Let's talk about Goodreads.

Publishing obsesses over Goodreads, but does Goodreads actually sell books?

If you were trying to ruin somebody’s literary career, eight negative reviews would not be enough. I mean, if a book received eight negative reviews across The New York Times and Kirkus and ShelfAwareness and BookPage and The Washington Post and—well, maybe. But eight anonymous Goodreads reviews?

That would be a poorly planned and frankly pathetic attempt at career sabotage. 

Especially if it backfired.

Look, the recent Book Drama™ broke free from bookish social media and into mainstream news coverage from the likes of NBC so I’m not going to drag out the story, because you already know it by now. Cait Corrain’s debut adult sci-fi novel, A Crown of Starlight, was slated for publication this year, until a group of Corrain’s fellow authors uncovered eight anonymous Goodreads accounts that Corrain created in order to leave negative reviews on their books and positive reviews on her own. After a tense back-and-forth across multiple social media platforms over several days, Corrain eventually confessed to creating the accounts and writing the reviews after suffering a “complete psychological breakdown” while on new medication. (I take Corrain at their word here, especially given how thoroughly and strangely she tanked her own career, and I wish them the best in their recovery journey.) Corrain’s literary agent parted ways with her, and her publisher canceled the book. 

In a way, I can follow Corrain’s addled logic. Authors claim that their fellow writers are their friends while jostling against one another for more marketing money and more attention from overworked publicists. Publishing loves to deprioritize books by marginalized authors and about marginalized characters, so threats to Corrain’s book’s potential success wouldn’t come from an established author, but from fellow debuts that would share A Crown of Starlight’s moment in the Diverse Book™ spotlight.

And of course, the easiest and fastest way to secure a spot at the top would be for A Crown of Starlight to be highly rated on Goodreads before publication—and for any other Diverse Books™ rivaling its spot to have lower ratings.

After all, Goodreads is important. Ratings determine the general public’s consensus about a book. Reviews determine how well a book is going to perform. They’re the marker by which we judge the art and industry of literature.

Right?

---

Indulge me for a moment. What is Goodreads?

Goodreads is a social cataloging website where users network with one another and add books to groups called shelves. The default shelves are “read,” “to-read,” and “currently reading,” but users can make any number of other shelves to organize their books as they see fit. Many readers, both outside of the publishing industry and inside it, use it to catalog their personal libraries and reading history; I used it that way for many years, and Chronicle Books independent bookstore sales representative Emily Cervone told me that she did too. 

A Big Five marketing manager we’ll call Jo shared with me that their “hunch is that Goodreads’ strongest utility is its shelves, which function as a kind of external brain for some folks. I may have heard about a book from an article, a social media post, a friend, whatever, but unless I go right that moment and buy that book (very low odds), I won’t remember it the next day unless I add it to my Goodreads shelves. Once it’s on my shelves, I can always find it again. Alongside my TBR, I can also keep track of what I’ve already read, what I thought of those books, and what I actually, physically own already. I reference my shelves frequently.”

The Goodreads homepage shows users reviews and other updates from friends and people they follow. Though this feed was once in chronological order, its content is now determined by an algorithm. Suzanne Skyvara, Goodreads’ Vice President of Marketing & Editorial, told independent literary publicist Kathleen Schmidt that the algorithmic content on a user’s feed “comes from your friends and the authors and readers you have chosen to follow as well as article suggestions from our editorial team, and updates from the Goodreads team. We also offer sponsored posts for advertisers to show content related to your interests and these posts are clearly marked as sponsored.”

Both Book Riot’s Arvyn Cerézo and Michelle, a student at the Harvard Business School, conducted in-depth explorations into how Goodreads makes money. The platform’s income streams break down into three categories: affiliate links; ads, like those sponsored posts mentioned above, along with placements in Goodreads’ email newsletters, advertorials and sponsored polls; and giveaways. 

In short, Goodreads is a social media and review platform where users catalog their libraries, publish reviews of books they have—and have not—read, view curated book lists, and interact with other users.

Oh, one last important detail: Goodreads is owned by Amazon.

---

In 2013, Amazon acquired Goodreads for an undisclosed sum; speculation at the time ranged from $150 million to a nonsensical $1 billion. At the time, 19% of Americans were responsible for 79% of books read each year, with many of those readers increasingly finding books through social media like Goodreads, where 29% of its then-16 million members said they’d bought a book after discovering it on the platform. According to The Atlantic, that made Goodreads as influential in the book world as Facebook was in the general social space. Controlling Goodreads gave Amazon control over valuable book market data.

The move also cemented Amazon’s dominance over the independent publishing space. Forbes acknowledged this power and expressed optimism about how self-published authors might use Goodreads as a promotional hub for their books. But “had the [Goodreads] founders decided to channel the indie sensibilities of its user base into becoming a publisher and distributor,” The New Republic observed, “it could have posed a competitive threat to the province of the Amazonian empire that still deals with books.” 

Amazon was and is an empire. Its acquisition of Goodreads came after its 2008 purchase of Shelfari, a Goodreads competitor bought for an undisclosed amount  following an initial $1 million investment. In 2016, three years after Amazon purchased Goodreads, the retail behemoth merged the two bookish social websites. Amazon’s purchase of the used and rare book website ABEBooks in 2008 also gave it a 40% stake in LibraryThing, another Goodreads competitor; unlike Shelfari, LibraryThing still exists.

In hindsight, Slate’s headline described Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads perfectly: “Amazon Buys Goodreads, Agenda of World Conquest Marches On.”

---

These days, the issue that most plagues Goodreads, which now claims to have 150 million members, is review bombing, which is when a book receives an influx of negative reviews with the goal of impacting its publication or sales. (Back in 2013, Forbes touted Goodreads’ “credible reviews” as one of the benefits Amazon would reap from the site’s purchase of Goodreads.) Review bombs are deployed for a variety of reasons, but most often for perceived or actual flaws in the representation of a marginalized character or experience. The effects of review bombs are almost always worse when they're targeted at marginalized authors. At this point, review bombing is a phenomenon that has impacted every category of publishing, from adult fiction and nonfiction to YA and children’s books.

One of the most high-profile examples occurred in early 2020, when discussions about racism in Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt and its promotion took place both on social media and in Goodreads reviews. Amazon even restricted the ability to review American Dirt on its own platform to users who had purchased the book from them in an attempt to quell the situation. However, the controversy did nothing to slow book sales or hurt the novel’s Goodreads rating in the long term. Blessed with blurbs from the likes of Ann Patchett, John Grisham and Oprah, American Dirt sold more than 3 million copies worldwide and has a 4.37 rating on Goodreads, with more than 50% of the book’s readers rating it five stars. Cummins “identifies as white with Latina heritage.” 

Debut author Cecilia Rabess’ Everything’s Fine was review bombed on Goodreads six months before its June 2023 release. Though the novel was categorized as “women’s fiction” and featured a cover design that looked nothing like most romances at the time, negative reviews claimed that publisher Simon & Schuster had misleadingly marketed the book as a romance and felt that the book was racist and anti-Black because it romanticized relationships between Black women and racist white men. “People were very keen not just to attack the work, but to attack me as well,” Rabess, who is Black, told The New York Times, adding that she felt “particularly vulnerable” to the attacks.

Sometimes even just the suggestion of “bad” representation is enough for Goodreads users to slam a book they haven’t read. On June 6, 2023, author Elizabeth Gilbert unveiled her next novel, The Snow Forest, and announced that it would be published in February 2024. “Gilbert set the novel in mid-20th century Siberia,” according to the Los Angeles Times, “and it followed a group of people who removed themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and industrialization.” The Snow Forest quickly received more than 500 one-star reviews on Goodreads, and “large swaths of the reviews included concerns that the novel would ‘romanticize’ Russia.” 

Six days after her first announcement, Gilbert canceled The Snow Forest’s publication. The book can no longer be found on the Penguin Random House website nor on Goodreads, and it is not known if or when it will ever be published. No galleys of the book were ever made available to the public, so there is no proof to support claims that the book would have romanticized Russia.

Young adult novels have been particularly susceptible to review bombing due to the smaller and more vocal nature of the YA community online. Until recently, negative discussions often started on Twitter before spilling over onto Goodreads. The first significant example of this came in 2016, when Keira Drake’s The Continent was slammed after author Justina Ireland shared her thoughts on the book’s racist caricatures and white-savior complex on Twitter. (Ireland was also subsequently attacked.) 

A pattern began to emerge. In 2017, a widely shared blog review of Laurie Forest’s The Black Witch caused the book’s rating to drop “to an abysmal 1.71 thanks to a mass coordinated campaign of one-star reviews, mostly from people who admitted to not having read it.” That same year, Veronica Roth’s Carve the Mark received negative reviews decrying its racism and romanticization of chronic pain, which eventually forced Roth to reveal her own chronic pain condition. In 2018, author Kosoko Jackson canceled his debut, A Place for Wolves, after it was criticized for its representation of Muslim characters and its depiction of the Kosovo war. In January 2019, author Amélie Wen Zhao delayed the publication of her debut novel, Blood Heir, after being accused of depicting enslavement in a racist way; she revised the novel and released it in November of that year. 

Children’s books are not exempt from this phenomenon either. Ramin Ganeshram and Vanessa Brantley-Newton’s picture book, A Birthday Cake for George Washington, and Emily Jenkins’ and Sophie Blackall’s picture book, A Fine Dessert, both earned negative social media attention that led to Goodreads reviews criticizing the books. Scholastic withdrew A Birthday Cake for George Washington from stores less than two weeks after it was published; A Fine Dessert, which was named a New York Times best illustrated book, is still in print.

There are far, far more examples than these. YA and adult author Rin Chupeco saw ratings of their books tank after they criticized another author on social media. Adult sci-fi author Patrick S. Tomlinson endured a review bombing campaign that originated on Reddit and became so intense that the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association felt they needed to make a statement. Independent authors have occasionally been subjected to review ransoms, in which negative reviews are accompanied by threats that the reviews will continue unless a payment is received. 

“We depend far too much on a site that can easily be manipulated for non-reading reasons: one-starring books just because an author is Black or gay or you just hate their name,” a person I’ll call Cal, who works in sales at a Big Five publisher, told me. Cal speculated that some Goodreads users might be giving books five-star ratings to defend them from more negative ratings—or even simply because “you just like giving 5 stars. It’s become far less about actually talking about books from what I see.” 

Cervone, the Chronicle sales rep, finds the influx of false negative reviews frustrating, but said that the influx of false positive reviews also makes the platform unusable for her as someone who uses it not only as a reader but also as a publishing professional. In this role, Cervone also uses Edelweiss, a website where publishers upload sales catalogs and bookstores place frontlist orders and submit event pitches—and where Goodreads ratings are imported into each book listing. “Every time there is a beef on the Internet between two authors, you know the followers of one of those authors is going on Goodreads and just destroying the other’s work,” she told me. “On the flip side, Goodreads is full of 5-star reviews from readers who haven’t even read a book yet. They’re just excited to know it’s coming out. While there is no malice in this sort of review-bombing, these pre-pub 5-star reviews are misleading and tip the scales and do a disservice to both the book and those trying to decide if they want to read the book.”

Goodreads halfheartedly responded to the increasing number of review bombing incidents at the end of October 2023 in a member post titled “Working Together to Protect the Authenticity of Ratings and Reviews on Goodreads.” Signed from “The Goodreads Team,” the post contained empty promises about how the platform planned to prevent fake reviews, review bombing, and other problems. It encouraged users to report suspicious reviews, shifting the onus for change onto readers, authors and publishing professionals. The only action undertaken by Goodreads staff would be “the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity,” which somehow didn’t exist before. 

A middle grade author of color I’ll call Toni described how this “this apparent abandonment of the entire site to users” would cause Goodreads to become “like any unmoderated space on the Internet.” They were blunt about the effects this was having on the platform: “The worst possible people to be the loudest are becoming the loudest and making it not only unpleasant but downright dangerous for anyone else to feel comfortable spending time there.”

It’s not that surprising. A group of former Goodreads employees who spoke to the Washington Post explained that “the site is built on outdated technological infrastructure, which made the cost of overhauling and updating it a challenge that was ultimately not worth it for the e-commerce giant.” That’s a problem you’d expect from Neopets, not a website owned by a multibillion-dollar corporation. 

But I suppose that Neopets, for all it had its own problems last year, isn’t an industry behemoth like Goodreads—and it isn’t owned by Amazon.

---

The issues at Goodreads go far beyond review bombing. The way the industry treats Goodreads as both a one-stop shop for information about books and some kind of guiding light with the ability to predict a book’s reception gives the website far more heft than it deserves. Goodreads weighs more heavily than it should on the minds of authors and publishing professionals alike, and the high status this affords the site leads people to use it to justify bad decisions and ill-informed upset.

“I think in the beginning, Goodreads was a growing place for reader community,” said New York Times bestselling author Ashley Poston. “But, as with most things on the internet, it became a place to rage farm and be your least thoughtful and nuanced self.”

Authors constantly warn one another not to read Goodreads reviews, but they can’t seem to stop—and they can’t seem to stop responding terribly to reviews, either. In April 2021, essayist Lauren Hough lashed out after two readers gave her book four stars, despite explaining in their reviews that they actually rated the book 4.5 stars. (Fractional ratings aren’t possible on Goodreads.) Though social media users criticized Hough’s behavior, her book still spent two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. In July 2023, debut author Sarah Stusek attacked a Goodreads user on TikTok for “only” rating her novel, Three Rivers, four stars. After “fellow Goodreads members rose to [the reviewer’s] defense and flooded Three Rivers with around 600 one-star reviews,” Stusek’s publisher cancelled her book. 

It’s no surprise that authors feel contentious after reading negative reviews of their work on Goodreads, since they constantly hear that such reviews can affect their careers. Although books are commodities for sale, literature is also a form of art, which means that flattening it to fit into the star-scale culture of digital reviewing will always lead to contention. Add in the disproportionate weight placed on early Goodreads reviews and ratings, and it’s easy to understand why authors might find it challenging not to respond. As Copper Dog Books co-owner Meg Wasmer told me, “‘One star, love interest has same name as my ex’ shouldn’t be a thing that impacts a person’s ability to make a living.”

Toni, the middle grade author of color, was even more blunt, even as they acknowledged that the identity politics of professional reviewers and review outlets are also far from ideal. “No, we do not need some random white guy’s take on why he doesn’t connect to a [person of color] protagonist and taking down the score of a book being as heavily weighed in a book’s market value as a Kirkus review or Booklist review or whoever professional is reviewing a book.”

Even authors who don’t engage on Goodreads can find themselves tracking reviews and ratings as a way of gauging reception, since data can be so difficult to find. Dragonfall author L.R. Lam found themselves sliding into that mindset in 2023, despite a decade of publishing books. “You write to connect, and while I would get notes from people who did connect with my book, for months I struggled with feeling like overall it wasn’t landing how I’d hoped. I kept beating myself up about it quite viciously.”

Eventually, Lam realized that they were “subconsciously trying to change the way I wrote as I had all these voices in my head telling me my book was too slow, had too much upfront worldbuilding, was too confusing. Of course, the good reviews didn’t stick in the same way. All the angst was a waste of energy; it’s not like those who didn’t finish the first are going to read the second.” As is recommended to many authors, Lam’s publishing team ultimately insisted that they block the site.

“There is an inherent problem with taking a reader’s personal opinion as professional fact—authors are taught that our experiences are not a monolith,” said Poston. “The same can be said for reader experiences, too, and a lot of discussions stemming from Goodreads forget that. A lot of the rage baiting comes from the rating system, period. Goodreads ratings tip the nuance out of a piece of art and commodifies it into a thing to be consumed. It’s like rating the Mona Lisa 3 out of 5 stars because you thought she’d smile more.”

Reviews aren’t the only source of cultural contention generated by Goodreads, either. The Goodreads Choice Awards riles authors and readers up, too. In 2021, author Jay Kristoff and his fans complained about his failure to be nominated, while in 2023, children’s authors stood alongside poets and graphic novelists to denounce the axing of their categories from the awards altogether.

Though different in scale—one is a man upset over a personal snub, the other is horror at entire categories being eliminated—both of these incidents stem from the same source. The Goodreads Choice Awards are an algorithmic popularity contest, and in 2021, Kristoff apparently just didn’t have the numbers. Children’s literature and poetry also didn’t have the numbers for Amazon to justify investing in promoting those categories. Literary agent Jennifer Laughran explained why: “The people who most use Goodreads are adults who are big time readers of YA and grown-up books. The people who care most about kids books and [graphic novels] are, well... kids. Kids don’t use Goodreads.”

With its lists and easy categorization tools, Goodreads helps users organize and track their books—even as the platform alienates readers who are beyond its core demographic, and even as it ignores the chaos that unfolds when review bombs or attacks on reviewers occur. PEN America examined this back-and-forth around Goodreads in a report titled “Backlash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm. In it, they argued that “at their best, sites like Goodreads function as channels for engagement and debate, driving sales and helping authors reach new audiences. But when they are used to pressure authors to change or pull their books, or to demand that readers avoid certain books altogether, users can chill the space for disagreement and unorthodoxy and discourage writers from taking chances in their work.” 

In today’s social media era, it’s not surprising that there can be a performative element to reading in the same way there is for, well, everything else we do. Kat Smith wrote in The Guardian that “tracking my reading activity on Goodreads is far more performative than I have previously admitted to myself: I love reading, but I also love the feeling of people thinking I’m well read.”

Performative reading along with performative activism may explain the onslaught of review bombing; review bombing certainly isn’t the work of good-faith activism. Both help Amazon: All those reactions and interactions are free data! Why prevent the general public from leaving pre-release ratings and reviews when you can, instead, get all the juicy information that comes from morally motivated networked harassment and performative behavior?

Because Goodreads wants what its parent company Amazon wants: your data, to scrape and to sell. No matter what current Goodreads staff might claim, “former employees said Amazon seemed happy to mine Goodreads for its user-generated data and otherwise let it limp along with limited resources.”

In a newsletter for Book Riot, associate editor Erica Ezeifedi suggested that Goodreads “owe[s] it to the book world to try” to fix some of the damage caused by bad-faith book reviews, especially given how much more such reviews impact BIPOC authors. The platform, Ezeifedi wrote, “could be more aggressive in moderating reviews on the site, as their owner Amazon is for its product reviews. They could also be more open to feedback from their users, some of whom have experienced review bombing firsthand.” But Goodreads has already said it will keep the onus of review monitoring on users of the site.

Schmidt, the independent literary publicist, speculated whether publishers pulling their money from Goodreads sponsorships might affect change. But backed by its enormous parent company, Goodreads might also shrug, deprioritize such publishers’ books in its algorithms, and call it a day.

Back in 2015, author Jennifer Bresnick proposed that Goodreads add a pop-up that would appear any time readers rated a book one star, in case they’d done so mistakenly. That’s a nice idea, sure, but it wouldn’t fix the abundance of intentionally negative  ratings and reviews, and it would antagonize the site’s casual users.

In a New York Times op-ed titled “Let’s Rescue Book Lovers From This Online Hellscape,” the literary critic Maris Kreizman described herself as “committed” to Goodreads as a site “worth trying to save.” She suggested converting the platform’s currently unpaid librarian moderators into full-time staff, which “would empower Goodreads’s representatives to communicate with publishers, large and small, to facilitate posting books to the site when, and only when, a book has actually been written and edited and is ready to be shared with the world.” 

But even if books weren’t listed on Goodreads as soon as they’re announced, both Goodreads and Amazon pull from the same data uploads that generate information for preorders on retail sites, and Goodreads allows its users to rate and review books prior to publication, with no incentive for changing. All those titles being added to all those shelves and heated discussions on those books’ pages? That’s more data for Amazon to monch.

As e-commerce expert Shakib Nassiri told Book Riot, “The direct income of Goodreads isn’t as important as it used to be. Now, it is more of a pipeline to push avid readers towards purchasing books on Amazon . . . It is an incredibly valuable bank of data for Amazon to have access to, and to be able to send Amazon-specific ads on. Goodreads likely brings in a decent chunk of Amazon books sales.”

I can list a thousand ways Goodreads could improve, but at the end of the day, it just won’t. I’m not debating the benefits of a website that allows you to catalog your library and rate books you like. I agree with Kreizman that, were Goodreads similar in design and behavior to the movie review platform Letterboxd, it would be a great resource for readers. But Amazon owns Goodreads, and Amazon has no interest in changing it.

You can’t put out a fire from inside the house, especially not when Jeff Bezos likes it warm.

So let’s step outside the house.

---

The product that Goodreads is selling is not books: It is the readers who use the website. If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.¹

So what does Goodreads actually do? Who does Goodreads serve? If Goodreads users are the product and Amazon is the consumer who owns and exploits all of the data that Goodreads users generate, what is Goodreads’ role in the publishing industry, and how should we treat it?

The answer you will hear is that Goodreads is how readers discover books, which leads to sales and success. (Sales are not the only measure of how successful a book can be, but they are one of the few that we can quantify; other metrics, such as critical acclaim, awards or cult followings, in addition to not being easily quantified, also have little to do with Goodreads.) For instance, Jo, the marketing manager at a Big Five publisher, said that from their personal and professional perspective, “discoverability and word of mouth is [Goodreads’] second strongest utility. Goodreads is no Bookstagram, but you can curate a decent friend list among people whose tastes you trust, and being able to see their updates can introduce you to new titles you wouldn’t have tried before.”

But is that true? As it turns out, it’s not—at least, not on a market level.

Yes, individual users discover books on the platform through recommendations from Goodreads friends, but according to both anecdotal and statistical sources, such discoveries just do not translate to actual sales in any significant way. One, two, or 10 people adding a book to their shelves on Goodreads simply doesn’t move the needle in terms of visibility the way traditional media coverage or grassroots marketing campaigns do. As far as I have been able to discover, there is no evidence that adding a book to a Goodreads shelf increases or predicts buying behaviors. Additionally, recommendations from users’ friends generated by the platform itself don’t come spontaneously from a reader finding the book on Goodreads: Users find books outside of the website and introduce them to the Goodreads ecosystem.

Goodreads is, as Jo put it, “a secondary connector.” 

The closest instance I can find of Goodreads having a direct, discrete and quantifiable impact on a book’s success happened back in 2015, when Goodreads had such an effect on the sales of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. Several months before the novel was published, a Goodreads reviewer named Karen gave it a positive, four-star review, comparing it to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Karen’s review, along with Goodreads giveaways, spurred many users to add the book to their wish lists. Yet these two sources of influence did not drive nearly as many adds as traditional marketing efforts, as Goodreads’ own tracking graph neatly shows. Magazine coverage and the publisher’s own social media marketing efforts account for far more total adds than Karen’s single Goodreads review. Goodreads highlights no other reviews as instrumental in The Girl on the Train’s success. 

Between 2012 and 2019, Goodreads discussed many books on its blog, including The Power of Habit, The Silent Patient, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Little Fires Everywhere,  Lilac Girls, The Late Show and The Nightingale. (They likely covered more, but searching for this specific kind of post on Goodreads is difficult, and the blog is not easy to navigate.) All those books were traditionally published with large marketing budgets, occasionally from already-established authors, and in the posts, even Goodreads cannot avoid crediting traditional media coverage for most of their success.

Goodreads’ coverage of Colleen Hoover’s 2012 debut novel, Slammed, epitomizes how little Goodreads actually does for discoverability of new authors. Thanks to BookTok, Hoover notoriously sold more books than the Bible in 2022, but back when Hoover self-published Slammed as a free Kindle ebook in 2012, it generated virtually no attention on Goodreads. The website claims that “Hoover smartly took matters into her own hands, running a pair of Goodreads giveaways in late February and early March. [...] It immediately got the book onto people’s shelves and generated a few reader reviews, which is vital for any new book.” The blips are minute, and the post credits Slammed’s later success to bloggers and the site’s recommendation algorithm. Slammed never breaks 100 new daily adds at any point.

Compare this to Booktok in 2020, which had a significant and measurable impact on the sales of books that were heavily discussed on the platform, particularly backlist titles, indie titles, and traditionally published books that did not have large marketing budgets.

To think that publishers can isolate and measure the impact of Goodreads engagement on book sales is optimistic at best. Cal, the salesperson at a Big Five publisher, admitted that their employer has no quantifiable way to track whether Goodreads affects sales. 

“Publishers depend way too much on Goodreads,” they said. “In some ways I understand, because where else do you do galley giveaways to consumers?” Cal’s publisher will often make fewer copies of galleys available to booksellers than to Goodreads, where it focuses on rolling giveaways, even though this strategy sometimes gives the impression that a book isn’t performing as well as the publisher would like—and even as the publisher is trying to print fewer galleys overall. But as Cal reiterated to me, “We can’t actually quantify if a Goodreads giveaway helps sell a book, but we sure can quantify when booksellers advocate for a book.” 

Despite the fact that publishing company workers talk about Goodreads ratings in nearly every meeting, because it’s the only source of ratings and reviews so early in the publishing process, there’s no evidence that Goodreads itself sells books. 

Take a gander down the existing reviews for any forthcoming title on Goodreads and it will quickly become apparent that such reviews aren’t often written by readers who obtain books via giveaways or other forms of Goodreads promotion. As Cal pointed out to me, you’re more likely than not to encounter a note at the bottom of those reviews indicating their true source: “Thanks to [imprint or publisher] for an ARC/egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.” These reviews are, by and large, written by readers with access to NetGalley or Edelweiss, who tend to be booksellers, bloggers or other folks who create content on social media—not Goodreads-focused reviewers.

While Jo said that consumers may be alarmed when they find a book on Goodreads that has no reviews, and that reviews can be useful for readers who need a quick vibe check, and Cal told me that early review can change a marketing strategy for a book, the actions taken on Goodreads itself don’t impact a book’s success. “There’s no quantifiable evidence that early ratings or shelf adds affect a book’s performance. It often feels like ‘this is a good sign, right? People like it!’ more than anything else,” Cal said.

Jo emphasized how useful Goodreads giveaways can be when it comes to raising general awareness of a title, and that there is “quantifiable evidence that large-spend Goodreads advertising—think, like, homepage takeover level money—is effective.” But books with marketing budgets so sizable are promoted everywhere, not just on Goodreads, so it’s no surprise that Goodreads users would be intrigued by them. Even Jo admitted that it “might be a little chicken/egg. The title might have a hefty budget because it already has an audience, so spending money to let that audience know there’s a new book—and/or to build FOMO by signaling this book is a Big Deal to potential readers who may be tangentially aware of the title/author/series—makes sense.”

“On the consumer side of things, I think it does sell books a little,” said Cervone, who acknowledged that superfans might follow Amazon or Audible links when adding books to their Goodreads libraries, though she believes casual users are more likely to “already own the book or have already planned their purchase when they’re actually on the page.”

But for Cervone, who works in sales, Goodreads doesn’t matter to the sort of work she does, which is selling books to independent bookstores. “On the publishing side, I don’t think it sells books anymore. At one point positive reviews and winning Goodreads Choice Awards affected sales, but I think once Amazon bought the company the indies bookstores that may have used those ratings stopped. As Amazon really promotes itself on the site, sales wouldn’t translate to indie stores or Barnes & Noble so stores aren’t eager to buy from publishers.”

It’s obvious that this is true to people who work elsewhere in the industry as well. A Barnes & Noble bookseller told me that they “don’t think [Goodreads] affects Barnes & Noble [sales] at all. The same books that are popular [on Goodreads] are the same ones that are popular on every other social media platform.”

“I’m not sure Goodreads matters nearly as much as most authors fear,” wrote fiction writer and former Electric Literature editor-in-chief Lincoln Michel in his essay, “Goodreads Has No Incentive to Be Good.” “Barnes and Noble isn’t deciding how many copies to order based on advanced Goodreads ratings. Indie bookstores aren’t basing table placement on them. I don’t even think Amazon factors them into their algorithm. If you beg friends to five-star you and successfully bump your rating from say 3.52 to 3.76 or if you piss off some people online who one-star you to drop your book from 3.76 to 3.52, is either of those things really going to substantially affect your book sales?”

At its core, Goodreads just reflects the book market: It’s a mirror of sales, not a doorway into them. It has no real retail power—it only has social power, and its social power merely regurgitates what is happening elsewhere on the internet.

Author Beck Rourke-Mooney put it to me perfectly when they said, “Goodreads is a ‘community of readers’ in the same way Yelp is a community of eaters.” Poston echoed this comparison, saying, “Once Amazon took over, [Goodreads] became less like a water cooler for readers and more like—well—Yelp, where you can one-star books without ever having read them, and decide whether you want to read them based on personal opinions and, more importantly, the marketing and ad budget afforded the novel.” 

In fact, Poston couldn’t think of a single book that became big because of Goodreads despite her 10+ years in the industry. “It’s more likely that the more money put behind a book, the better the rating will be because people, at their core, feel better when they are a part of something bigger.” 

---

So. Goodreads is a platform owned by Amazon that any reader can use to catalog books, and it’s treated with great respect by the publishing industry, but it’s not a significant source for book discovery, and it doesn’t measurably affect book sales.

Goodreads does serve readers by enabling them to catalog books and see what their friends who also use Goodreads are reading, but the problems that plague the site make it ever harder for readers to find helpful, good-faith reviews and to interact publicly with others on the site without being attacked. Amazon, which owns Goodreads, won’t fix the site’s problems: not the review bombing, not the pre-release ratings, not the user harassment, not the broken infrastructure. As Michelle the Harvard Business School student wrote, “Despite this consistent and loud feedback, [Amazon] has apparently made no investments in the platform experience since the early 2010s. And why not? Because they’re a monopoly. Why invest in platform improvements if you have a captive audience with no meaningful alternatives?” 

Or as my editor, Stephanie Appell, said to me in a text message, “Amazon does not care about the health of any communities, literary or otherwise.” 

Amazon will not spend money on Goodreads when its problems actually increase engagement on the website, therefore generating more data for Amazon. 

I’m a girl who likes action items. If Amazon won’t do something about Goodreads, maybe we can.

I would love for this essay to now cut to fantastic movie footage of booksellers rappelling into Amazon HQ and hypnotizing Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy into caring about the health of the literary ecosystem and its communities, that is beyond this newsletter’s budget of $0 and my personal stealth abilities. (I am not Bella Swan levels of clumsy, but I am no rogue.)

Though many authors suss out some of the obvious tips and tricks about interacting on Goodreads—including not attacking reviewers or leaving public negative  reviews—through advice from friends and common sense, authors don’t usually receive any sort of preparation or training for how to endure negative commentary on their work online. “That level of confusion and disorientation is partly the fault of agents and editors and other gatekeepers who don’t understand that authors are new hires,” author Courtney Maum wrote in a post to her Substack, “and you need to train us to be good at our new jobs.” 

A huge portion of the hold Goodreads has on the publishing industry is social: We have decided that it matters, therefore it matters. But we also know that Goodreads doesn’t sell books. Goodreads is only a reflection of the market—one that authors can watch meticulously and in real time, driving themselves mad. Just as we wouldn’t encourage authors to search for their names on social media, we also shouldn’t encourage them to be on Goodreads in any capacity. 

“Goodreads never was and never will be for authors,” said Poston. “The reviews posted cannot change a book that’s already published, and only serve to abuse authors by forcing them to ingest every opinion, both good and bad, of their work.” 

Cal agrees. “I don’t think Goodreads is healthy for authors. It is a place to see early reviews but reviews can be targeted and mean and authors don’t need to see that.”

Educating authors to stay away from Goodreads, and training publicists and marketers to devalue the platform, would go a long way toward improving the overall health of the publishing industry’s relationship with Goodreads and the overall mental health of authors. An excellent start would be for literary agents and editors who are signing new writers to offer packets about how the publishing industry works, with a section on why to avoid Goodreads (and how to block it on their computer and phone).

Reiterating that reviews are for readers, not a way to filter feedback to authors, may also be a necessary step. While some professional reviews can affect how publishing treats a book—a positive New York Times review might cause a publisher to put more marketing money behind a title, for instance, or early feedback from booksellers might lead to some tweaks to a final manuscript—reviews made by members of the public are written for other members of the public. 

“Despite the weird takes going viral on Threads, reviews are not feedback for the author—they can’t be,” said Lam, who emphasized to me how important it is for authors to stay away from review sites so that their creativity and individuality isn’t flattened under the pressure to conform to the most-proven levels of marketability. “You can’t action ‘too slow’ from one review and ‘too fast-paced’ from another. Some are also simply written in bad faith. I can’t take anything useful from a transphobic review ranting about my ‘gender agenda’ except that the reviewer in question was transphobic, for example,” they explained. “Authors have not consented to being in a critique relationship with readers after the book is published. It can’t be changed, and they released the book they wanted to write. Readers are welcome to enjoy or not enjoy the resulting piece of art.”

As readers, we can use Goodreads alternatives like Storygraph, among others; and as publishing professionals, we can invest in and promote those platforms. “I try to focus on the next thing coming down the pipe, and as much as I did enjoy keeping my GoodReads challenge up, I’m moving toward Storygraph and other means of tracking like the Book Riot annual spreadsheet,” said Toni, the middle grade author, who explained that they want to be able to use websites as a reader “without stumbling over someone’s take on my book or something else frustrating that isn’t even related but just is a waste of time to engage with.” Poston also expressed her enthusiasm and fondness for Storygraph.

“I don’t think any of us [in sales] are trying to help activate those other places, even Edelweiss,” said Cal. “I think we underutilize communities because we don’t really know what works.” Giving publicity and marketing departments the time, money and staff to invest in alternative spaces could lead to more sales and a healthier book ecosystem.

And, of course, we can make an active effort to encourage readers to branch out from not just Goodreads but also Amazon, in order to break the chokehold Amazon has on the book industry. For publishers and traditionally published authors, that could mean linking to independent bookstores and other book retailers instead of Amazon whenever possible, and partnering with them to incentivize readers to shop there.

For indie authors (who, according to multiple sources both professional and nonprofessional, are some of the few authors who do occasionally benefit from the discoverability offered by inclusion on Goodreads lists), that could mean ensuring that their books are available directly from their author websites and from a range of digital platforms. It could also mean speaking out against Kindle Unlimited's exclusivity policy, which prevents authors who publish work this way from making it available anywhere else for the first 90 days after publication.

But the number one thing we can do is just … talk about Goodreads. Not because it has power, but because it doesn’t. 

Look, Goodreads is great at the one thing it does best, which is allowing readers to organize their shelves and look at what their friends are reading. But readers who compose Goodreads’ core demographic discover books outside of the platform and bring their excitement to Goodreads. Users get heated on social media and take their anger to Goodreads. Nearly everything that pours into Goodreads does so from external sources, rather than being generated on Goodreads itself.

As a middle school teacher, Rourke-Mooney tried to use Goodreads to create a reading community, but the platform didn’t work like they’d hoped it would. “We were much more into pressing an actual book into each other’s hands, or gushing in person about something that we read the night before. There was something so… removed… about Goodreads that made it less applicable to our real world community of readers.”

Goodreads is a tool for readers, and for readers, it is a useful tool. Organizing shelves can be both practical and fun, and having a place to easily catalog the books you find elsewhere can have long-term benefits for individual readers. 

The site’s many problems, however, make any real time spent there toxic for creatives. Its functionality limitations and inability to quantifiably impact book sales means that it’s nearly useless as a tool for the publishing industry, save books with the largest marketing budgets that are already well positioned for success.

Goodreads has become nothing more than a fractured reflection of an industry that demands the blending of art and commerce, where actual communal relationships and authentic, good-faith reviews vanish beneath Amazon’s desire for more user data and a social media culture in which anger and distaste earn more attention than unmitigated enjoyment.

Let’s talk about that.

1. I wanted to find a direct source for this well-known aphorism, but it’s been regurgitated often and taken many forms over the past 50 years. The original iteration seems to be from a 1973 video by Richard Serra about television, where he writes, “It is the consumer who is consumed. You are the product of t.v. You are delivered to the advertiser, who is the customer. He consumes you.”