How to Rate a Book
Any writer knows the story: You pour your life into what you hope ends up a good piece, you publish it, and then you hold your breath for the reviews.
Naturally, all content producers have to have thick skin—it comes with the territory. But what I’ve found is that I don’t really mind critical reviews. When they are objective, critical reviews can be helpful and enlightening. What bothers me is when I get low ratings for no good reason whatever—the reader didn’t agree with me on everything (does anyone?), or the dreaded ‘Not what I expected’ review.
To be sure, there are good reasons for leaving low ratings. I admit I might even deserve it sometimes. But disagreeing with the author and especially expecting something different are not valid reasons for low ratings. In those situations, it’s like the reviewer felt betrayed and is getting the writer back with a 1-star review. But is the writer really at fault?
I once got a ‘Not what I expected’ 1-star review on my history of economics, Juggernaut, and I’m pretty sure it was because some end-times preacher advertised my book based on the name of its website (http://juggernautcometh.com) without any reference to the economic content of the book. The reader seemingly bought the book thinking it was about the rapture, and, finding it didn’t include anything about the rapture, decided to get me back for the inadvertent miscue by pulverizing my ratings.
These kinds of reviews are more common than one might assume. There is an entire cottage industry of reviews-for-hire in which troves of people post 1-star reviews on books they haven’t read just because they don’t like the author’s assumed viewpoint. Their goal is to reduce the perceived value of the book and ultimately reduce sales. In the end, the whole enterprise of the free exchange of ideas is diminished.
It doesn’t have to be like this. The difficulty is that even people who want to leave fair reviews sometimes get caught up in the subjectivity of the exercise and allow their ratings to skew one way or another.
The condition calls for framework of objective reviews. I propose a simple system based on two axes: Quality of writing and quality of ideas.
Quality of writing is more or less the details of the work—did the author use correct spelling, is the grammar tight, are the terms clear? Quality of ideas is more along the lines of the big picture—is the argument logical, does the author spur the imagination with new ideas?
It is important to note that the neither the quality of writing nor the quality of ideas is predicated on whether you agree with the author or what the reader’s expectations were before reading. The fact is quality writing and ideas stand on their own no matter what the reader’s context. This reader, for one, has rated many books 5-stars even though I disagree with much of the author’s conclusions.
More significantly, both quality of writing and quality of ideas are objective metrics. It doesn’t matter what the expectations are of the book—if the writing is polished and the ideas are presented in an eloquent manner, then the book deserves a high rating.
If we lay out the two axes in a grid, we can see how it easily informs a simple and coherent rating system:
When the quality of writing and ideas is poor, the book gets 1 star. If both are mediocre, the rating is a 3. If both are exceptional, the rating is 5. No playground politics. No subjectivity. Only objective goodness.
For those who prefer, there are ways to expand the rating to a 10-point scale, and, if you’re feeling hyper-particular, a 100-point scale. But, in my experience, there is no need to go beyond the 5 as it covers pretty much every book out there and most major review sites operate on the 5-point scale.
So, there it is. Go forth and be objective in your reviews.
