Statistics are provided for each of your books, so you can see how they are performing. 

Every attempt has been made to provide a fair scoring system:

1. Only members are allowed to rate books and each member is prevented from writing more than one review per book.  This is to prevent someone giving the same book a thousand reviews (either good or bad). 

2. Only members (regular, authors and agent/editors) downloads count in the ratings of books and only the first download will increase the book's download count .  Simi liar to item 1, this is to prevent someone from downloading the book a thousand times to improve their score. A member may download the book a second time, but the second download will not be counted. 

3. Visitor downloads do not count in the scoring process.  This is necessary because visitors can not be reliably tracked and prevented from executing multiple downloads which would distort the counting process.  We can only track visitors using 'cookies'-which can easily be circumvented.  Thus their downloads are tracked separately on a 'sister site'.

4. Downloads from agents and editors count twice as much as regular download.  This is to ensure books that are attracting agents and editors are being rewarded for doing something right.

5.  The score is calculated by the following formula: [ Total Average rating * (downloads of members and authors)] + [Total Average rating * ( 2 * downloads of agents/editors)]. Please be aware that the Average rating presented above is ROUNDED for presentation, and thus if you calculate your score using this rounded number, you may come up with a number slightly different. 

6. Editors and Agents are carefully verified. If a bogus agent/editor does slip through- their membership will be invalidated and their ratings and downloads removed from the database.

7.Books are ranked weekly based on the scores at the time of the weekly update. This provides stability to the web site and allows a book to hold its rank for a whole week so that viewers may return and find it in the same place they last saw it (for a week). This is probably obvious: but the ranking of '1' means it is the best scored book in the library.

8. Books are presented by their rank: Obviously the books are presented by rank in the TOP TEN page, but books are also presented by rank when a member selects to view by GENRE, by AUTHOR, or if they request to view the entire library. 

What this means is the #1 ranked book will be viewed first in almost all presentations for which it qualifies.

Legitimate ways to increase your ranking:

1. Market your book!  Let people know it's out there and let them know about the book club and what we are trying achieve. Provide people business cards bearing your name, the book and the web site and hand them out freely.  Encourage them to become active in the club: not only reading the novels, but writing reviews to help us improve.

2.Improve the presentation of your book.  Enhance your 'blurbs', select a better review header, re-evaluate your genre to ensure you are attracting the right readers.  Make certain you are putting your best foot forward.

3. Improve your book.  Take the feedback you receive in reviews and make your book better. 

 

Non-legitimate ways to increase your ranking:

1. Lower other's score by giving everyone else's books a bad rating.  This doesn't mean you cannot give a book a bad rating if warranted, but if your ratings do not appear to be in line with the general consensus and there is evidence that you haven't even read the book, at the discretion of management you can loose your reviewing privileges and your ratings will be removed.  (This rule holds true for general members as well.  So don't let your mom do this either.)

2. Multiple downloads by same member to increase count - won't work (see above).

3. Multiple reviews by same member to improve average rating - won't work (see above)

As you can see we have tried very hard to create a level playing field where the best books, presented and marketed the best will rise to the top of the ranks where they stand a better chance of being seen and picked up by an agent or editor.  If you have suggestions on how we can further improve this process we'd love to hear from you.