How Amazon Sank Goodreads
Reading Time: 6 minutesAmazon Is Letting Something Terrible Happen to Authors on Goodreads, Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest was ‘review bombed’ into oblivion. There are ways to mitigate such pile-ons before they happen., Elizabeth Gilbert was review bombed on Goodreads. Amazon could
The announcement for Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, a historical novel set in Siberia, landed in my inbox on June 6. Titled The Snow Forest, the story revolves around a Russian family who escapes early Bolshevik Russia to live in decadeslong seclusion in remote Siberia. Gilbert is an author with dynamic range, nailing bestselling memoirs (Eat, Pray, Love), award-winning literary fiction (The Signature of All Things), and trusted self-help (Big Magic). The combination of the author plus the subject matter was sure to create buzz.
About a week later, after users enraged by the book’s Russian setting launched a coordinated attack on the book’s Goodreads page, Gilbert pulled her novel ‘indefinitely.’
That a book has been taken down by a targeted review attack is not entirely unsurprising. The incident is one in a long string of Goodreads ‘review bombing’ incidents, in which users pile on with negative reviews that have little to no basis in their actual experience of reading the book.
This is particularly unfortunate because Goodreads is a platform that has helped authors reach wider audiences, and even driven some writers to huge success. It’s also been a place for readers to connect, and show off their reading lists as well as their chops for critiquing work. (As someone who reviews books professionally, this is indeed its own kind of art.) But the platform has become a shadow of what it could be, languishing since Amazon’s acquisition of it in 2013.
The tech giant could deploy some easy fixes to make Goodreads genuinely enjoyable. Instead, the platform is now actively hurting the community it was designed to uplift.
Goodreads was founded in 2007 by Otis Chandler, the grandson of a former owner of the Los Angeles Times, and his wife, Elizabeth Chandler, then a journalist at the same paper. The platform allows users to track the books they’re reading, as well as rate them and leave reviews. The social network for books took off: The platform doubled its user base between 2011 and 2012, and by 2013, it had 15 million members; that year, the New York Times claimed that it was ‘the largest source of independent reviews on the Web.’ It was purchased by Amazon shortly thereafter.
Authors, booksellers, and others in the literary community objected to the purchase. Some were concerned about Amazon mining their data, while others were concerned about industry consolidation. Amazon had been coming after bookstores somewhat directly, selling e-books at bargain-bin prices and introducing an app that allowed people to scan bar codes in brick-and-mortar bookstores in order to encourage them to buy it online for cheap. Now it was taking over an online community too. The Authors Guild called the Goodreads acquisition a ‘truly devastating act of vertical integration.’ Thriller author Scott Turow, then the president of the guild, wrote in a statement at the time that Goodreads swamped Amazon in terms of reader engagement and online reviews—thus, Amazon purchased it in an attempt to eliminate its competition. The acquisition, Turow wrote, was a ‘textbook example of how modern internet monopolies can be built. … As those in advertising have long known, the key to driving sales is controlling information.’ The Chandlers assured the book community that Amazon’s control over Goodreads would remain minimal.
Both before and after the acquisition, Goodreads has helped books succeed. The Chandlers have said that E.L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey, and Colleen Hoover, author of Slammed and It Ends With Us, credit their early books’ success to Goodreads. Jordana Kulak, a publicist at Penguin Young Readers, says Goodreads is a significant part of a book’s early publicity cycle. ‘It’s important in terms of discoverability, in the same vein as BookTok and Bookstagram,’ she says, referring to the book communities on TikTok and Instagram, respectively. ‘The ratings on Goodreads and on other platforms like Amazon have a lot of weight.’ Ratings, giveaways, reviews, and lists all contribute to a book’s discoverability, she says.
But the platform can also be detrimental to a book’s success, as evidenced by Gilbert pulling her novel before most reviewers even got pre-publication galleys. ‘I feel like I hear more about Goodreads panning a book or stopping publication than that a book is a success because of Goodreads,’ says Tove Danovich, the author of Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them. Kosoko Jackson’s young adult novel A Place for Wolves is likely the most famous incident of a book getting canceled due primarily to backlash on Goodreads (at least until the Gilbert novel, depending on what happens with that). Other books, such as Amelie Wen Zhao’s Blood Heir, faced delays after controversies that occurred predominantly on Goodreads.
One book I recently reviewed in the New York Times, Cecilia Rabess’ Everything’s Fine, was review bombed on Goodreads in January of this year, six months before its release: The reviews, as with Gilbert’s book, are short on context, and focus instead on the misunderstanding that the novel is a romance about a liberal Black woman and a conservative white man. (The book is not a romance.) The novel, with a total rating of 3.39 out of 5 stars, has not fully recovered.
These pile-ons are not directly the fault of Amazon—they’re classic internet-crowd behavior. ‘Someone on TikTok took issue with the book, and then people 1-star piled on via Goodreads,’ says a publicist for a ‘big five’ publisher, who wished to remain anonymous because she wasn’t authorized by her boss to speak on the record. ‘I’ve seen books with 1 star from users on the app when I know the manuscript isn’t even in yet. How can you rate something 1 star you definitely haven’t read?’ What’s more, review bombing often hinges on a book’s apparent disruption of a particular group’s norms, which many readers may find irrelevant to their decision to read, or not read, a book; the distorted reviews then largely don’t reflect upon the book’s ‘quality’ itself, but rather its adherence to a specific audience’s demands.
Hannah Orenstein, the author of, most recently, Meant to Be Mine, says, ‘I’ve found myself occasionally avoiding certain ideas because I imagine they wouldn’t go over well on Goodreads.’ She says she no longer checks the site, as she doesn’t want to exclusively cater to the opinions of Goodreads reviewers. But it might get harder for authors to individually tune out feedback from the site. Novelist Leigh Stein wrote that Gilbert’s capitulation to the Goodreads reviewers’ pile-on ‘sets a dangerous precedent.’ What happens, Stein wondered, when more audiences demand ‘product recalls’?
The onus is on Goodreads, and in turn Amazon, to better moderate its own platform, and create user norms and expectations that demand more respectful, relevant reviews. So far—despite years of this being an issue that Goodreads itself has acknowledged—this hasn’t happened. ‘Goodreads/Amazon have not invested in content moderation,’ says Nicholas Brody, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Puget Sound in Washington state. There’s at least one simple fix that would help, he noted: ‘Rotten Tomatoes removed the option for fans to review movies prior to the release date several years ago.’
Goodreads is hardly the only website to experience review bombing. Steam, a video game store owned by the video game developer and publisher Valve, implemented new moderation policies in 2019. The platform isolates what it calls ‘off-topic’ reviews—those that, the company deems, contain critiques that are unlikely to factor into a future purchaser’s happiness after buying the game—and separates them from the game’s overall score. Yelp, another site prone to review bombing, has what it calls ‘unusual activity alerts,’ in which it shuts down users’ ability to review a specific business if it sees a sudden increase in traffic. Noorie Malik, vice president of user operations at Yelp, told the Wall Street Journal, ‘When a community member or a business owner alerts my team about potential issues, we have a real human review every case, every single time.’
In 2021 Goodreads told Time it was actively working on a solution to mitigate review bombing. But when I asked the company about what changes it’s made since then, a spokesperson, Suzanne Vergara, offered no specifics. ‘We listen to feedback from readers, authors, and publishers, and invest in tools and support teams to improve our ability to quickly detect and stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines,’ she says. ‘For feedback coming from members, we have increased the number of ways members can flag content to us, improving the speed of responsiveness.’
It’s not speedy enough: In the days it’s taken me to write this piece, the Goodreads page for Gilbert’s The Snow Forest has disappeared entirely. Three weeks after the novel’s June 6 publication, the clever and subversive Everything’s Fine has crept up from a score of 3.27 stars to 3.39. If the worry was once that Amazon would have too much control over the books community via Goodreads, the opposite has come true—it’s simply let it languish. That’s proved dangerous all the same.
Ref: slate
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