Reviews

I touched upon the subject in previous posts about community, but I decided to spent a short bit of extra time talking about the reviews itself.

Like I said before, being able to get a lot of reviews is the reward all authors would like to get with their stories. Merely getting hits isn't as good, because it's just numbers, many of which may be just a browsing going in, and then leaving. But a review, that shows that the reader liked your story enough to actually congratulate you for the job well done.

Since it feels so good, the natural conclusion is that the more reviews you get, the better.

The writing style of the reviews in themselves, though, surprisingly can be used to tell a bit about the quality of the story they're commenting on. Technically, that is the function of the review, anyways, but since reviews often are so vague in an of themselves, it's simply to just read the tide by reading the writing style.

In general, the maturity and general intelligence infused in each review also reflects on the quality of the story in question as well, "Birds of a feather flock together". Reviews tend to come in about three flavors.

1. Overly Excited and Mediocre: "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh omigodomgigod *Squeals and dies happily*, plz, plz update soon!", "lolz, funny", "love it! Update now!" Yeah. If there's a story that collects a lot of reviews that tend to come up with responses like that, first, it doesn't tell me much, second, it makes me wonder what kind of story it is that panders to this level of denomination. Naturally, I don't trust it much, and assume it's not very good.
   
   
2. Average, Readable: "Good stuff. (Commentary on current chapter here), well, I hope for the next update". This is the general threshold that a story should have to convince me that I should try reading it. The guys are smart enough to spell properly and all that.
   
   
3. Huge Essay Format: By which I mean, the moment the story has a review that's comprised of several paragraphs, that's a very good sign that the story has a lot of depth to it. While depth may mean "high quality", it can also mean "pretty damn long, to the point it warrants an unusually long review".

As usual, it's usually better for the quality of the writing to be more towards the higher-grade. Since you're glancing through reviews, it actually shouldn't be a problem if you get the aforementioned huge essays. Though you should keep in mind, again, what kind of reading you have in mind, length and otherwise.

Reviews, though, being opinionated and finicky, aren't as reliable as reading the tide via summaries and word/chapter count, though it makes a good supplement for a second opinion. There are loopholes, though.

Stories that are for certain questionable, are multi-chaptered, yet it seems all the reviews are all by one person, with one or two lines. That's not a very good sign for me to try reading it. If a story has a few dedicated readers that review per chapter, that's at least more believable.

Likewise, more reviews doesn't mean the story is better. It simply means it has more attention from the adoring masses. A story with a few reviews or even none might be good, too, but likewise, it's careful to wonder the quality of a story that has little to none in reviews, too. Either it's not popular, or it's not popular because it's not good.

In the end, reviews should be used in conjunction with all the previously mentioned techniques to gauge a story.