Full disclosure: I obtained the Kindle edition of The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast by Sophie Love on 8 May 2021 when it was offered free on Amazon. I do not know the author nor have I ever communicated with her about this book or any other matter. I am an author of historical romance, contemporary romantic suspense, and assorted non-fiction.
I have no way of knowing how many copies of any given author-published book are actually sold or at what price. Whether Sophie Love made a profit on this book is her business. How much she paid FreeBooksy.com to promote it is also her business. (That's where I got the link to the free Kindle edition.) How many reviews the book got from that promotion and the ratings on Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites is also her business.
As of today, Monday, 28 June 2021, the book has 1450 ratings on Goodreads for an average of 4.0 stars. The written reviews number 160. The breakdown by ratings is as follows:
5-star -- 500
4-star -- 558
3-star -- 299
2-star -- 79
1-star -- 14
On Amazon, it has 2361 ratings for an average of 4.3 stars.
So here's my first mostly rhetorical question:
If 1357 people liked it -- that's three stars and above on GR -- why is the author still paying a promoter to give it away for free?
The obvious answer, of course, is that by giving away the first book in a six-book series, she will interest readers in buying the subsequent books. They will love Book #1 so much that they will plunk out from $2.99 to $5.99 each for the sequels. That answer may or may not be accurate.
Look at the huge drop-off in just the number of ratings for those sequels! From 2361 Amazon ratings for the first book to just 180 for the second? The sixth book, Disaster and Dessert, has only been published for a few weeks -- 8 June 2021 -- and only has 21 ratings on Amazon (none of which contain reviews that passed Amazon's criteria to actually be shown) and 16 on Goodreads. The only text review on GR is a 1-star, in which the reviewer cites continuing problems with typos. One might wonder why the reader continues with the series if this is a situation that bothers her enough to include it in a review, but she's absolutely entitled to leave that review.
Which leads to the second mostly rhetorical question: Who pays more attention to reviews -- readers or self-publishing authors?
I learned a long time ago, long before Goodreads and Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing, that reviews are always suspect. They were questionable back in the days of Romantic Times and Rave Reviews and I knew that from first-hand experience. Fast-forward from those 1980s and 1990s print reviews to the system-gaming swap groups and fiverr shills of the 2010s, and the writing should have been on the wall that no review is to be trusted on its face. There were too many verified examples of fake reviews.
Do readers continue to trust them? I have my doubts.
I don't choose books based on reviews. Not ever. I may go by the recommendation of a friend whose opinion I trust, but not by strangers' reviews. Am I typical? Probably not.
When I read reviews, I almost always start with the one- and two-star opinions. In fact, I can't remember when I've ever started with the five-stars. From my earliest experience with Amazon reviews in 2012 and then Goodreads, I knew the five-star reviews were far more likely to be bogus than the one- and two-star criticisms. To this day, I can read one-star reviews that overtly state they don't know where all the great reviews come from because the book in question is lousy.
I suspect, therefore, that few readers actually rely on published reviews when deciding what books to read. They may look at the number of reviews and maybe even the rating, but the text review is far less important than genre and price. Yes, price, because free is attractive to the voracious reader. I personally download anywhere from five to twelve free Kindle books every single day, thanks to FreeBooksy.com. (Don't ask when I'll read them. That's for another blog post.) When Kindle books by established, traditionally-published genre authors cost $12.99 and up, all that free stuff is mighty attractive.
Often a four or five or nine book series is available for free. Even if the writing is utter garbage, it's reading material. And for the non-discriminating reader, the person who just lies on the beach or curls up on the couch to while away a few hours in another place and/or time, quality may not be a priority.
Do (traditional) publishers care about reviews? Oh, maybe, as long as they're good reviews that promote the book and drive sales. Publishers are less interested in quality and more interested in quantity; their only concern is the bottom line. Publishers -- and of course this includes self-publishing authors and small press independents -- do not appear to care if the reviews are honest.
Can a reviewer collect free books from NetGalley and post the exact same five-star review, not changing a single word, not indicating anything about the book, multiple times and get away with it? Sure, as long as she has a 4.99 average rating on Goodreads over approximately 5000 titles. No one cares if she actually read the books or liked them. As long as she puts down at five-star rating, it's all good. Three, four, five books a day, every day, five stars here, five stars there. It's all good.
So then comes the third somewhat rhetorical question: Do the authors care?
Okay, that question goes beyond rhetorical and into facetious.
Authors, and particularly the self-publishing ones, only want five-star reviews. They don't care how they get them, and they don't care if they're honest opinions or not. They will buy them from fiverr and other shill outfits. They will solicit them from friends and family. They will establish sock puppet accounts on Goodreads -- less easily done on Amazon, but not impossible -- and rate their own books the best evah.
They will insist that no one should ever rate a book -- especially their book -- negatively without reading the whole thing. If the book is so bad the reader can't get past the second chapter, is the reader not allowed to say so? Apparently not. Maybe it gets better in Chapter Five. Or maybe not. Regardless . . . .
No negative reviews.
They will insist that no one should ever post a one- or two-star review who hasn't also written a book, because only someone who knows the work that goes into writing can be justified in criticizing a fellow writer's work. But they will also insist that no fellow writer should ever do anything but support a colleague. So if you're a writer, you're only allowed to post positive, supportive reviews even if they're untrue.
No negative reviews.
Writers will say -- on Twitter, on Facebook, on Goodreads, on Amazon -- that they welcome constructive criticism. Negative reviews are allowed (of other writers' work) if they contain suggestions for improvement. Of course, the reviewer has no way of knowing if the author will pay attention to those suggestions. And the writer has no idea if the reviewer is qualified to make those suggestions. And then there are the readers: Do they want to take a chance that the author ignored the advice? Do readers even know what's good writing advice and what isn't?
I know, I know, I know. We've been down this road before. At the end, we always come up against that great big huge gate where the reviewer is accused of being a gatekeeper -- or just a plain hater, or even a jealous hater -- and nothing is accomplished. Turn around, go back the way you came, pick up another book that's got 1500 five-star ratings on Goodreads and hope for the best. If it's not the best, or not even good at all, don't say anything. It's not allowed.
If you're one of those readers who has been discouraged from writing honest, critical reviews and who has increasingly turned to traditionally published books that tend to get more honest reviews or to old favorite comfort reads, do you ever wonder if there are new authors you might be missing? Or do you weigh that loss against the risk of finding just another piece of crap?
Okay, that's not a rhetorical question. It's legit. Even though the odds against finding something good are rather high, there is always the slim chance of finding a good freebie.
But even less rhetorical is the question to the authors who aren't being read. The authors who are being pressured to give away twenty thousand free copies of their books in the hope that someone will read them and give a good review and prompt other people to buy the book. That question is, How do you feel when you see all the freebies going out and the five-star reviews coming in and you know the books are crap?
Which gets us back to the book mentioned in the opening disclosure.
I forced myself to read just about half of Sophie Love's The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast before I gave up in disgust. The first two chapters were lively and interesting, and introduced the main character Marie, who is 39 going on 12. Marie is locked in a dead-end job -- the book's description paints her as a successful dog groomer in Boston, but she's a down-trodden employee of the groomer -- and in a dead-end relationship. All the dead-endedness comes to a head, and Marie quits both job and boyfriend and takes off for Maine. She inherits a seaside mansion from her great-aunt and decides to turn it into a bed and breakfast. Three weeks later, she's up and running. Sort of.
Marie has no clue what she's doing. Though she claims to have had this dream of running a B&B since childhood, she's never apparently done any research on how to do it. She sets up a website in half an afternoon or so and expects reservations to come pouring in immediately.
How is she taking payments? What laws govern B&Bs in Maine? Does she have insurance to cover liability if her guests get hurt? What is she going to do for money?
Most readers won't notice any of this and won't care.
I noticed and I cared.
She starts major renovations on the house almost immediately; where is the money coming from? Her savings? She had savings working as a dog groomer?
Her contractor quits, or just fails to keep showing up, and Marie does nothing for several days until finally his assistant just starts doing the rest of the work. The renovations in question are not one- or two-day jobs, yet she's planning to have guests in less than a month.
Oh, there's also a dog. Named Boo. Halfway through the book I don't know if he's a ghost ("Canine Casper") or not.
Halfway through the book, there's no murder, no breakfast.
Halfway through the book, Marie gets her first paying customer and he does something to upset her to the point that she runs out of the house and heads for town, leaving this guy alone in her B&B. I'm not sure if she runs to town or drives -- she has an ancient but reliable Saab (they stopped production in 2014) -- but she gushes out her tale of woe to her friend and no one suggests she go back to her business and, you know, take care of business.
It's not just Marie who is, well, TSTL. Her paying guest, Brendan Peck, is just as bad.
“I’m a photojournalist on assignment to sort of… well… hold on. Let me start again. Because I only tell people I’m a photojournalist when I don’t want to embarrass myself.”
“So then what are you?”
Brendan sighed and said, “I’m a paranormal investigator. I’m on assignment for a television network
Love, Sophie. The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast (A Canine Casper Cozy Mystery—Book 1) (pp. 80-81). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition.
He's on assignment. He's some kind of professional. He has some kind of experience. Or at least that's what I thought.
But then he gets video footage of something paranormal inside the B&B and he posts the video to Twitter.
“I know, I’m so sorry. I should have gotten your permission first.”
“You really should have,” she said. She wasn’t angry… not yet. She was more disappointed than anything else. “Did you post where it was taken?”
He frowned, his eyes still on the ghost on his laptop. “Yes. But I can delete it! No harm, right?”Of course, it's all going to work out in the end, isn't it? None of his 31K followers will have seen it, other than the 26 or 27 who liked or retweeted it . . . .
Love, Sophie. The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast (A Canine Casper Cozy Mystery—Book 1) (p. 85). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition.
That's when Marie runs out and leaves him there. She runs into town -- I don't know how far it is and I'm not interested in looking it up -- to have lunch with her friend. While they're eating, the reservations come pouring in. Brendan's tweet has saved Marie's business! The one she doesn't know how to operate! The one she just literally ran away from!
That's when I gave up.
Those are the structural issues, and they're serious. The stylistic issues are less serious, but they're not inconsequential. At one point Marie reminisces about sliding down the balcony in the house when she was a child visiting her great-aunt who lived there. No, one slides down a banister. Marie constantly refers to the house as a "manor." Well, maybe it is, but there are other words, too, and just using manor over and over and over makes it stand out.
These are fine details a good critique partner probably would have caught and fixed. Or a good editor. It's pretty obvious to this reader that Sophie Love had neither.
I can't leave a negative review on Amazon because I'm an author of romantic suspense/gothic romance. I can't leave a review on Goodreads because I'm banned there -- for writing honest but negative reviews.
Mostly I write reviews for readers, because I believe readers deserve honesty. They also deserve to know there are better books out there and they don't have to settle for crap. Sometimes that means writing a review based on one page, which invokes all kinds of anger from the self-publishing authors. The writing problems manifested on page one are almost never resolved later in the book. Writing problems that manifest on page one are problems with the writer, and the writer doesn't change.
But now I'm also reviewing for writers. For those writers who really do want to improve, who don't want to be relegated to giving away boxed sets of a dozen full-length novels or selling them for $0.99 on Amazon. Maybe they're making a lot of money via page views on Kindle Unlimited, but if so, why are they giving the books away for virtually nothing?
The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast might actually have potential. I got notice that there's been an update just since I downloaded it six weeks ago, but of course I have no way of comparing the two versions because Amazon will erase the old one when it downloads the new one.
I'll continue to write reviews like this. Read and follow them if you like. Respond if you care to. I won't tolerate abuse, and I won't edit for free.
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