My Personal Amazon Rating for My Debut Novel (And Why It’s Not Five Stars)

I truly believe my debut novel is as good as I could get it. So why not max out my own personal rating?

Here is the question behind that decision: can you be objective about your own work? Can you read it not only as the author who has lived and breathed every detail for years, but also as the reader who opens the first page with no knowledge of what’s coming? I’d like to think so—but the truth is more complicated, especially when you’ve been living inside the world for so long.

World and character building are where objectivity slips away most easily. You’re approaching the page with the same imagination that conjured it. So when you describe a character moving left toward the door or heading down the stairs, you know exactly what that means—what the room looks like, how the space is shaped. The reader, though, might be left wandering, disoriented, because you didn’t map it out clearly enough. Or with dialogue: you know the tone, the nuance, the irony in your head. It sounds organic and alive to you. But the reader only has the words themselves, stripped of that private soundtrack, and they may not hear what you intended at all.

With Into the Infinite Unknown, the world is utterly alive in my mind. But the harder question—the one that matters—is whether I made it alive in yours.

Pacing is another stumbling block. As the author, I know where the story is going, so I grant it grace. I’ll linger in the grand introduction because I already trust the reward waiting at the end. But readers don’t owe me that patience. What feels to me like a sweeping overture may feel to them like precious minutes slipping away.

So, can I be objective? Not really. Which is why, if I had to rate my own debut, I wouldn’t give it five stars. I’d give it four. Four stars for a book I’ve poured years into. Why? Because the first book is as good as it can be for a beginning—but it is a beginning. And beginnings should leave room for growth. My goal is that each book in this series will outshine the last, richer and more layered until the whole saga, when finished, deserves that elusive five stars.

But at the end of the day, my rating isn’t the one that matters. Yours is. I can only see the story through the lens of the one who created it—you see it through the lens that decides whether it lives or dies in someone else’s imagination.

So here’s my invitation: read it, rate it, tell me what you see. Did I make the world come alive for you? Did the pacing pull you along—or lose you in the opening stretch? I gave it four stars. What will you give it?