no stars on a Goodread reviews is treated as...

[julesjones]

..a zero star review.

birdsedge points out that if you don't put a star rating on a Goodreads review, Goodreads treats that as a zero star review when calculating the star average for the book, i.e. as low a rating as you can give, and not as an abstention.

Amongst other things, this means that if you don't give a star rating because as an author you feel uncomfortable doing that to other authors, or (as I sometimes do) because it was a book you didn't like but recognise as this being you and not the book, what you're inadvertently doing is rating the book as even lower than 1 star, even if you thought the book was worth 4 or 5 stars. On a book with few reviews, that can significantly affect the average rating.

Comments

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Thanks for passing this on. Seawasp has done the same, too. I've also posted it to my wordpress blog and tweeted it. I know it's not a huge issue, but it tends to be writers who don't star their reviews (comfort levels being one of the reasons) and I'm sure they're not meaning to give zero out of five.