A Review of My Side Hustle (Part 2 of 3)
Back at the end of May, I started writing book reviews for Online Book Club. This is a review of my experience so far.
My final issue with their system is with the claim that a reviewer could become a level 5 or 6 reviewer in as few as three reviews. Now, the reviewer score is out of 100 points. You need at least 85 points in order to be a level 5 reviewer. A person can get a score of 46 without ever writing a single review. You do have to have written at least one review to get any other points.
14 of those points come from popularity. So if your first three reviews are wildly popular – either 1400 average views per review or an average of 14 unique replies per review. If you really work at it, you could conceivably get that average of 14 unique replies on each review, but I will mention it has taken me until my fourth review to get 15 unique comments on the single review. The other three all only have 2 or 1 unique comment, bringing that average down. But if you are really dedicated, I can see getting the 14 from the start.
Still, this only brings you to 60 points. You still need 25 points to make it to the minimum score for level 5. All of those points are from Editor Scorecards. These are filled out when an editor for the site reads through your review before publishing it. This scorecard is also done on a 100 point basis. 30 points come from following the rules (you either get all the points or none of them). 40 points come from copyediting. You lose 10 points per spelling/grammar/punctuation error. And the other 30 come from the editor’s subjective rating.
They try to have more than one editor go over your review, and they average your score. This seems fair, but some of the copyediting stuff can seem subjective as well. Errors one editor finds, another does not, or does not see as an error. (For example, one editor docked me 20 points for not hyphenating “middle grade” but another did not. I have also been docked 10 points for something the editor decided was a run on sentence, but was actually a properly constructed and punctuated sentence with dependent clause.) But if one editor docks you 20 points for 2 errors and then another one docks you the full 40 points, they will go back and adjust the first editor’s score by the additional 20 points. And then they average.
All of this is to say, it can be really hard a perfect score on an editor score card. And that overall is fine. Over my four reviews, I have an average editor scorecard rating of 70%. Given that they say the average is about 58%, I will call that pretty decent. However, remember going back that in order to get to be a level 5 reviewer, we need at least 25 points from this editorial analysis score. My four reviews with an average review rating of 70% gives me 16 points.
This is part of the formula that has no transparency. The average they use is out of the last 30 scorecards. I have 6 scorecards. Obviously, they are not using an average of 30 scorecards to give me my points. (This is good.) But 16 points is also not 70% of the 40 possible points, which is what I should have if they were only using the average of the number of scorecards I have. 16 points is 40% of 40 points. Which means that my editorial score is based on 10.5 scorecard, 4.5 of them having a score of 0. But that is me doing the math. I have no idea how they actually formulate this part of the score. But based on this, my math says that even if my average editorial score was the full 100, I would only have 21.8 points, not the full 25 I would need to get to be a level 5 reviewer. So how could someone get there in as little as three reviews?
By my math, they would need to score a perfect 100 on 7 reviewer scorecards. That means all of their reviews receive two editor scorecards, and one receives three. (For the record, I have gotten two editor scorecards on two of my reviews and only one on the other two.) This is again, something out of the reviewer’s control.
I have no problems with the rule that says people need a total score of at least 85 before they can start getting the highest paid review jobs. I understand site’s need to protect itself/it’s integrity around these reviews. I do have an issue with the claim that someone could get to that score in as few as three reviews.
