✨ HALF A STAR ✨

analyzing sales data (roughly) through Goodreads ratings, reviews, and shelving

Okay, I’ll admit, it’s not a perfect system…

but unless you have access to Book Scan and some woo woo magic that involves a combination of knowledge on verified book sales + orders (unverified, meaning they could be returned, and are really a bet on expectation built by what is known as a P&L sheet)

…then looking at Goodreads ratings & reviews can give you an idea of book sales. At the very least, it can give you an idea of scale. If an author has 300 book reviews and 2,000 ratings compared to an author that has 20,000 book reviews and 40,000 ratings, you can conjecture about the sales data on those books and which one might a. have had more support and/or b. might explain it’s popularity.

Of course it’s not accurate or perfect, particularly because the Goodreads audience skews to a social media audience, this doesn’t take into account audiobooks or giveaways or galleys, and it may not include your mom’s book club group, or your dad’s retirement TBR, or even your little sister’s Barnes & Noble haul if she reads as a solo act and/or uses Storygraph, but it can give you a rough indication or idea of how a book is selling.

I realize that Goodreads can be kind of a cesspool, but it’s what we currently have, so I’m using it here. Book Riot does a weekly post using Goodreads most-read, Emily Gould gave advice on the “trashy” Goodreads husband, Maris Kreizman wrote about “redeeming Goodreads,” Her Campus recommended the app in the last few months, NPR covered “review bombing,” and Lauren Oyler wrote about Goodreads gone bad alongside the “bad side of the industry” from David Smith.

Let’s use the “campus novel” as our experiment. I’m going to use this list from New York Public Library as the list for data.

A few general things this data revealed:

• most anticipated novels come out in the spring

• publishers choose the most splashy reviews for retail sites (often neglecting independent review sites and sometimes leaving off a negative review)

• keeping those retail sites up to date with publicity and marketing coverage helps a book’s success

• non-debut books rely less heavily on blurbs

• everyone lives in Brooklyn (which is kind of unfair specifically here because it’s a New York Public Library list)

• the more coverage for the book—the more readers (doesn’t totally matter what the coverage is, it just needs to be a pile

• you’ll see the same media over and over again with some of these titles, and that’s either because they followed-up the momentum OR these titles were already frontlist for the publisher, and so they got the most effort, time, money, etc, and the sales team took them more seriously when talking to bookstores, trade reviews, librarians, etc, etc, etc.

• good early industry / trade reviews (Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, Foreword Reviews, Booklist, Bookpage, Book Reporter) matter

• Booklist LOVES a campus novel

• some of these books look like they got a lot of coverage but it was mostly coverage to a certain demographic audience, which maybe contributed to their not reaching more readers across various other angles

• More blurbs does not mean more excitement (it seems to be more about choosing the right blurbers for the right book).

• The ratios of ratings and reviews have almost no logic, but I’d love to see some sort of study on what sort of audiences REVIEW books on Goodreads and which books get mostly ratings

• I wonder how the pandemic timeline influences some of this.

• publishers (obviously) know that doing a Goodreads giveaway automatically adds the book to the “want to read” shelf of everyone who enters the giveaway

• and personally, publishers who name the reviewer / critic have my heart

• For authors with second books out (Either/Or by Batuman has about 1/4 of the ratings as The Idiot, The Late Americans by Taylor has about 1/6 of the ratings as Real Life, and Filthy Animals is a little less than 1/3, Conversations with Friends has a little more than 1/3 of Rooney’s debut, and Joan is Okay from Wang is really doing great with almost 2/3 of the ratings of Chemistry).

• From the last bullet, I’d love to see data on the HOT debut vs. the HOT fourth book and what it does for a career? Is someone more likely to go back and read an author’s catalog vs. pick up the next book by an author and vice versa?

• most books with a lot of reviews usually ends up with something like a 3.5 to 3.9 rating in the Goodreads universe

I obviously did not account for whether the book had an award-winning Hulu show, if it was published in other territories, demographic information of the author, genre (it’s hard to judge crime sales success vs. a literary novel success—and where it’s housed in a bookstore or a big box store matters), and many other factors.

What I’m trying to say is this is for funsies! And stemmed from last week when I was doing some snooping (a reconnaissance mission) about how FAR Maggie Smith has outsold all the other “divorce era” memoirs (granted she has a year on them in the marathon, but her social media and belovedness is putting in work).

I would love to hear what other folks see here, so…

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Here’s how my handy-dandy chart is organized. Highlighted blue reviews are starred. Repeated blurbers are pink. Blurbs by authors on the list are yellow.

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ICYMI: Mindy Friddle is on the Southern Review of Books “Best Books of May 2024” list, Jessica E. Johnson has an excerpt from Mettlework in MUTHA Magazine and an EXQUISITE essay “Losing the Daphne” in The Common & her poetry collection Metabolics was featured in Poetry Daily, The Leaving Season was reviewed by Publishers Weekly, MER Literary reviewed Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner, Jewish Book Council reviewed Liberty Street by Jason K. Friedman, unalone by Jessica Jacobs is a Summer Book Club pick from Jewish Women’s Archive, Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca was reviewed in Massachusetts Review, Kate Doyle’s I Meant It Once was recommended by Style UK, Sara Moore Wagner read from Lady Wing Shot in PARIS with Verse April, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.