I've said it before - Amazon has changed the way books are bought and read and given all authors a massive worldwide platform to share their work with the world. They are the King of books and I humbly acknowledge that. However, they can also be sneaky and as a huge player that knows they pretty much control the world book selling and e-book publishing industry, sometimes they do things that are just plain unfair.
Recently an indie author John Locke admitted he had paid for hundreds of glowing reviews of his own book. While it is without doubt an unethical thing to do, it was also without doubt a dumb thing to admit to. So like the whole class who gets kept in at lunch time because one kid won't admit to doing something wrong, thousands (or millions) of other authors have to suffer the fallout from this.
Over recent months many of us have noticed that some of our reviews have simply disappeared from the Amazon.com website. Given how hard they can be to come by and how much weight they carry (in terms of encouraging other readers to buy our work) this is a real setback. Amazon have given no explanation as to why the reviews have gone, they have not notified the authors concerned and they simply refuse to say why. In fact some people who have taken them to task have apparently been threatened with having their account cancelled and being banned.
Should Amazon be on the lookout for shonky reviews? Yes, absolutely. But in reality how many reviews can the average author buy? If you are a struggling first time author you won't be able to afford to pay people to review your book. The reality is that most authors probably do get their friends and family to write reviews for them - but there is nothing to say you can't do this. Again just how many friends and family who actually have Amazon accounts would an average author have? Maybe 5 or 6. Sure some might have more, but we are talking averages here. Also if Amazon want to crack down on fake reviews, shouldn't they only be targeting people who have dozens, if not hundreds of reviews? It just seems massive overkill to take out authors with less than say 10 reviews - let's face it, with that number of reviews you are not going to be at the No 1 spot any time soon!
I get it Amazon, you are the big player and I respect that. I thank you for the opportunity you have given me as an author. But I'm disappointed you have taken such drastic action over this without any consideration for those of us caught up in the crossfire.
Exercising might without regard for casualties. And there is not a thing we can do about it except try and buy from other companies, and do our reviews somewhere else. I'm pretty sure that I lost a review from a total stranger - is it because he said something like 'this is the first review I've bothered writing?' Maybe their programme or humans, whoever are doing it, decided that meant that it was shonky.
ReplyDeleteAre they targeting books with a high proportion of 5 star reviews? Have they forgotten that sometimes it could be because it's a 5 star book? I know that I have only had 5 star reviews deleted, while the few 4 star ones remain, lowering the overall average. Others have said that all the one and two star reviews remain, though they could just as easily be fake as the high-star reviews.
It's all a bit sad.
M. A. McRae (Marj)