By Murray Middleton, author of No Church in the Wild
With my second book, No Church in the Wild, having just been released, I’m now facing the question that most published writers answer a resolute ‘no’ to: do I dare read reviews of my work on Goodreads?
My first book – a collection of short stories – currently averages a rating of 3.37 out of 5 on Goodreads. The written review section of the site includes some drive-byes on my credentials as a writer:
‘Middling, bland stories.’
‘Every story’s about everyday people. I can find that any time in Reader’s Digest.’
Writing that reminds the reviewer of ‘some stories they wrote at uni, which, to be quite frank, were rubbish.’
Worse sentences than Fifty Shades of Grey!
Come on, people, my mother has to read this!
Talking of mothers, I should acknowledge that the mothers of my ex-partner and my current partner both rated my collection five stars, which should also, possibly, be taken with a grain of salt.
The social cataloguing website doesn’t require the same scaffolding as a published review. In fact, no ‘reviewer’ is even obliged to do an induction on the site, let alone justify the rating they leave.
My main beef with Goodreads is that users aren’t offered half stars as an option when rating a book out of five.
From trawling through hundreds of reviews, I suspect readers tend to scale down, rather than up, when caught between stars. At the risk of sounding embittered, I felt like readers deducted half a mark (or a full mark!) for every story in my first book that they didn’t like.
Curiously, there seems to be a sweet spot with Goodreads average ratings where the majority of the books I love end up landing.
I call it the 3.4-3.8 honey hole.
The Barefoot Investor’s absurdly successful debut, Five Steps to Financial Freedom, has an average rating of 4.39.
Trent Dalton’s 2023 release, Lola in the Mirror, has a barely believable average grade of 4.47.
How can we possibly trust such an orgy of readerly kindness?
Mark Manson’s self-help ‘revelation’, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (careful Middleton, it’s a Pan Macmillan title!) has been reviewed over one million times and comes in at a solid 3.89.
Unfortunately, all we can do is disregard Manson’s mantra for falling outside the honey hole.
The Mars Room, a prison novel by Rachel Kushner that experiments with voice and form, and that I found riveting from the first to the last page, has an average rating of 3.45.
Honey hole!
In a Strange Room, by South African Booker Prize-winner, Damon Galgut, is a novel like no other I’ve ever read, often flitting between first and third-person narration. So abstract and yet so real. The protagonist has certainly accomplished the subtle art of not giving a f*ck:
3.65
Kushner and Galgut’s books give readers a lot of credit – perhaps too much credit? – in that they require readers to peel back the layers of the characters portrayed in them and to question the narrative perspectives on offer. These books bleed into your thoughts for weeks afterwards, which is the main way I gauge a great book.
For every five-star review of The Mars Room on Goodreads, there’s likely to be another reviewer who favours Orange is the New Black for prison content, and who wishes that Kushner would give up her day job and return to waitressing at the International House of Pancakes.
Ultimately, I believe Goodreads has a role to play for thick-skinned writers. Like dealing with structural edits from a publisher, the site provides an opportunity to set aside our egos and our stubborn tendencies, and to learn where our writing might be failing to capture readers’ imaginations.
If enough ignoramuses (sorry, ‘reviewers’) say the same thing about our work – however abrasively they may say it – we might be able to meet them halfway. In my case, this involved writing my second book in a marginally more expository manner than my first.
So please, please, cut me some slack this time, gentle readers! Scale up – not down – when caught between stars.
At least let me land in my beloved honey hole.
Murray Middleton is a Melbourne-based writer who spent eight years working in the city’s education system. His first collection of stories, When There’s Nowhere Else to Run, won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. He is also a winner of The Age Short Story Award. In 2016, Murray was named Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Australian Novelist. He currently restrings tennis racquets for a living.