Matching Reviewers with genres

[R A Lester]

Hello,

I did a review exchange for my book on this forum. The story that I got was an erotica story. I was a little surprised, but not offended by the story. However, that is not my chosen field of reading or writing, and I don't believe that I was the best person to review the material.
Similarly, the person reviewing my book was a (too) young lady whose favorite book is a popular adventure piece. She is clearly NOT the demographic that my book is aimed at. I am actually a little concerned about her having read some of the material in my book. Also, the genre that she believed she was reading was completely wrong. She thought my book was a horror novel, which it isn't.
I believe that this forum needs to do a better job of matching reviewers with material. If a person's favorite movie is Marry Poppins, and you send them Texas Chainsaw Massacre to review, then, they aren't going to like it. I think it is skewing the expectations.

Thanks

[Scott]

What do you mean by review exchange? We don't do review exchanges. The software should have made it clear that it is against the rules for someone to be both an author/publisher requesting review and a member of the review team.

Books are sorted by genre, and reviewers choose which books to read based not only on title and genre but also by the description offered by the author/publisher. If a non-horror book was mis-categorized as horror or vice-versa this must either mean there was a software glitch or that the author/publisher submitting the book selected the wrong genre. Also, reviewers are able to stop reading a book part-way though because it is not a good fit and put back up for a different reviewer. If an author/publisher provides an improper description that leads to multiple reviewers not realizing what kind of book it is and finding out after selecting it that it is not a good fit, then that review request will be cancelled. Reviewers who repeatedly send books back as 'not a good fit' will also be found by statistics, and will be warned and potentially fired from the review team for not taking enough care to check book descriptions and genres before choosing a book.

With that said, I very much appreciate your feedback. And I will try to think of ways to make it clearer to authors to provide a through description and make it clear to reviewers to check the description before reading a book.