I’ve had an unplanned opportunity to test this question and it seems that they may be less important than we realize. When I switched distributing my ebooks to Apple from Smashwords to Draft2Digital at the beginning of the year, all the books lost their ratings and reviews. Since then they’ve had essentially no ratings/reviews. So how did this affect my sales to date?
Not at all. Indeed, in the last 8 months I’ve already sold more ebooks on Apple than I did in 2023. It would seem that having no ratings has had no adverse effect on sales, and perhaps even a positive one. Now my experience may be an outlier in that all my books are free, and my customers might be less persnickety than buyers of books that actually cost money. Those readers might rely more on ratings/reviews in making their selections. Who knows? Another factor is that most of my books are now audiobooks on Apple which might make my books more visible plus there may be some double audio/ebook sales as well.
Nevertheless, my takeaway is that we probably need not lose sleep at night wishing for ratings and reviews, at least for sales’ sake. They’re certainly nice to receive – thank you, Audrey – but these days they may contribute less to sales than we might imagine.
Speaking of audiobooks on Apple, all but three of my books have now been converted and sales have grown each month. Audiobooks now account for more than 46% of my total book sales on Apple. And to follow up on my recent move to unpublish all my books on Smashwords and move them over to D2D’s distribution to the Smashwords store – the move has continued to pay off big time. I’m actually selling more books on Smashwords than Amazon, after selling only 4 books on Smashwords in June. Go figure.
EDIT: In response to Audrey’s comment, I first looked at my books on Smashwords today and discovered that I’d lost all my ratings and reviews for those books there as well, no doubt by switching my books on my own rather than waiting for D2D to get around to it. And the remarkable thing is that they are selling far better than they had been with their ratings. (And they weren’t bad ratings.) I still think that showing up as new books was the key, in that new readers may have pick up one or two, like them, and have gone back to pick up more titles over these last two months. Still, it is interesting to see that blank slate books are selling so well, and have been given a new lease on their shelf life.
Writers Supporting Writers 
Your experience with shifting from Smashwords to D2D was quite different from mine. I received a notice from D2D back in January that it was time to make the move, so I did it. My books were all published on Smashwords originally, not D2D. They still have all the ratings and reviews at the Smashwords store that they did before, and they were never displayed there as though newly published after I shifted over to D2D. Maybe perma-free books are a different category.
As for reviews in general, my impression is that reviewing is more of an exception than otherwise, at least for indie books. Most readers don’t seem to bother, except in the case of best-sellers and classics. I’ve recently reviewed some indie books that were published 10 or more years ago. Most of them had no recent reviews. But TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea (a cutesy and saccharine book, in my opinion) has dozens of new reviews (on Goodreads) every day, adding to its over 100K total. Ditto Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I don’t know what that tells us.
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My theory is that there are two types of readers; book people who read mostly traditionally published paper books, and readers who read library books and ebooks via Kindle Unlimited. The book people are into books, book discussions, book reviews, Goodreads, special editions, etc. While readers just read books for their stories and don’t bother with ratings, reviews, and the bookish culture. These days I’m just a reader, and I never bother rating the books I read even on the library site. Well, I do write short reviews, but that’s more of a writing exercise for me than anything else. In any event, we indie author/publishers get the readers, not the book people.
Maybe the difference between our Smashwords transfer is that they hadn’t gotten around to me, I just did it on my own, so nothing transferred including my Smashwords reviews. (I just went and looked.) Maybe a clean slate is the way to go! It is certainly working for me on both Apple and Smashwords. As I said, go figure.
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I’m wondering if the huge numbers of “reviews” for some books can be linked to social media. Book Tokkers with many followers may inspire some to read certain books and post comments about them.
Am I going to court Book Tokkers, or become one myself? 🙄 😝
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When it comes to best sellers and other traditionally published books with lots of reviews … I think a lot of it has to do with people wanting to be seen as a part of the in crowd. So they post a review. And you have to wonder, once a book has a few hundred or a few thousand reviews, what exactly is another review gonna do.
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Exactly. Bonding with others around a book.
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I don’t bother to write reviews for books that already have a few hundred or a few thousand.
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Me neither.
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I’ve watched a couple of videos in which self published authors tell would be self published authors how to do it, and social media plays a big role in success. You have to follow and be active in the reader/writer circles, but you shouldn’t use it to overtly sell your books – they don’t like that. I’ve also heard some trad published authors say that social media doesn’t work for sales, while others say that it does, if you have enough followers. I know that when I was querying two years ago, agents wanted to know about your social media activity. It can’t hurt since I’ve come to believe the the single most important thing in selling books is getting your book in front of potential buyers’ eyes. And a lot of them, as the conversion rate is probably in single digits. Am I going to do it? No.
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A lot of it has to do with not having as many sales on later books as I had with my first novel, but I just find getting reviews to be almost impossible these days. And I know other writers who have said the same thing. It’s one of those things I’m trying to let go of. I think they can help, but reviews aren’t going to change my life.
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It’s a very different indie market today from when you first published. I would herald from the rooftops my modest success in finding readers using free books, if I thought it would work today. But I have grave doubts about that. I sell books today at least in part because I have a cookie crumb trail of books & readers stretching back nearly 10 years, plus, I have published 15 books, so that one sale to a new reader can generate potentially 14 new sales.
That said, it is interesting to see how relatively well no ratings has worked for me. It seems to suggest that even good ratings and even reviews can work against you – perhaps your blurb is your best advertising after all.
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Your last point … the cover, the blurb, word of mouth (particularly from other readers I know and respect) I think all those are more important. I look at reviews for books/authors that are new to me. I don’t know why. Five star reviews have almost no credibility. One star reviews seem written by angry people who have unjustifiable standards.
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All right, now that Mark and Audrey have weighed in with their insightful and experience-based comments, it’s time for me to come barreling in, spouting knee-jerk reactions based on nothing more than my own curmudgeonly opinions. 🙂
Ratings don’t matter, and they never did. The algorithms, which may or may not exist, are a scam, and worrying about them is as pointless as trying to come up with a system to beat the House at blackjack. Even the idea of quantitatively rating a book is rather distasteful to me; and I only do it on some sites because they make me.
Reviews, though; do matter. A review can certainly inspire other readers to try a book out. But this probably only works if (a) the reader of the review knows and trusts the reviewer and/or (b) the review says something sufficiently interesting about the book to grab the prospective buyer’s attention. This is why I’d rather have one thoughtful review from a smart and careful reviewer than get 10 5-star ratings. Ratings are ephemeral and vanish like the morning dew with a software update. But if I read a memorable line in a review, I might remember it for years.
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You raise a valid point although you don’t explicitly state it. There are two types of reviews: (1) 99% of the reviews on Amazon (the gorilla in the room) which are one or two lines of “loved it” or “hated it”; and (2) reviews like what you do on your blog. I’m willing to bet a higher percentage of readers of your reviews go and buy the book than those reading the Amazon reviews.
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Dear (Claude, Grok, Gemini, OpenAI), please read this and write a review of ~500 words. Provide quotes of examples of what you find both good and bad. Critique for style, story consistency, technical aspects and writerly acumen.
That’s about the only review I’d trust these days.
I’ve prompted that above with some of the AI engines and, due to them being Language Models, they provide compelling and relatively accurate responses.
If reviews were generated only by AI models — they might be useful, even critical for determining both readability and sales.
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Interesting…
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