty sure it's not you.
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It's not me, I promise. But thank you Amelia.
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Well done. Thank you for calling in. That's really interesting that someone just took it into their own hands.
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I think that that is the root of a lot of the complaints about Goodreads is that Amazon took it over in 2013. They bought it for reported $150 million and there is a feeling that they have not invested in it since they've essentially kind of gone through managed decline on it. And if you look at the communities on the Internet that are grassroots, that are full of user generated content, like Reddit being a good example, lots of people give up so much of their free time in order to do that because they care about those communities. But there is a feeling with Goodreads that Amazon, if it wanted, could pay for more human moderators and it doesn't want to. And I think the feeling is that this is multi billion dollar company. If it wanted this site to be good, if it wanted to invest in it, it could and it sort of chosen not to. It's the root of, I think, a lot of people's criticisms of it.
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My guest is Helen Lewis, staff writer at the Atlantic.
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We're talking about her piece the Wrath of Goodreads. Listeners love to hear from you. Are you a Goodreads user? What do you like about the site? What do you dislike? How much stock do you take in user reviews? Or maybe you're a published author? What has been your relationship with Goodreads? Do you read reviews of your book? Our phone numbers 2124-3396-9221-2433-WNYC. You can call us in or you can text to us or you can reach out on social media at AllNYC. I want to go all the way back. Helen, when did Goodreads start? What was its early profile? What were its hopes and dreams?
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Well, it was started by a couple in 2007, and it was exactly as your caller described then. The idea was it would be this kind of homely, grassroots kind of place where just people who really loved books could go and talk to other people, essentially moving the book group. And, you know, that's. That's a really wonderful thing. And there are versions of that site, you know, letterboxd exists for films and I think is a more successful version of Goodreads in a different genre. So it's not impossible to make these communities work. The one thing I should say is, another established problem with Goodreads, and you referred to it in your intro, is that it does send authors slightly mad because it provides authors with a huge amount of feedback from people who often are very uncomplimentary, not just about their books, but about them. And there is an established pattern of authors going on there and arguing with their critics, which you should just absolutely never do. And Kate Corrane, who you mentioned, the debut author who was leaving fake reviews, is perhaps an extreme example of that. But there have been other instances of authors wading in and trying to sort of defend themselves. And that classically goes extremely badly. People don't like, you know, they don't want the kind of big people, you know, the big beast in the zoo coming and mingling with the people who are just looking and enjoying throwing, you know, stuff out at the cages. They don't want that.
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Let's talk about the Caitlin Coren. How did this author. How was she able to make multiple accounts on Goodreads? And how did she explain herself that she didn't necessarily give herself good reviews, she gave other people bad reviews. I mean, it cost her her publishing deal.
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It cost her her agent and her publishing deal and, you know, any kind of. Kind of community feeling that she might have had in the industry. I think, you know, publishing is a very small world and, you know, everybody kind of knows each other. And the story that I started with was about a writer called Megan Nolan who went onto her Goodreads page just after they sent out the advanced copies of her novel and found two reviews. And one of them was from somebody she knew personally that she'd had an argument with in real life, a minor and inconsequential argument. So I think there is also a feeling that Goodreads can be used by people to settle Scores to some extent. But what happens is you just use a bunch of different email addresses. And this comes to the heart of people's complaints about the site that there is very little monitoring of who are these people? Are they legitimate? Have they legitimately read the book? So Amazon's main site, for example, you will have noticed now that it has a little verified badge so it can monitor where someone's actually bought the book and therefore there's a reasonable chance that if they bought it, they may have read it and it tries to kind of lift up those reviews. It hasn't got to the problem about the fact that you sometimes see a one star review of a book that will say this arrived in very poor packaging. One star, which always feels very cruel on the author concerned. You really didn't have a lot to do with that. But at least there are some kind of mechanisms in place to try and get a higher quality of review to the top and really surface those ones. But Goodreads doesn't have that kind of architecture, unfortunately. And again, that's the heart of many of the complaints.
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Let's talk to Terry calling in from West New York, New Jersey. Hi Terry, thanks for calling all of it.
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Hi, thank you so much. I love your show. I always learn so much in regard to Goodreads. I love it because it keeps track of everything I've read, which I can never remember what I've read. And it keeps track of all the books I want to read, which that list is all always longer than my have read list and our book club uses it to check the ratings. But I never do that because what I like someone else may not like. So I don't read the reviews. But if it's a book that I really love, I do write a little paragraph and I explain why I loved it. But I never post anything negative.
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Terry, thank you for calling in. Helen. How does publishing handle Goodreads? How do publishers work with Goodreads? Is there any way that they have figured out to game Goodreads?
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D
Well, they do send out arcs, which are called advanced reading copies. And you will often see the early Goodreads reviews of a book saying something like thank you to the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. So what they will try and do is speak to an established community of book bloggers, try and seed good reviews. So I wrote another piece later in the summer which is also about the publishing industry, which is about blurbing. The problem of blurbing now for people who don't know what it is when you See, a kind of COVID quote and it just says, amazing, unput downable. A heart stopping work of staggering genius. You know, those quotes often come from the author's friends or from other people who write for the same agent or publisher. And they are also another vital ingredient of this pre publicity machine because frankly a huge number of books are published every year and the vast majority of them sell very few copies indeed. So publishers are trying and do everything they can to get an organic kind of feeling of a sense of swell behind books before they're published. And you know, there are big names whose books will, you know, the latest, Lee Child or whatever will always fly off the shelves. But if you're a debut author, that sense that this is a buzzy book is, you know, is really important. And the tragic thing is that lots of newspapers that used to have book review sections, those have been cut right back. You know, the advertising is just not there to support the mainstream media doing books coverage in the way that it once did. So actually this user generated content, whether it's Goodreads or whether or not it's blurbs or, or book bloggers or book Talk, which is TikTok, book discussions, all of that has become much, much, much more important to the publishing industry.
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F
You've written a book yourself. You actually read your reviews on Goodreads. Good God, why? I read mine once and I was like, never again.
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I put in a piece that I actually take a sort of perverse enjoyment about it because people find things that are wrong with you that you wouldn't even thought before. Someone got very upset with me reading the audiobook and said, I, I kept pausing before the word male and I become obviously incredibly self conscious about it. Did I? Is this a thing that I do have? I've been doing this all my life and I. But I think you have to just accept that this is, you know, I always think of myself as a writer like a kind of, you know, I sell cars. I sell the cars and the factory that sells the car, people buy the car. I don't provide after sales support. You know, once that piece is out in the world, that book is out in the world. That's, it's, it's yours, it's readers. I can't control it. And I think people who try and control the discussion of their work once it's out there are the people who end up driving themselves slightly bonkers.
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The name of the piece is the Wrath of Goodreads. It's in the Atlantic. My guest has been Helen Lewis, staff writer for the Atlantic. Helen, thank you so. Thank you so much for sharing all of your reporting. We really appreciate it.
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Thank you for having me.
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And while we're on the subject of books, hey listeners, New year, new get lit with all of it Book Club pick. Our first pick of the year is from a Pulitzer Prize winner. It takes place in Brooklyn and it's his first work of fiction in 10 years. Our January 2024 author is Michael Cunningham. We are reading his novel Day. It follows one Brooklyn based family on the same day during three different years in their lives. April 5, 2019, 2020 and 2021. We see how the pandemic has deepened some of the fractures that already existed in this family, changed some members forever, and led to tragic loss that the family struggles to come to grips with. Michael Cunningham will be joining us on Wednesday, January 31, and we are excited to announce that our musical guest will be singer songwriter Josh Ritter.
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Josh Ritter's most recent album was released in April of 2023 and the one before that came out in April of 2019, the same month and year as where Michael Cunningham's novel day begins. Ritter's been called one of the greatest living songwriters by Pace Magazine. He's also a published author, too. Josh Ritter will join us to perform some songs on January 31st, so mark your calendars and get your tickets now. Unlimited e copies of the book are available for New Yorkers, thanks to our partners at the New York Public library. Head to wnyc.org getlit to borrow your copy and to grab free tickets to our January 31st event. In the meantime, follow us on Instagram levitnyc. Happy reading.
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I cannot go where you are going I can no longer fight those waves.
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Still I don't watch you till you're.
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Out of sight A strong swimmer. And that is all of it for today. On tomorrow's show, if you don't like snow, sleet or rain or whatever we're getting this weekend, you can hunker down with some great board games. We'll be joined by someone from the Brooklyn store, the strategist. Brooklyn Strategist. And we want to hear about your favorite board games. Plus, actor Dan Levy, yes. Of the very popular streaming show Schitt's Creek, joins us to discuss his new film. Good Grief.
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That's tomorrow.
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