When I was younger, I wouldn’t review things. Not that I wasn’t critical. In fact, I believe I was much more critical when in school than I am now. School taught me to judge things harshly. I have learnt since then that it really isn’t worth that much energy unless you truly want to or have an interest in learning something from it.

There were all of those assignments though. Review this book. Critically. And I hated most of those books too. I’m not sure whether I hated them because I was being forced to read them in this light or not. But it was beyond frustrating.

So flash forward. Time for the internet. It took me a long time to put myself forward on this platform, though I spent a good deal of time haunting certain grounds. And because I didn’t want to put myself out there, I didn’t review anything.

This is very important when it comes to books. Even more so when it comes to self-published authors. The reviews, or even just the rating, is the only thing that will draw people in. You can have the best selling point in the world, but when people come up and look and see that it looks like no one has picked it up at all, they hesitate.

This isn’t just books. This is all products. If there isn’t a rating, forget about the review, people are less inclined to pick things up.

A few years ago I realized this was the case. Because it took me that long to shop online, first thing. Harder to do that in a store (as most people forget to do the survey, and even that is about the store and staff – not about the products you buy). After that, it’s when I started thinking for the first time since childhood that I could become a writer. It’s what everyone was talking about.

I have nothing new to add on the subject. This isn’t just something I bring up for me. If you buy any book from anything online and you can rate and review it? Do it. Even if it’s just the rating. It can be hard sometimes to write out exactly what it was about the book that you liked, hated, or whatever. It takes time. Time you could be spending picking up another book.

Take it from me, someone who rates all my books now, for the sake of others. People need to hear whether you like things or not. Maybe you aren’t the audience, but other people deserve to know too.

And an author can’t get a bad critique. (I think I already espoused the difference of critiques and just shit-talking something, so I won’t get into that.)