I'm noticing that most Top Ten books are getting 2-4 reviews a week. Well that explains everything.

Got sort of sidetracked there, lostamy, you did. I'm not denying there are excellent books in the Top Ten, merely having a moment of revelation as to why some superior books I have reviewed (all subjective of course) have NOT made it to the TT.

I too considered the Read Feed as the main culprit, but not only on the basis of these being unattractive, but on them being too accurate and running across genre-bigots.

I've a record of all those I have reviewed and very few of them resort to angry responses on the MB, most of them being thankful for any and all reviews and eager to clarify points which they have not fully understood.

Scanning down the Thank You thread, there is mighty few angry or even sarcastic responses, so any dander down that road is a bit of a cop-out.

I'm guilty of ascerbic responses to reviews, yet my own genuine grateful Thank Yous by far outweigh the less than enthusiastic ones. It's just that niggly barnacles attach themselves to the negative ones and give them greater weight than they really deserve. But this thread is not all about me.

It is about the MIA delights which do not get the recognition they deserve. "Why bother?" Why bother coming on the site at all? It is a mutually beneficial site. You offer a review, you get a review. You don't have to read their rants or even take them to heart. (this is the generalised "you" - as in 'one') Here, most exist in fanciful avatars. It's not even as if their rants are against the actual person, but the review. But that's me giving in to the clouding of the issue.

The fact is that TT success stories receive more frequent reviews, and it's not all about the unattractiveness of the read feed. As regards first pages, well - any serious reader knows that you have to provide a hook to engage, but you must wait for most of the material until later chapters.

We can't expect the majority of the plot in the first 7000 words. That's ludicrous. That's for screenplays, movies, and short stories, not novels. Yet a lot of reviewers crirticise the writer for just such a "flaw".

The top ten isn't really indicative of the best writing - the most outstanding piece I have read on here (Mutatus) barely cracked the top twenty. It wasn't an easy read for various reasons, but it was fantastic. What the top ten tells you about your writing is that it's easy to read - which means all the usual requirements (grammar, punctuation, sentence structure etc) are in place - and that it has a good hook and sustainable characters.

I'd argue that being in the top ten can work both ways in terms of receiving reviews. Having discussed this before, it seems that members are punished and rewarded in fairly equal measure. If they get timed-out, they can be pretty certain it is NOT because their work is atrocious! the long and the short of it

Mauvey foie - sounds like your paté has grown a pretty color mould.
As Basil at his best wd say: Pretentious, moi?

Mutatus is certainly daring in format and content - in its current form. I don't see any particular evidence to being "fantastic" though. I'll defer to dancingsue on that. She reviewed it a while back and I only glanced at it enough to get a general feel for it - and am a bit embarassed using that word in conjunction with this excerpt from Mutatus.

"Let me lift your skirt,
drive my hand inside your underwear,
touch the secret between your legs as you open them.

Take your bra off.
Let me play with your nipples,
bite them, softly, so you can feel a little pain.

Take my trousers off.
Let my penis come out
straight up
pointing to your mouth;
you can savour it, lick it as I strip before you."

It's as good as erotica gets, I suppose. Nothing one couldn't read in Playboy, James Herbert or Harold Robbins.

I do notice though that it had been reviewed quite regularly and there seems to be consensus in the reviewers that it is quality, though I would not have rated it. But again, I merely skimmed, and also missed its earlier incarnation - or incarnalation.
To me, the synopsis is superior to the content. I suppose that got the reviews rolling. As to ratings, I can only surmise this a matter of taste. I shy away from that idiom, again recalling the excerpt I've incuded here.