Uncle_Sheogorath I don't agree. I am a contracted author, I have been on here for almost a year(I am one month away from a year) my book is completed and sitting at 1.7mill views. I have never had to delete a single review for my novel till this week. And I only deleted it for one reason and one reason alone. This person sent a review that said.
"This book isn't good at all, go read something else, don't know what people are raving about." and gave one star.
I honestly didn't care at all about it and would have left it until I saw that the person hadn't even got past chapter zero. That freaking irked me. I felt really annoyed and even went and asked my editor if they thought they would ever implement making reviews only open to people who got past you know the first paragraph.
Like, let me explain this. You move onto reading chapter one the moment you scroll the bar or flip a page. That means for someone to be at chapter zero, it means they opened up the book, never scrolled/flipped the page, never moved the screen at all. That means they read less than three paragraphs before going and telling people not to read my novel.
There is NO WAY, you can get a sense of a story, or someone's writing, in less than 15-30% of any book, let alone the first page. What they did was essentially like walking into a book store, picking up a book, and reading the back of it, then saying nope not interested.
Now that's fine, and all, but lets put it this way. If that same person went out of their way to leave a note to tell everyone else not to read it because the book is just trash. But then they never give anyone any valid reasons why they are saying it was. Then other people start to stop reading it, or picking it up at all and reading that book. This domino effect then causes harm to the author, who possibly spent months, or even years working super hard on that novel only to get paid less than .01 cent a word for their effort. An effort which is not easy might I add since basically birthing and creating a whole new world for someone elses entertainment is incredibly hard to do. Also, webnovel books are obscenely long with stories stretched out over a huge amount of chapters to give depth and background to the stories like they are some epic tv production. Yet someone stopped after a paragraph and went nope this is simply trash. That effect is essentially what would have happened here. And that is why authors here despise any star 0 chapter reviews and will delete them.
And it is why I deleted that review. My first lower than 4 stars review on my book in 11 months and the person didn't even read the book. And that book has 1.7million reads.
So, yes dear, it is possible to have that many views and only good reviews without ever deleting real people's genuine reviews. Because in an entire year and with that many reads I still never get people reviewing with less than 4 stars. And I have multiple books out too. With hundreds of thousands of views. And that was the only bad review I ever got. And it wasn't even from a real reader.
But anyway, people saying authors are not supposed to remove the trolls from their books, but instead just let them get attacked seems ludicrous to me. Seriously, for real, if you want to leave reviews that are constructive about how bad something is after reading over 30% of any book. I say have at it. Fly be free.
Honestly, though this whole thing could be sorted if they just locked reviewing novels. If webnovel made it mandatory to read at least 30-50% of the novel before reviewing a book was unlocked for a reader. That would really solve everyone's problem. Because all opinions stated would be valid. Because they really, for real; gave that book a shot for the author before making up their mind that it was well and truly awful. I think people walking away from books before that point is fine. But they shouldn't be able to review before then. If they want to read like half a chapter or like 3 chapters and tell people the grammar is bad, they can simply, just comment on the chapters.
