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As a long-time D&D player, I wind up trying to translate 1-5 ratings to the 3-18 bell curve for D&D stats:
3: 0.5% (actually 0.46, rounded off)
4: 1.4%
5: 2.8%
These get grouped together as 1 star: abysmal. Nobody (reasonable) can call this a good book; the best that could be said is "it had interesting characters" or "occasional good dialogue;" nothing made it worth finishing unless the reader was under some kind of duress. Not recommended to anyone.
6: 4.6%
7: 6.9%
8: 9.7%
Two stars. Awful, but might have some redeeming traits anyway. Maybe. If you're feeling generous. Might have some appeal among genre fanatics, or people who absolutely loved one of its feature traits ("I love anything with pirates in black boots, therefore this was worth reading.") A lot of older erotica is in this category--the writing's awful, but so little was available that readers were willing to put up with it. Some older science fiction is here too, for the same reason.
9: 11.6%
10: 12.5%
11: 12.5%
12: 11.6%
Three stars. Average. Maybe a little above, maybe a little below, but mostly run-of-the-mill. Tolerable but nothing special. Most formula/line-based romances go here--if you love the genre, they're nice timewasting material, but you won't remember the details a month later. (I assume that a lot of genre line material is here, but I don't know enough about potboiler mysteries or adventure novels to be sure.) This level has a problem: fans of the genre or the details of the story are prone to rating it with 4 stars because they liked it.
13: 9.7%
14: 6.9%
15: 4.6%
Four stars. Exceptional; stands out in the field. Should be interesting to people not interested in its genre. People who hate the genre should still be able to find this worth reading, although not to their tastes.
16: 2.8%
17: 1.4%
18: 0.5%
5 stars. Excellent. Is noticeably good by any scale of objective standards people can come up with for literature. Should have strong appeal across many reading preferences.
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