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This isn’t a rhetorical question.
I really want to know why it is that I feel a wave of disappointment whenever I receive less than 5 stars for my novel, The Curiosities of Perciville Harper.

It’s not that I think I’ve written a masterpiece, nor that 4 stars represents anything close to failure. Whatever it is, there’s something about the sub-5-star review that makes me feel like I’ve made a mistake or I’ve let the reader down.

This is quite unusual for me, considering my background.
If I were to self-examine my general attitude to work then I ought to be grateful for receiving any rating of 3 stars or more on Goodreads.
The reason being that, at least when I was at school, I never strived for excellence. I left that for the students who were excellent. So long as I had completed some amount of homework to hand in the following day, it never bothered me whether I got a D, a C or a B. I was a happy average, middle-of-the-road kind of a student.

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Incidentally, if you’re of a younger generation, this archaic method of marking a piece of work with letters instead of numbers was a trialed and tested system that had been employed successfully for decades. Then rolls in a government [enter Stage Right] who, in a desperate attempt to be seen to be doing something, decided to ‘revolutionise’ the way our essays are graded. Whatever happened to, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?

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Still, it was only when I went through university that my work ethic transitioned from ‘get the job done’ to ‘do a damn good job that you can be proud of.’
Consequently, without this turning into my CV, I ended up graduating with more than my schoolboy self could ever have dreamed, owing greatly to my stellar dissertation on the impact of Norfolk’s coastal erosion on archaeology. It was riveting. I won an award for it.

Fast forward the best part of ten years to the weeks leading up to Publication Day and I was preparing my wife for reading the reviews on my behalf.
I wasn’t afraid of receiving a bad a review. Everyone is entitled to an opinion and poor feedback is an inevitable facet of the Internet.
No, what I was afraid of was receiving a bad review that was simultaneously fair. One that I couldn’t excuse or brush over.

As it happens, Goodreads has become my latest addiction and I find myself scanning Curiosities’ reviews far more frequently than it is worth, especially considering the slow rate that new appraisals spring up.

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Now for the inevitable disclaimer:
If you have taken the time to read The Curiosities of Perciville Harper before logging into your Goodreads account to rate and review it, then I am eternally grateful, irrespective of what you scored it and what you wrote about it. Genuinely!
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your experiences with my book; the world; the characters, the interwoven plots. Even the criticisms have been well-received, giving me pause to consider where and how to take the series further.
The purpose of this article isn’t to bemoan reviewers and your insights into my work, but rather unpick why it is that I often feel an irrational wave of disappointment when I fall short of those big 5.

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What has become most apparent to me is how subjective our reading experiences are and, thus, how we review our latest endeavours.
As an archaeologist, I am rather fond of the popular adage, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” and this really rings true when it comes to reviews. One man’s five is another man’s three.

For me, the reductionist Goodreads rating scale reads like this:

• 5 = Excellent. Perfection. Chef’s kiss.
• 4 = Very good. Great, in fact! Chef’s peck on the cheek.
• 3 = Good. Didn’t blow me away but it was entertaining enough to keep me hooked. Sous chef’s kiss.
• 2 = Fine. More like a parking fine than fine dining. Finished reading it but only because I believed it could end well. It probably didn’t. A Little Chef’s kiss (AKA spitting into the broth).
• 1 = Ouch! As they say on Goodreads, DNF (Did Not Finish). You get better character development on Love Island. The plot has more holes in it than a slice of Swiss cheese on a golf course. So many holes, in fact, that it triggered my trypophobia. The chef kissed you and you immediately fell ill.

On that basis, I should be thrilled by every 4-star review that comes my way and, in truth, I generally am. I wrote a book, you read it, and thought it was very good, at least by my metrics.

But then that voice at the back of my head…

“Very good. Nice. But why not excellent? Where did it fall short? What have you missed, Simon?”

Afterall, this isn’t Year 9 Maths homework anymore. This is a novel that I have spent years planning, writing, editing, editing and editing. It’s the single greatest creative project I have ever embarked upon. I thought of everything. Didn’t I?

So where did it lose that last star? Okay, 4 stars is 80%. That’s a solid 1^st, but there’s still room to improve. Where do I need to tighten the screws? The writing style? The world-building?

Or perhaps it all comes down to the reviewer. The fact that they were reading it at the station while their train was running two hours late, and they were going to miss their kid’s birthday for the third year in a row. They skipped lunch because they were supposed to go out for dinner at Pizza Express, so they’re stressed, hungry, tired…and the fantasy book on their Kindle that would ordinarily provide them with escapism and solace is just another stark reminder of the pending argument they’re going to have with their spouse when they eventually got home.
A month ago, when they received that promotion at work and they won on their Premium Bonds, this would have been a 5-star read.
This evening, just as the sky is darkening and the first spots of rain are gracing the shoulders of their newly-drycleaned jacket, it’s a 1-star. DNF. Dire, Nonsense Farce.

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So I guess, dear reader, I must return to my original question from the beginning of these bloggular ramblings: Why do I think a 4-star review is bad?

Perhaps it’s a feeling of guilt for failing to fully satisfy a reader who invested a fraction of their life in my novel.

Perhaps it’s embarrassment for overlooking something trivial which stole a part of that reader’s enjoyment.

Ultimately, I think that it’s simply because 4 stars isn’t 5. That for all the time and effort I poured into this book, there’s still room to improve, at least by the expectations of some readers.

Perhaps then, I need to adjust my own expectations, realign my perspective and listen to what these 4-star reviews are telling me: that this first book is very good and, given hard work, patience and some honest self-appraisal to erode away my hubris, I could hone my skills to write something great. I know I have it in me. After all (and despite this article), most of the reviews I have received came with a 5 star rating anyway.

Now is the time to knuckle down, dig deep, and write something to be really proud of.

P.S. Did you Google ‘Bloggular’ to see if it’s a real word? It’s not. I just came up with it. But you can use it now.

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