You’re wearing the shirt of the band you’re going to see. Don’t be that guy.
You, next to the Goodreads ranking! Drop the cursor and back away slowly!
Yeah, reviews are odd, and we all have our odd little quirks about them. I’m one of those people who tends not to get bothered too much by reviews, who tends not to respond to them at all, and tends to read every one of them just to see if the reviewers caught something I missed (it’s happened). But there is one thing that out-and-out annoys me when I see it, and that’s authors who review their own books on Goodreads or Amazon (or what have you).
Look, I know it’s tempting, and that you’ve got that itch to five-star yourself. But please, don’t do it. We already know you think your book is great. If you didn’t, why’d you bother writing it and releasing it? But that’s the thing — you released it. You let it out into the world. And though it’s tempting to use your own five-star rating to bump the book’s average back up when you see the ratings start to dip, don’t. Let it sink or swim on its own out in the world.
What about you, folks? Does it annoy you when you see an author review his or her own work? Or is this one of those things that’s just me?
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Hey! Supercritical is out now! You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Carina Press, Diesel, Audible, and the Sony Reader Store! Go ahead and buy several copies so I can continue to rant at you daily. 😉
It would never dawn on me to review my own book. I wouldn’t want people even CLOSE to me (family, for example) to review something I wrote for fear of somebody catching it and blowing it all up into something more than it is. More than that, it’s cool when you see a review from someone you don’t even know.
Even if I were running for office and could vote for myself on a private ballot, I couldn’t do it. If my opposition was decent, I’d vote for them; otherwise, I’d leave it blank. Same thing with reviewing my own work…even pressing “LIKE” on Amazon. It seems weird to me.
I’ll review other author’s books, but even in the review, I’ll mention there’s a connection for the sake of transparency.