In today’s literary landscape, authors find themselves increasingly concerned about their Goodreads ratings.
Goodreads, the US-based web platform that allows readers worldwide to post book reviews and assign star ratings out of five, has become the go-to site for evaluating the quality of books one intends to purchase.
Recently, bestselling US author Elizabeth Gilbert has taken the drastic step of delaying the publication of her latest book due to the backlash it received from Goodreads users. Gilbert, renowned for her widely popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love (2006), which was adapted into a film starring Julia Roberts, announced her forthcoming novel, The Snow Forest, to be published in February 2024 by Bloomsbury. Marketed as a romantic exploration of the Russian soul, the story revolves around a family’s decades-long sojourn in the Siberian wilderness following their escape from Stalinism in the 1930s. However, as soon as The Snow Forest received its own Goodreads page, it faced a barrage of condemnations from Ukrainian readers and their supporters, accusing Gilbert of “romanticizing” Russians.
During the controversy, The Snow Forest garnered 173 “reviews” and received 531 one-star ratings on Goodreads before its page was taken down after two days. Gilbert has since acknowledged that “it is not the time for this book to be published,” and it has swiftly disappeared from the websites of her US and UK publishers.
This backlash represents the latest in a series of incidents suggesting that Goodreads’ influence on the literary world may be more detrimental than beneficial.
Launched in 2007 by Otis Chandler, an American computer programmer, and his wife Elizabeth Khuri, a journalist and the editor-in-chief of Goodreads, the websites aim was to provide a space for ordinary readers to share their opinions on books, countering the growing criticism of professional book reviewers, who were often labeled as “gatekeepers” obstructing the success of books.
Over time, Goodreads reviews have gained more trust compared to those on bookselling sites like Amazon, partly due to low-star ratings on Amazon being influenced by factors unrelated to the book’s literary quality, such as delivery issues. However, Amazon later acquired Goodreads in 2013 for a reported $150 million, granting the online retail giant access to a vast amount of readers’ reading habit data, with the site currently boasting 125 million users.
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