Most of my blog posts are really positive, sharing exciting news about new releases, blog tours, milestones reached and so on. The reason for all the positivity is because I love what I do, I’m so incredibly grateful that I have a devoted readership who support my writing and enable me to write full-time, and I want to share the successes with my blog readership to show that things can change if they’re struggling at the moment. I struggled for five years but found my publishing family with Boldwood Books who changed everything for me.
Occasionally, though, I write something which isn’t quite so shiny and happy because that’s the reality of the job I do. Much as I love it, there are downsides to being an author. Readers can make an author’s day with a kind review, a message about how much a story has resonated, and excitement every time a new book is released. But readers can also (whether intentionally or not) really hurt an author.
Negative reviews come with the territory. Like so much in life, reading is very personal and what is right up one reader’s street won’t be someone else’s cup of tea. Even if a reader loves a particular genre and reads voraciously within that genre, there will be sub-genres they don’t like and authors whose voice or style doesn’t work for them. Some readers don’t like books written in the present tense and others don’t like first person narratives. And even those who love a particular author might find a specific book or even a series by that author doesn’t work for them. And all of that is fine because, let’s face it, it would be a boring old world if we all liked exactly the same thing.
While I know I’ll never be able to please all of the people all of the time, negative reviews can still hurt. With tens of thousands of positive ones across my books, they don’t hurt as much as they used to but I wanted to talk about a word that appears in many of my reviews which I find such a struggle: predictable. I swear I’m coming out in hives just thinking about it. This word isn’t just confined to the negative reviews – it slithers its way into the positive ones too so can creep up on you unawares. It isn’t just in my reviews either and it isn’t restricted to my genre of romance.
If we look at what the dictionary says, predictable is defined in the following ways – certain to happen, able to be predicted, happening in a way where you know about it before it happens, obvious in advance that it will happen – and so on. When ‘predictable’ is used in a negative review for a book, it is clearly meant as a criticism. But what about when it is given in a positive review (which is a 4 or 5-star review on Amazon who classify a 3 as negative)? Is this an insult?
I spotted a very recent 4-star review for Chasing Dreams at Hedgehog Hollow, the fifth book in the series. The review was full of positive comments about how much the reader loves my writing and how much she values the escapism but the middle of the review states, “I find them [Jessica’s books] very predictable, maybe because I’ve read a lot of books in this genre, but you can often see how the storyline is going in the first few chapters. This one is no exception, but it didn’t stop me racing through it to make sure I’d guessed correctly!”
It was lovely of this reader to leave me a 4-star review and I am so very grateful that she has read and loved my books. What I’m about to say is not a dig at her or anyone else who has left a positive review for me or any other author in which they have mentioned the word ‘predictable’. It is simply an observation about how it feels from my perspective as an author, so here comes my reaction…
When I read this review, my heart sank. I didn’t see it as a 4-star review. I took in none of the positives flanking this and could only focus on this middle bit and, even though the reader tempered this by saying she’s a voracious reader of the genre (so will be aware of the recurring themes/tropes etc), and conveyed a sense of excitement about racing through to check the accuracy of her guesses, this is what my head translated: I find Jessica’s books predictable. All of them. I’ve read loads now and they’re all the same. I don’t know why I bother reading her books because there’s nothing original about them. I only bother turning the pages because I’m hoping for some amazing plot twist which never happens and I only keep going to the end to satisfy myself that I was right and could have plotted this book out myself.
I know that’s not what it says … but it feels like it to me as the author. And, despite being 4-star review and therefore positive, it floats in that dark cloud along with the 1-star and 2-star predictable accusations, a selection of which you’ll find below along with a couple of other insults about my writing abilities (or lack of them!):

“Waste of Time – Not her best work, too formulaic and predictable. Could not hold my interest. If her remaining books in the series are this poorly written I won’t be reading them” (1-star review for All You Need is Love)
“Written for children – Predictable and long and drawn out. Utterly disappointed” (1-star review for The Secret to Happiness)
“Light reading – This story has a predictable ending… Worth a free download. I wouldn’t pay to read this book though” (2-star review for Christmas at Carly’s Cupcakes)
“Sweet but predictable story – This story was okay but pretty predictable and far too sweet and tame for me… There are 2 more books to read in this series but unless they are vastly different from this one I doubt I will bother with them” (2-star review for New Beginnings at Seaside Blooms)
They say that there are no original stories and I turn to a classic author to illustrate this point from way back. Mark Twain in Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review states, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
This quote was published in 1906 so if Mark Twain had declared this 117 years ago, what hope is there for authors today to be completely original or, to put it another way, not to be predictable? And if Twain was thinking this back then, surely that wasn’t him sharing a lightbulb moment at the point where new ideas had run out, so how far back do we go? Could we argue that all modern plots have echoes of biblical stories? What about before then? Can we go right back to cave paintings?
Is predictable even a bad thing? In romance fiction, we talk a lot about romantic tropes. These are elements of a plot which drive the story forward. Readers recognise these and love them and the familiarity they bring. Some readers even have their favourite tropes e.g. enemies to lovers, fake relationship, second chance at love and so on and will immediately dive into a book which promises that trope. There’s been a lot of interest about in tropes on BookTok with books now specifically being marketed by their tropes. There will therefore always be an element of predictability in whatever trope the author is using. If they are using enemies to lovers, then guess what’s going to happen?
And if we strip a romance book back to basics, they’re about boy meets girl (or boy meets boy, girl meets girl, girl means shapeshifter… but that’s a different sub genre and a whole different conversation!) Of course the reader knows the couple are going to get together by the end of the book and get their HEA (happy ever after) or perhaps their HFN (happy for now) ending. That’s the whole point of the genre. There are slight variations. I personally write women’s fiction so my stories are about wider community, friendships and families and there isn’t always a romance story driving the plot. But where there is a romance, the reader knows the couple are going to get together but what is delicious and exciting is the journey they go on to get there. What barriers are in their way? What baggage are they carrying? What misunderstandings will unfold? Will a case of bad timing catch them out? When they do get together, having overcome all of this (or at least found a way to work through it), then we feel a sense of satisfaction as readers and have our “aww” warm and fuzzy moment. Isn’t that what readers want? It’s predictable but what would unpredictable look like? They never get together? One of them dies? One of them is abducted by aliens? There’s a wedding but they’re all massacred? (Hang on a moment, were those last two plots from 1980s US soap Dynasty?)
There will always be exceptions which work well, a classic of recent times being Me Before You by JoJo Moyes which didn’t have a HEA for the couple but, in the main, romance stories will follow the familiar conventions and that does include predictable elements. But I defy anyone to say that everything in the book is predictable and this is what upsets me. I take great pride in my work, carefully constructing the plots and sub plots so that my books are NOT predictable. Chasing Dreams in Hedgehog Hollow in particular presents a mystery and I’ve had feedback from a lot of readers that it isn’t predictable. Yes, readers will know that heroine Lauren is likely to get together with a certain character and I would be happy for readers to predict that because, let’s face it, that’s why that character is there. But her backstory is not predictable and neither are several other aspects so I struggle not to be insulted by a review which uses ‘predictable’ as a blanket term. The romance? Yes, because that’s the point. Everything else? No!
The Boldwood authors are all part of a Facebook group where we ask questions and support each other and predictability has come up as a common bug-bear which crosses all genres. Author Jane Lovering made me laugh in one of the discussions, citing Basil Fawlty’s famous rant from the Fawlty Towers sitcom of the 1970s. Hotel owner Basil has taken a customer to her room and she has expressed disappointment with the view. Their exchange builds up to Basil exploding with, “Well may I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain…” We wonder sometimes if this is what readers expect from our novels! And yet if we moved away from the predictable (familiar) tropes and structure and did something completely way off the mark, readers would very likely hate it.

Let me turn to another genre: crime. The predictable criticism is frequently levelled at authors of crime novels. Why? Is the book predictable because the detective or sleuth catches the murder/solves the mystery? That’s no different to saying that a romance is predictable because the boy and girl got together. The whole point is to solve it. Or is it predictable because the reader guessed who the killer was? But isn’t that the whole point of crime novels too? Isn’t part of the journey seeing if you can be the sleuth and put the clues together to solve the crime?
In the 1930s, several prolific British crime writers joined together to form the Detection Club. Members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Robert Knox and many others. They developed ‘Knox’s Commandments’ which were a set of guidelines around ensuring that the reader had a chance of solving the clues alongside the sleuth. These were considered to be fair-play ‘rules’ and some members like Christie adhered to them, skilfully peppering the clues for the reader. Others were less strict about this. The Detection Club is still in existence today although the members don’t necessarily follow these ‘rules’ anymore. However, most good crime writers would argue that it doesn’t make for good reading if some random person is introduced at the eleventh hour with no connection to any of the storyline so far and found guilty as the murderer. I think most readers would feel cheated if that happened. So some level of predictability exists and, with crime novels, the reader is surely trying to guess and their reward is if they were right. It doesn’t mean the book was too predictable. It simply means they happened to pull together those clues in the right way. Or they got lucky with their guess.
I absolutely love the TV series Vera based on the books by Ann Cleeves. We watch it as a family and try to guess whodunnit. We’re rarely correct or, if we do guess, our reasoning is wrong. But on the rare occasion we get it, it’s lucky. We’d pat ourselves on the back but we’d never, ever say, “Oh, that was predictable”. Because it wasn’t. The only things we can predict are that Vera is probably going to help herself to someone else’s food at some point, and that’s part of the fun too.
What do you think? As a reader, do you like books that are ‘predictable’? Perhaps ‘familiar’ should be a better word? If you’re an author, how do you feel when you see the word ‘predictable’ in a review? Can it be meant in a positive way? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
That’s my rant over for now. I’m off to write another predictable story 😉
Big hugs
Jessica xx
(Or maybe I shouldn’t end it like that because that’s predictable too!)
Hi Jessica,
I’ve never commented on your emails before, although I always enjoy reading them. This one struck a chord with me and I just wanted to say that- there will always be those people out there who find the need to write hurtful or damning comments but there will always be those of us who look forward to reading your books and enjoy them for how they make us feel.
I’m not one to write reviews very often. I first found your books on Audible and quickly became hooked. I’m pretty sure you have always got a 5star review from me but I don’t usually write on the comments section.
I don’t care if a book is predictable- so what. Your books make me happy and that’s why I keep reading them/listening to them. I have another favourite author in the crime genre and I can usually guess whodunnit- but that’s not a negative thing. I always look forward to his books too.
I don’t understand people- if you don’t like it then just don’t read any more. Sadly people feel the need and think they have the right to comment on everything nowadays. (I am very anti- social media for this reason! Especially for the children who are growing up with all of this added stress). I used to read reviews before ordering a book- now I don’t bother. Some people are pretty rude about narrators too and I always feel for them.
Your books have the power to brighten my day and comfort me when needed. I always look forward to pressing play or picking up the book when I have one of yours on the go! I can’t wait for the next one.
I hope this makes you smile xx
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Thank you so much for taking the time to comment, Claire, especially when it’s something you say you don’t normally do. Your words have definitely brought a smile to my face and I appreciate your kind comments so much. It’s great to hear that predictable can be seen as a good thing – perhaps a comfort. I hear what you’re saying about those unkind comments some people seem to think it’s ok to make, irregardless of the impact it may have on the receiver. I do worry about my daughter growing up with a world like that and hope she can be strong and rise above the unkindness shown by some. Thank you again xx
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Tropes (in any genre) are a thing precisely because they are predictable! I read certain tropes because I know the outcome is one I want. With romances I can very often tell from a few chapters in, who my ‘hero’ is going to be – because I do want a hero. The fun is always in finding out how the inevitable is achieved. As for books being tame (or otherwise) that’s a matter of taste on the readers part and not a fault to be laid at an author’s door (unless they’ve specifically suggested otherwise). Just carry on doing what your doing for all the readers that are delighted to read your books – they’re the ones that count. You can’t please all of the people all of the time and when it comes to reviews there will always be naysayers.
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Thanks for commenting Jill and you’re so bob on about those tropes. We want that familiarity, don’t we? It’s what we’re drawn to, knowing we’re going to have the ending we desire. Thanks for your kind words. Really appreciate it x
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You know, I got really angry when we talked about this on the course zoom. When I had a #RespectRomFic as my FB cover photo, one of my friends said she wouldn’t respect rom fic, if it wasn’t always the same old thing rehashed. You put it a lot better than I did, but yes, what do you expect? A romance where A & B are destined to be together, but then A gets eaten by a pack of squirrels & B spends the rest of their life sobbing into a box of Kleenex? Or like you said with crime, 300 pages & nope, they don’t find out whodunnit, oh dear, the murderer is still at large & Miss Marple has taken up knitting. As you say, the JOURNEY is the interesting bit, not just the destination. And your books are truly wonderful, I think I’ve read maybe 7 or 8 of yours now, might be more and I plan to read everything you ever write. And I’m pretty sure the one thing that is predictable is that I’ll be giving you 5 star reviews.
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Wow! What a thing for your friend to say. Why are people so judgey about things? If you don’t like it, move away but don’t slag it off. I’m loving your pack of squirrels eats hero or heroine story, though. There could be some mileage in that, lol! You’re absolutely spot on with all that and thank you so much for your kind comments. I’m very happy with that kind of predictability xx
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A word is a word is a word. It has a meaning in the dictionary and it has a meaning we attach to it based on our experiences in life. As a reader I don’t think predictable word stops me from a buying a book. Readers’ money readers’ words so complete respect to them. In a world of pandemic and war and financial crisis I would think most readers want predictable. If readers are buying your books and enjoying them. That means predictable works. In my opinion reviews are meant only for readers
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Thanks for commenting, Shalini. Good to hear that you’re not put off by that word and I completely agree with the escapism aspect of the familiar, especially right over recent years
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You are an absolutely amazing author, I adore all your books, they transport me right into the story, each book in turn is absolutely wonderful. Please please keep writing I love all your characters I particularly like the Hedgehog Hollow books as we see the progression of the lives of the characters in your books. I give you 10 stars 10 ⭐️ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Best wishes😊🙏🏻
Mary Leamy⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Aw, Mary, that is so lovely. Thank you so much for commenting and for all your support. Really appreciate it. I’ll take those 10 stars with a big smile x
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Every word you’ve written is true and I will share this blog post on my other sites. I think romance does come in for some unfair comments. I mean, when the readers bought the novel how did she think it was going to end? Publishers now (and esp with Book Tok) are very trope-focused and this naturally dictates how a book will end. Sometimes, I feel like saying to reviewers: “what did you expect? Space aliens landing on the beach and taking the hero/heroine off to another dimension/space time continuum.” Perhaps readers/reviewers use the phrase because they can’t think of anything else to say? Who knows. All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not alone in agreeing with your thought.s Or is that just too predicatble ?
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Hi Lizzie, thanks for reading and commenting and you’re so welcome to share away. You’re so right that the trope focus goes even further to signpost what to expect – not only are you going to have a romance where boy and girl get together but this is the way it’s going to happen. And even then the journey is still unknown. I always think about that idea that you can give 100 writers the same premise and characters and they’ll all write the story differently x
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Superb blog, Jessica, totally agree with all you’ve said. Readers can tell by our titles and covers that our books are feelgood romance, and the pleasure in reading them is the journey we take our characters on until they end up where they ultimately want to be. That, as you say, is the point! (Although sometimes, I have a hell of a job trying to get mine there!)
Reviews are so important to us, it’s feedback from people who are supporting our writing careers – and I have in the the past found some critical comments helpful. But I too weep when someone describes our genre a ‘predictable’. When I think of all the time, effort and angst we put into creating wonderful stories taking readers out of their of daily lives for a brief period of – often therapeutic and restorative – escape. Your success is testament to how good you are at what you do! And I ‘predict’ further great and wonderful things for you and your brilliant career! X
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Thanks so much for commenting Adrienne and you have made me smile about the sometimes tough job at getting the characters there. They can be very obstinate! You’ve hit the nail on the head about what hurts. To say it’s predictable suggests no care has been put into it and anybody could have written it which absolutely isn’t the case. Thank you for your kind prediction x
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