Goodreads Needs to Do Better by Marginalized Authors
I’ve had a Goodreads account since 2008, just one year after the site was started by a married couple looking to recreate a cozy book recommendation experience online. Despite me being what the kids would call a Goodreads Elder, I only just started to look at the myriad of ways the site fails to deliver since I started working at Book Riot. But it doesn’t just fail readers; it actively hurts authors whose identities lie on the margins of the U.S. social structure.
The most recent Book World drama is a perfect example of what I mean. There are many messy details that I’ll leave to you to wade through, but the gist of the story is that white debut author Cait Corrain — who was being published by an imprint of Penguin Random House and whose book was scheduled to have an Illumicrate box — review bombed her fellow debut authors, many of whom were nonwhite, with fake Goodreads accounts. The story was blown wide open by author Xiran Jay Zhao, who was not among the review-bombed but was obviously privy to the situation. After a few days — and a few lies — Corrain was dropped by her publisher and (barely) fessed up to her behavior in a meager apology.
Though the situation with Corrain is just one instance, it points to a much bigger issue. While there’s been a lot of criticism surrounding Goodreads — from its outdated interface to its constantly crashing app — one of its most egregious offenses is how easy it is to review bomb books.
If you’re unfamiliar, review bombing is when negative reviews and ratings are left for a book with the intent to drop its rating. While genuine criticism is a healthy thing in a world of different perspectives and opinions, review bombing is done by people who haven’t actually read the book they’re reviewing.
With more than 125 million members who have left 26 million book reviews and 300 million ratings in the last 12 months alone, Goodreads is the biggest book review site. Keeping these numbers in mind makes it easy to imagine why a book given an unfairly low rating through review bombing can be so damning. So absolute is Goodreads’ influence, in fact, that it even affected the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert.
Earlier this year, her new book, The Snow Forest, had gotten hundreds of bad reviews before its advanced review copies had even been printed. The reason being? Because it was set in Russia and would have been released while the war that Russia started with Ukraine continued. Gilbert — to the disappointment of some — decided to cancel the book’s publication.
Owned by Amazon since 2013, Goodreads is, in many ways, a microcosm of American class dynamics. It is fueled by the same brand of American capitalism that is rooted in the slave trade and is a behemoth of a thing that favors those with big publicity budgets and allows other, smaller presences to fall to the bottom. With that said, if an author like Gilbert can be review-bombed into oblivion, so can lesser-known authors.
Some may say that the onus of responsibility for book sales does not belong to Goodreads, and I would agree. To an extent. While so much of the site does seem to operate on a very basic popularity system, there is a more insidious underside to it all. An underside on which Corrain was able to slither along to make 31 Google Doc pages worth of negative reviews of BIPOC authors’ books. It’s this underside that undercuts any integrity the site may claim to have and that has sank books by authors of color months before they were even released.
As with many other aspects of American capitalistic society that are touted as being merit-based, the book world — including Goodreads — isn’t. Not really. Though publishing has long had a diversity problem, there was some acknowledgement of the systemic inequalities that have led to this disparity following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, but some publishers seem to be returning to form after only three years.
This is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy that goes on in the publishing world that seems to be endemic to media overall. The bias that led to fewer marginalized authors being published in the first place also leads to publishers questioning the public’s interest in their work after it doesn’t perform how they’d like it to. This critique doesn’t seem to fall on cis white authors.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, bestselling author Dhonielle Clayton noted the difference while talking about her packaging business that she aims to diversify the publishing world with. When discussing the many rejections she’d received, she said how, often times, the reasoning given was that readers weren’t interested in books about people of color. But her business — which hires writers to write books around already thought-of plots and then sells the books to publishers — has sold 41 books since 2020.
“Some publishers that raced to diversify their lists then saw disappointing sales for some titles are now falling back on the old arguments that such books don’t resonate widely — a standard that doesn’t seem to apply to white writers,” Clayton said.
Though publishing’s inherent biases existed before Goodreads, it’s important to consider them in order to see how marginalized authors are on unequal footing from the jump. Review bombing further hurts their chances of having their books read and judged fairly.
Now, Goodreads did release a statement at the end of October stating that they would be combatting review bombing, but it came after the practice was already a well-known problem. And, clearly, it’s not enough. Corrain’s negative reviews remained on the site after Goodreads’ review bombing statement was released. There’s no telling how many marginalized authors have been and are currently being set back because of review bombs.
But what can Goodreads do, other than try to catch review bombing as they outlined in their statement? For one, they 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.
No system is perfect, and while Goodreads may not catch all the fake reviews even with genuine effort, I think Amazon’s beginnings as a bookseller and the success of the Kindle brand — not to mention Goodreads’ 125 million members — mean they owe it to the book world to try.
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