What Is Goodreads — and Why Every Author Needs Ratings

If you’ve written a book, you’ve probably heard the name Goodreads. But if you’re not sure what it actually is or why it matters, here’s the short version.

What Goodreads Is

Goodreads is the world’s largest online community for readers. Owned by Amazon, it’s the place where millions of people go to find their next book. Readers use it to rate books from one to five stars, write reviews, keep track of what they’ve read, join reading groups, and swap recommendations with friends.

Think of it as social media built entirely around books. When someone finishes a great read, this is where they talk about it — and where the next reader goes looking before they buy.

Why Authors Need Ratings

A book with no ratings is a book no one trusts yet. Here’s why those stars and reviews matter so much:

They build trust. Readers rarely take a chance on a book with zero reviews. Ratings are social proof — the modern version of a friend saying, “You have to read this.”

They boost discoverability. Goodreads recommends books to readers based on ratings and activity. More ratings mean more chances your book shows up in front of the right people.

They influence sales everywhere. Many readers check Goodreads before buying on Amazon or in a store. Strong ratings there can move the needle across every platform you sell on.

They give you real feedback. Reviews tell you what’s landing with readers and what isn’t — insight that makes your next book stronger.

The Bottom Line

Writing the book is only half the job. Ratings and reviews are how readers find you, trust you, and decide to buy. If you’re an author, getting your book onto Goodreads and encouraging honest ratings isn’t optional — it’s one of the most important things I can do for my work.

Goodreads

“He wants me to bargain for the ring and put it away with him, brother beside brother.” I said it flat. “It’s a lie. He means to have the ring and to have me in the ground.” — Nathanael Livanos, in The Oagenn: Turning the Tide by Paul Sasser.

Four rings. Four powers older than the world. Wear one, and no other can touch you — but no one who has worn one was ever the same again. One ring bends the living. Its answer rules the sea and sky. He has spent three hundred years keeping them apart.

(This artwork is made by human hands, not AI)

Available on Amazon

The Oagenn: Turning the Tide is available on Amazon for a limited time I’m offering a 50% discount to friends and family who see this link. After that the price will increase to $24.99. Act not to buy the hardback version for the price of a paperback. This offer expires July 21, so act now.

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Less than a mile from where I now live, on a bend of the Waccamaw River, men once built a ship so large the river could barely give her up.

Her name was the Henrietta, and she was the largest wooden sailing ship ever built in South Carolina — and, by most accounts, the only clipper the state ever produced. When I went looking for a ship to carry the hero of my novel across a hundred years and an ocean, I didn’t have to invent one. I only had to walk down to the water and listen for her.

The story starts, as a surprising amount of Lowcountry history does, in Maine. In the 1820s a lumberman named Henry Buck came south looking for timber and found it here, in the cypress swamps and virgin longleaf pine along the Waccamaw. He built sawmills and a town — Bucksville — and grew rich on Carolina pine. After his death, his son William took the family business in a bolder direction: if the trees were here, why not build the ships here too? He sent for Maine shipwrights, blacksmiths, caulkers, and riggers — more than a hundred of them — and laid the keel of something enormous.

They had practiced first on a three-masted schooner, the Hattie McGilvery Buck. The Henrietta was the big swing. Work began in the fall of 1874. When she was finished she ran just over two hundred feet long and close to forty wide, registered around twelve hundred tons, and carried twenty-four sails; the top of her mainmast stood a hundred and forty-seven feet above the deck. She cost a little over seventy-seven thousand dollars to build — an astonishing sum in 1875, out of a town most maps have since forgotten.

And then they had to get her to the sea. This is the part I love. The Waccamaw is a beautiful river, but it is a river, not an ocean road — narrow, dark, hung over with trees. They launched her in the spring of 1875 with her masts still lying on her deck, because there was no room overhead to step them between Bucksville and Georgetown, and a steam tug towed her down toward Charleston to be rigged. When she reached the bar at Georgetown she drew too much water to cross it. So her builders lashed empty turpentine barrels along her hull for buoyancy, cradled her, and floated her over the sandbar by main force. She scraped bottom on her way out. Then she stood into the Atlantic, and she never came back to Horry County.

She didn’t need to. For nineteen years the Henrietta sailed the world — the China trade, Australia, the long Pacific runs — and she was reckoned one of the fastest of her kind, among the last sailing ships to carry tea from China to New York. Local accounts say that when she lay at Portland, Oregon, the only American ship in the harbor, the sitting president came aboard to look her over. In 1894 her luck ran out and she was wrecked off the coast of Japan. Only one photograph of her is known to survive, taken half a world away in Kobe. The Buck shipyard never built a second Henrietta; the experiment, and the fortune behind it, eventually failed.

That was the ship I gave to Nathanael Livanos. In my novel, The Ốẚḡenn: Turning the Tide, she sails under another name — the Rebecca Lane — and I made my changes: she’s a schooner in the book, three-masted still, and her story runs in a very different direction than the real one. But her bones are the Henrietta’s. I wanted my captain, a man who has outlived nearly everyone he loves, to stand at the wheel of a ship built from the same cypress and pine I can see from my own dock. It seemed right that a story about endurance should float on timber that came out of this ground.

I think that’s why the Henrietta has stayed with me. She was made the way I try to make a book: slowly, by hand, by people who came a long way to do careful work, out of the best material they could find close to home. She was too big for the river that made her — and she went out into the world anyway.

The Henrietta

More on how she became the Rebecca Lane in a later post. For now, if you’re ever on the Waccamaw near Bucksville, look at the water a moment and imagine her there: two hundred feet of Carolina pine, her masts on her deck, waiting on the tide.

— Paul

Sources & further reading: the South Carolina Maritime Museum, Georgetown; Robert “Mac” McAlister, Wooden Ships on Winyah Bay and The Lumber Boom of Coastal South Carolina; and the South Carolina Encyclopedia.

Your Job: Read The Ốẚḡenn - Turning the Tide before it launches then make a post on Amazon on November 11, 2026 (the release date of the paperback and e-book). And give your feedback here, anytime. That’s it.

The Ốẚḡenn - Turning the Tide launches in paperback and e-book this November on Amazon. I am putting together an ARC team. ARC stands for Advance Reader Copy. It is a standard practice in publishing, and it is how a debut novel builds momentum. If you do not have it all ready, click on the button below to sign up to be on my team and get your free e-book.

FREE e-book

The initial manuscript is finished, but we could still make some changed. The final edition will be published on November 11. So, between now and October, I would appreciate your input.

Here is how it works.

If you join the team, I will send you a free digital copy of the book. You read the story early. In exchange, you agree to leave an honest review on launch day. You can say you loved it or hate it, or did not read it. It does not matter what you say. What matters is that I need at least twenty people to click on the link on November 11, 2026.

I will send four monthly newsletters out to the ARC team starting in July.

FREE e-book

Reviews matter. They are the single biggest factor in helping a new maritime fantasy thriller find its audience.

I am looking for reliable readers. If you are not interested you are not required to do anything. You can keep the e-book I will send you the details though if you are interested.

The Story. For three hundred years, Nathanael Livanos has worn the face of a man in his thirties. He has a wife, a son, a shipping fortune up and down the Atlantic coast, and one secret worth killing for. In 1935 his immortal brother — who can leave his own body and hunt the night as a black jaguar — takes Nathanael’s son and names his price: the ring Nathanael has guarded since the night he took his brother’s eye in 1886. To get the boy back, Nathanael runs a rescue through the marsh country of the South Carolina Lowcountry and across the sea toward a cliffside oracle who alone knows what the ring is truly for.

Genre: Historical fantasy (1886–1936, dual timeline) Thriller.

Length: ~80,000 words, complete and professionally copyedited — a clean read that will respect your time

Comps: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett meets The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón — epic historical sweep and a slow-burning, atmospheric mystery with a touch of the uncanny.

Content note: Period violence and peril, the kidnapping of a boy, and a historical Lowcountry setting that includes the legacy of plantation slavery and draws on Gullah Geechee culture.

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