Last week, I shared a post all about my different reading tracking methods. One of the ones I mentioned was CAWPILE. Today's blog post is going to be talking about my experiences using CAWPILE so far.
What is CAWPILE?
CAWPILE is a book review/rating method created by G from Books Roast on YouTube. The acronyms stands for the seven elements in a book that can determine your enjoyment. They are characters, atmosphere, writing, plot, intrigue, logic and enjoyment. When you have finished a book, you input your details and for each category you give it a score from 1-10. It is then divided by 7 to give you an overall star rating. G has created a CAWPILE template spreadsheet that does all the maths for you, that you can download and use.
Why did I decide to start using it?
I've been trying to give my ratings more analytical ratings rather than just enjoyment. Sometimes when I give a book fives stars, I look back and think, that book wasn't worth five stars. With this method, I can rate individual themes/categories and see what I feel about them individually. It's helped me think clearer about how I rate my books.
My thoughts so far?
I've been using CAWPILE for nearly two months. My thoughts so far are that it's a great way to review books. It helps you think about them with clarity. I'm more keen to read so that I can add the data to my CAWPILE spreadsheet and see how I feel. That being said, I do have some issues with this rating system. Firstly, and this is entirely personal, is that it uses 1-10. I struggle with 1-10 as I very rarely give books low scores. I mostly give them 6-7 (and that is low for me). I would prefer 1-5 as that's what's used on Goodreads. My other issue, is that sometimes I can input the data for a book and I know the star rating it comes back with isn't quite right. It's very hard to get 5 stars on CAWPILE. I will admit that I have cheated and changed ratings for when I know a book should be 5 stars. Overall, I have really enjoyed using the CAWPILE method and am planning on continuing using it. I've been able to see which areas of a books writing, plot etc stand out to me when I'm reading. It's also been informing me of what I prefer so I can include that in my own writing. I've tried so many different ways of rating books over the years and this one does feel like it's the right one for me.
Have you tried the CAWPILE rating method?
