Ryan M. Patrick

I see a lot of discussions on Twitter (X), Discord, Facebook, and other places authors congregate about reviews and their relationship to sales. There’s a lot of chaff and misconceptions, and I might even have bought into some of them! But I’m going to go through the roughly 18 months of data that I have on The Martian Incident and give some real data on both my sales (which I’ll probably do a bigger post on later this year) and how many reviews/rating I’ve received on Amazon and Goodreads – even showing off the 1-star I’m the most proud of!

Sales

This is my “humble-brag” section. The Martian Incident has sold way beyond my expectations – almost 500 copies in a little over a year and a half since its release in December 2023.

The large majority of those ebooks have come in two waves:

• Release – I moved 40 units (ebook/paperback/KU borrows) in that month.
• Sales – I sold ~30 copies in the Naratess sale in April 2024 and 111 in the Based Book Sale in February 2025.

However, and this is the interesting part, only the former – the release – really moved the needle in terms of getting reviews and ratings! I went from 0 to 20 on both Goodreads and Amazon in a matter of days after the book was released. Some of these were my ARC team, some were organic, but it really moved fast on both platforms. Since then, it’s really petered off – I get maybe a review a month, and no more than 1 or 2 ratings every 30 days. We’ll see if that continues once the sequel The Saturn Anomaly is released or on subsequent sales.

Reviews

Amazon:

Goodreads

It’s the same on both sites. Some of my writing friends have seen higher ratings on Amazon than Goodreads (which tends to have lower scores in general) but I haven’t seen that with any of my books. It’s pretty consistently within 4 to 5 stars and 1 review or rating doesn’t really move the needle either way.

There’s an urban myth that once you hit 50 ratings/reviews on Amazon, you get more organic discovery. I had heard it on podcasts, Twitter, lots of different places. I have not found this to be the case. I hit 50 on The Martian Incident a month or so back and nothing changed in terms of sales/borrows, and the rate of ratings/reviews continued at the same pace as before.

Across all three of my books, I have found a rough ratio of 1 rating/review for every 20 copies sold/borrowed after the initial ARC rush. This has held consistent even with the aforementioned sales – even with a “call to action” (Please rate or review my book on Amazon and/or Goodreads) on the very last page. I’m curious if I’m higher/lower than other authors – this might be a good topic to discuss.

My “call to action” in case anyone is interested:

1/2 Star Reviews

I see many authors worry about low (1-2 star) reviews. My advice – if you trust your craft, and you trust you book, don’t worry about it. I’ve posted this review before on Twitter but it’s still my favorite out of the (thankfully few) low reviews I’ve gotten:

The reader hated the book – got it, cool. But he or she hated it for the reasons I enjoyed writing it! I’m an engineer, I want to “show my work” and include things like that as much as possible. And much of my feedback, both on this book and others, rave about the technical detail and “technicalities” to the point where I’m ramping them up for the sequel.

The best part is that all of the negative comments are available in the Amazon sample – the reader had to have known that the book is written like this going into it!

Moral of the story – don’t worry about reviews. Even your negative ones (like mine) may be positive ones for readers looking for something different than the reviewer – my higher-rated reviews all include the knocks that this reviewer had as positives.

Conclusion

While reviews are important for some things (Book Bubs ads, social proof), they’re not the end-all/be-all of publishing. There’s some connection to sales but the vast majority of your readers aren’t going to leave a rating or review, even if you ask them to.

Instead of worrying about your Goodreads review score or your number of reviews on Amazon? Write your next book!