Interrupting mid-week to update on some reviews and news.
Three Dollar Bill Reviews is still going strong. VERY STRONG. In fact, anyone out there interested in reading and reviewing some lesbian fiction? Poor Emily is sick again (she needs to be a bubble girl) and totally overwhelmed with lesbian fiction requests. You’d think these poor authors never got reviewed. As excited as that makes both of us, we have so many requests it’s hard to keep up in a timely fashion.
So if anyone is out there that’s looking to read and review some lesbian short stories, give us a shout please!
My reviews at TDB are lined up for almost a month to come but here are some of the latest and they run the gamut from 2 to 5 stars:
Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale
Bristlecone Peak (Legend of the Golden Feather) by Dave Brown
Bleeding Hearts by Josh Aterovis
Ocean Breeze, Little Squeeze by Jenna Byrnes
The Silent Hustler by Sean Meriwether
There’s also a post on star ratings and what they mean. 3 stars is not bad!
Coming up here on my LJ the remainder of the week will be a review of Downtime by Tamara Allen and Hero by Heidi Cullinan. You won’t want to miss those.
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God, yes! Everything you said about WG. I loved it, but yes about the novella thing. I just sort of ran over that bit and pretended it wasn’t there, but yes.
Yea the fact that the story was broken up into two didn’t seem right but it’s a testament to great writing that you can get by that and love it anyway.
Hi, Kassa! Good for you and Emily, getting so much response to Three Dollar Bills reviews. I know what you mean about the need to clarify those stars on the ratings. Amazon assigns the following meanings: 5=I love it, 4=I like it, 3=it’s ok, 2=I dislike it, 1=I hate it, but over time the stars seem to have picked up a totally warped connotation like, 5= a basic positive recommendation, 4=uh, oh, there are some flaws, 3=I feel like picking on the author, 2=I hate the author’s guts, and 1=I hate the world! But then you have to consider the bell-shaped curve in statistics. The maximum range where most books fall is going to be a 3-star. Then there are going to be outliers in either direction, a few really good books and a few really bad ones.
Great comment and so very true Val. It’s one reason that I wanted to write that post since Amazon vs. Goodreads vs. random review sites all mean different things.
Considering the bulk of books are going to be 3 stars, I’m always frustrated to hear authors lament and complain about 3 star reviews. Of course they want 5 stars – who doesn’t? – but raving about a 5 star review from a site where 90% + are all 4.5 – 5 stars, how does that really elevate the particular book? If EVERYTHING is OMG SO GREAT, the book in question is still in a big middle heap.
I think that’s one reason reviewers tend to bump up stars because what’s the difference and everyone likes more stars but if you ignore the fact that most of the books you read will likely be ~3 stars, then the entire rating process is meaningless. At least in my opinion.
Thus reviews should either be a total process of 1-5 or no stars at all. But just my thoughts.
The whole star thing is tough, no question. On Amazon right now, I’ve been handing out five-stars like there’s no tomorrow because I don’t want skew the total star-ranking lower per title on the search-results page, which might influence the average reader not to click and go to the product page to see for themselves what the book is all about. Aside from not wanting to inadvertently sabotage a writer, the stars mean little to me, but I try to include some reviewing criteria within my Amazon review itself (strong points, weak points) so the readers have real evidence with which to decide if they want to book. Who knows if the readers are making it that far, though? They might see my five-star rating and think, “Oh, THAT reviewer gives 5 stars to everything so I’m not going to bother to read it!”
I’m definitely looking forward to your thoughts on Hero. I’m still not sure about that book.