I'm not complaining--some things are inevitable. You walk through a dog park, you'll step in poop. You have your books on Goodreads, sooner or later you'll get hit by a One-Star Bandit. It still can be a shock, especially when your book is still in the editing phase, and not even a single advance copy has been sent out, nobody besides your betas and publisher have read it. Then you check out the person, and it's someone with their profile set to private, and over five hundred ratings to their name at one and a half stars average. Bingo! You got hit by a crusader.
This person clearly has not read your book, or likely any of that five hundred, but they have an agenda, and you are in its path. You start to wonder what it is. Is it about the genre—the person fighting a microscopic moral crusade one rating at a time? Is it something more exciting? Perhaps a frustrated writer down-rating all the books of a publisher guilty of rejecting her/his manuscript? How much time a day this person spends tracking new releases to strike? Does (s)he get an emotional satisfaction out of it?
So many mysteries, so few answers.
All good questions. Since I don't look at the avg rating, but rather at what my trusted friends (different than my entire list o' friends) thought of the book, it doesn't necessarily affect my perception of books that have been hit thusly...
ReplyDeleteI'm more curious than anything. Hitting that many books takes dedication. I want to know what makes them tick (and click).
DeleteAltho they could probably do it via imports and exports and basically automate it...
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I wouldn't know how to do that.
DeleteI have to admit, I did wonder when a couple of three star reviews turned up on my not yet released ebook. Okay, I had sent it out to a couple of review sites the day before so I suppose it's possible they might be reviewers for there, but they don't say anything like that in their profile. Do you get three star bandits too?!
ReplyDeleteI've given up being outraged or offended by the one star bandits, now. They're more of a curiosity than anything else. Like you, I wonder what motivates them...
They gave you three stars? That's the oddest thing. It sounds more personal. Btw, true bandits always have their profile sat to private, so you can't tall what kind of books are attacking.
DeleteSomeone just asked about the one-star thing on the GRs Librarian group. No responses yet.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/777632
Imo, GR administrators could simply look out for "readers" who are crusaders. If you have hundreds of one star ratings to your name, and all of it in the same genre, you clearly have an agenda.
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