There’s good news and there’s bad news.

The good news is people seem to be reading A Time and Place. Or at least, they’re finally getting around to rating it on Amazon and Goodreads. Yay!

The bad news is the last two or three ratings have not been quite as high as I would like to see. Ideally I would like to see ratings of 6 or 7 out of 5 stars. I know this is not technically possible but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s what I’d like to see. But hey, everyone’s entitled to their opinion.

Mostly I’m inured to ratings because as a creator you have to be. You can’t let ratings and reviews get under your skin, or over your skin, or anywhere near your skin, really.

Nor can you respond to ratings and reviews. As a creator you need to be above that. As such I would never dream of responding to any one individual review or rating personally, as much as I might want to, especially when one gets some critical fact about my work wrong.

All that said, I just would like to add to people’s thinking. The notion that it takes a long time to craft a book, and very little time to read it (or part of it) and rate and review it. So I think there’s an onus to do the latter with some measure of respect. Leaving an anonymous one or two star rating unaccompanied by a review would constitute the opposite of that. Of course, anyone who would do such a thing is not going to listen to me on the subject. There’s something else going on in their thinking and behaviour that I can’t relate to. In this instance, I wish that Amazon, Goodreads and the rest would simply make that sort of rating impossible. If you’re going to give a one star review, you should be required to identify yourself, and ideally accompany the rating with a valid reason why you’re doing so.

In fact, to lend the entire rating system credibility, I think identifying yourself and providing a rationale for your rating in the form of a review, however brief, should be mandatory, or at least accepted good practice.

What do you think?