How to review Audible books

If you subscribe to Audible, you’ve received a prompt to leave a review. These reviews help other readers find good works.

The challenge is that it might take you days, weeks or months to finish the book. Once you reach the end, it’s hard to say if the entire book was great because the early chapters were so long ago. Furthermore, what does a five-star review mean anyway? A consistent scoring range would be helpful.

Here are some prompts and scoring that might I've found useful when I write an Audible review, and you might too!

Summary

• Rate the book overall based on whether you recommend interested listeners should toss / borrow / buy the book were it a hard copy.
• Rate the story based on how important, well-crafted or praiseworthy the book is. For nonfiction, consider background and details too.
• Rate the performance based on whether you enjoyed listening, the quality of recording, and how the narrator handled different voices.

Read on if you would like to know more.

Overall

The overall score feeds into Audible's algorithm  Your overall rating has a direct impact upon whether the book will be recommended to other listeners - you should craft your overall rating accordingly. I recommend the Toss/Borrow/Buy metric:

• 1-2 Stars = Toss. You don't recommend this book to anyone.
• 3-4 Stars = Borrow. You recommend that anyone who’s interested in this topic or genre should borrow a copy, but not buy their own.
• 5 Stars = Buy. You recommend that anyone interested in this topic should buy a copy, ideally featured in the background of Zoom calls.

For Audible books, you're not literally recommending toss or borrow because these are intangible assets, but if they were a physical book, then you would recommend that someone toss / borrow / buy it. Your rating simply maps your recommendation were it a physical book.

Story

The Story score is how important or well-crafted the book is. I don't have an English major, so I can't tell you what is and isn't worthy literature. This just comes down to what you think.

Story can also be how deserving you think the author is of acclaim. For example, if your favourite podcaster released a book that you enjoyed, but you can't in good conscience recommend it to other people, but you want to give your favourite podcaster some support, then give them a 5/5 Story.

For nonfiction, think of it how well structured and paced the narrative was. Some prompts I recommend you consider for nonfiction

• How much background is given? Does it justify its relevance? Examples:
• How much detail was there? Did it slow down the narrative? Or was the narrative lightly seasoned with interesting facts? Examples:

Remember, the story rating is not your recommendation whether people buy the book. Story is how important and well crafted the book is, and/or how worthy you think the author is of acclaim.

Performance

The performance is what you think of the narrator. Consider how much did you enjoy listening to the narrator? This is the bulk of your performance rating. Also consider:

• How good or bad are the different registers? Especially dialogue of the opposite sex to the narrator?
• An important sub-genre of different registers is how good or bad are the narrator's accents, if any?

Your score should also reflect and technical mistakes in the recording. Deduct a star if at any point the narrator:

• Went off-script, e.g. Said something to the recording technician.
• Audibly smacked their lips or inhaled loudly. A good editor should have taken that out.
• Background noise enters the recording, e.g. an emergency siren blares in the distance.
• The audio repeats itself. I once had a book repeat the opening of a chapter. I thought I’d hit rewind but the recording simply played itself twice.
• If the chapter numbers in the TOC don't align with the chapter numbers as read by the narrator, deduct a point.

Ultimately you should write what you think about the book. However, I hope these prompts will help you articulate your thoughts next time you leave a review.

Addenda

Seeing as you’ve come this far and you might now use toss / borrow / buy, then you might enjoy Booko and Better World Books. They’re especially useful for finding books not available on Audible.

• Booko is a price aggregator site for books, you can find many rare copies of out-of-print works here.
• Better World Books is a similar site as Booked (and often appears in Booko results) that focuses on reselling discarded library books.

I’ve used each service to find out-of-print books and heartily recommend them.