I have been attempting, without success, to post a book review on Amazon for a 99 cent ebook I’d bought and read from the giant online retailer. Apparently, this is a highly serious endeavor with great ramifications. The review has been repeatedly rejected and still remains unpublished. I wrote Amazon to ask why it was rejected, and even after reading the reason and resubmitting a version with a bold disclaimer upfront declaring my personal friendship with one of the authors, you won’t find it on the book’s product page. Maybe this practice of rejecting reviews from anyone who appears to know the author has been going on for awhile, but since I rarely write and post reviews anymore, I found the experience both surprising and frustrating, like I tend to do with most illogical policies.
The customer rep wrote me:
“We cannot post your Customer Reviews for [“title of book”] to the Amazon website because your account activity indicates that you know the author.
Customer Reviews are meant to give customers unbiased product feedback from fellow shoppers. Because our goal is to provide Customer Reviews that help customers make informed purchase decisions, any reviews that could be viewed as advertising, promotional, or misleading will not be posted.” Italics mine.
Problematic assumptions underlie Amazon’s policy for denying specific reviewers the opportunity to post their reading experience for other readers. And it indicates a desire to filter or censor information for grown adults who are intelligent enough to navigate the Internet online, shop for products, and who have apparently held down a job long enough to acquire a credit card in order to purchase said products. Plus, regarding book reviews, we are talking about readers here, people who have a refined and developed BS-detector when it comes to the written language. If anyone can recognize a fake review, it’s a reader.
First and foremost, books are not a set of pots or even a piece of software. There can never be pure objectivity in reader responses of books. Nevermind the fact that few people are motivated to write reviews about anything unless they are enthusiastic about the product or feel they got ripped off in purchasing it. Passion precedes the energy it takes to log back into Amazon after a purchase and type up a meaningful review. Reviews are opinions, and opinions are inherently personal and subjective. All kinds of external factors impact a specific reader’s opinion about a book. Books are complex things that elicit wide opinions from readers. My second issue concerns the customer rep’s suggestion that reviews are not promotional or a form of advertising. Does Amazon not understand that book reviews always have been and always will be a form of advertising? Book reviews are not literary analyses that investigate the merits of a work of literature. Even professional book reviews have done and continue to end with recommendations to read or not read the book—a form of advertising. It might be one of the more sophisticated forms of advertising, but it is, without a doubt, advertising. It’s not a mystery as to why books that get positively reviewed in major papers also see healthy sales. Reviews are coveted and hated by authors exactly because they can make or break the popularity of a book. Book reviews are the BEST kind of advertising a book can get.
Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand the recurring frustration generated by shill and puppet reviews, and Amazon’s need to address it. Both as a reader who was taken in a couple of times when I started buying digital books (fortunately, Amazon refunded my money, but I’ll never get back the time lost reading that truly awful tripe) and as a writer who strives to acquire honest reviews for her own work, I see the potential damage these solicited and/or fake reviews can cause for readers seeking honest reader feedback about a book as they shop. Suspiciously-motivated reviews risk the credibility of all the reviews; heck, they jeopardize the whole system and intent of customer reviews. Still. Amazon shouldn’t set up a gate-keeping system to stop one type of reviewer from posting comments on a book on the basis that some reviewers will be less honest than others. Funny thing about that, some people are just less honest than others. Kind of a life lesson here. Deciding that all people who know the author (but not those who don’t) are guided by less than honorable intentions is a broad, sweeping generality that astonishes me, and suggests that authors tend to surround themselves with liars and cheats
Sure, I also depend on posted customer reviews to buy most things on Amazon, including books. As I shop, I read those corny reviews from the author’s friends and family and the more effective reviews from fellow writers, and finally from the amazing bloggers out there who not only fill the content of their blogs with their own honest reviews, but also repost them on Amazon and Goodreads, thus helping both authors and readers find each other, and hopefully, the bloggers’ sites as well. The only reviews I truly roll my eyes at are the ones the author has clearly paid a promotional company to create and post via its network of paid “employees,” i.e. their hundred email/online aliases. But even those are easy to spot—the language is often repeated in one review after another with slight variations, as if a software program simply restructured the sentences in various ways. I’d far rather read a review from Uncle Joe who helped the author come up with the ending and how it all worked out so great and that’s why I should read his nephew’s first book. At least it tells me that the author has loving family relationships and takes advice, both encouraging traits in someone who wants to write.
While I continue to support my favorite authors by starring my reading experiences on Goodreads, I rarely write or post reviews on Amazon, unless it’s for an author I especially admire, either because her writing is my perfect read, or because I think she is a terrific person with a dedicated passion for the art of writing romance. Actually, before I started publishing my own stories, I steadily reviewed a lot of books on Amazon and never had an issue posting my reviews—some of them effusively drooling over authors I loved and couldn’t read objectively if I tried. I never got a message rejecting my review that assumed I was so biased that my opinion was unacceptable. Of course it was biased. I freaking loved that writer’s work! Even their weaker efforts garnered a more positive set of stars and comments from me just on the merit of their best work. Sometimes authors win the Nobel Prize for Literature following the publication of one of their weaker titles; it’s understood that the award takes into consideration their full body of work.
When I published my first book though, I generally stopped writing reviews. I don’t know how anyone else balances writing reviews and writing books for the market. I refuse to write negative reviews of people I consider my professional peers. And, in terms of time, I am generally too busy to review every book and/or author whose work I love anyway. Writing is a hugely time-consuming endeavor. I can either be writing my books or writing reviews, but not both. Just writing this blog today means I didn’t work on my novel. I’m not even sure anyone reads my blogs except for spambots.
If writers starting out in this profession didn’t give each other a leg up occasionally with a review in this competitive field of book selling, especially as indie authors, new readers might never find us. So, yesterday, when I tried to post a review on Amazon for one of my colleague’s books and it was declined, and I wrote to ask why—believing I had followed all Amazon’s review requirements—and I was told that because I knew one of the authors, my review could not be objective or sincerely written. I thought: Not true, and even if it were, so what? No one writes objective reviews. I understand why the problem of misleading reviews might inspire Amazon to terminate reviewing rights to associates of an author. But their solution is ineffectual, even disingenuous. It seems that Amazon is throwing the baby out with the bath water in the name of corporate efficiency. They are pretending that reviewing can be done objectively and without personal benefit in the first place by ANYONE. The closest the industry comes to objective reviews are from the limited slate of reviewers for companies like Publisher’s Weekly, or Booklist, but even these organizations are so enmeshed with earning their keep in the confines of the publishing industry itself that they can’t be seriously considered objective either.
Let’s be frank. Ugly as it may be, the publishing industry is deeply insular. Even at the so-called professional level, favors are done, reviews written for major newspapers by writers and reviewers and academics for each other all the time. It’s consider a form of peer review. Writing doesn’t pay particularly well for most authors, especially in literary fiction, therefore many writers supplement their income by reviewing, or by teaching writing at university in MFA programs that also happen to play a weighty role in which writers gets noticed by publishers, who then are published, and who then get favorably reviewed in the major presses. To be honest, the industry is hugely nepotistic. Pretending it isn’t doesn’t make it so. What is happening now with Amazon’s customer book reviewing is just a less organized, less sophisticated, less cultivated version of what has always happened. Imagine if the major papers didn’t let writers peer review each other’s work? Especially if the publication desired well-written reviews, which would mean that the reviews were being written by writers. And when one considers that the majority of all books are purchased and read by a tiny portion of the general population, we can imagine that even customer reviewers of books on Amazon amounts to a fairly tiny community.
In that email response, Amazon’s rep suggested I send my review to the author to post elsewhere. With print publications, publishers often include testimonials by other authors on the backs of books. With ebooks, this is simply impractical. No one reads the back page of an ebook while browsing online. Frankly, when shopping for books on Amazon, I rarely even read the testimonials posted as part of a book’s description—sometimes they are even folded up in a box that has to be expanded to read. I assume that’s done to ensure the dominant portion of the page is given over to the customer reviews. Also, unless I recognize the name of the organization, the published author or the blog, the blurb means little. Instead, I graze the customer review section, reading a few 5-stars, a few 3-stars and a couple 1-stars. I can pick out the language from mom’s review (generally lacking information about the book itself, i.e. “I’m so proud of this author. I’ve always believed she would be a great writer!”) or from a street team reviewer who got the book free along with promises of other forms of swag (i.e. “Just like in ALL so-and-so’s books, this story was great and your [sic] going to love it like I did.”). In practice, I read a lot of customer reviews, but I read them all with a grain of salt, whether the reviewer declares connections to the author or not.
Subjectivity in book reviewing is inevitable. Never mind family connections, friendships, professional relationships, purchased reviews, free ARCS from Netgalley, or street team fandom—in the end, all reviews are subjective. One person’s soul mate book is another’s pariah. The most respected books in the world have their share of one-star reviews on Amazon. I’d hardly call those reviews objective, even if the reviewer doesn’t know the author personally. Assuming that personal knowledge of the writer unfairly distorts the intent of the review is to suggest that taking money for reviews or running a blogging site that makes money promoting authors doesn’t also interfere with the objectivity of the review. With publishing going indie, readers and writers have active relationships online through social media and meet up in person at conferences and book-signings all year long. Just how “personal” does the relationship have to be to trigger Amazon’s subjectivity alert system? Probably, they can only honestly track these connections when the individuals are both indie authors in their KDP system who have reviewed each other’s work previously. So any connections a reviewer may have with an author outside the internal computers at Amazon go undeclared, unnoticed.
So what if I’m an author who knows a lot of other authors? I am invested in the success of some of them who I like to call friends, as well as colleagues, in a pretty solitary profession. But, I’m also a reader, and a person who strives to do things with integrity. Just as I would not write a glowing college reference letter for one of my students if I didn’t believe the things I was saying about him or her, neither would I write a review that I didn’t believe in, regardless of my affiliation with an author. If a fellow writer asks for a review and I think his or her writing is poor or the book is not worth buying and reading, I decline with the truth of being too busy—which is not a lie since I have a family, full-time teaching career and I write myself—and deftly side-step the request. Just as I 3+ star all the books I like on Goodreads and quietly delete the books I dislike.
Crazily, the rep from Amazon alternatively suggested that I go on the Amazon author and reader boards to post my review. I went on the boards once, a few years back. I posted a mild comment of frustration about some (unnamed) indie authors mis-categorizing their books as romance to try to attract sales, when in reality, the books were not romances at all (see earlier comment related in part to a refund request). The instantaneous, relentless viciousness of the resulting attack on me by several individuals on the forum shocked me, and their attack extended into them taking the time to seek out my prior reviews and mark them all as “not helpful” within hours. In response to one, benign post, that had nothing to do with reviews.
No thanks, Amazon. I encounter enough insanity and negativity with the nightly news and fighting traffic on the way to and from the day job. I don’t need to set myself in the direct path of ravaging, bitter-hearted, mean-spirited individuals who have somehow bullied their way to the top of the Amazon discussion board hierarchy. I suspect they live their entire lives there lying in wait for the next trusting person to come along and innocently post a naive comment. I’d NEVER go back there, ever, not as a writer nor as a reader. I publish through Amazon, but I find their relatively uncensored sponsorship, via free discussion boards, of vitriolic and destructive individuals, seriously disturbing. Amazon protects these people’s anonymity, but they won’t protect a reviewer’s identity? Personally, life is hard enough without being in the company—even online—with individuals who are clearly unhappy and looking for victims to punish with their hateful personalities. Maybe, Amazon might attend to gate-keeping these discussion boards rather than gate-keeping the review process? I certainly know that I’ve never discovered a book to read on a discussion board, since I won’t go there. I spend my time on Goodreads where I can filter out the putrid.
Truly, readers are more than capable of learning rather quickly which reviews are helpful and which are not. In fact, the more people second-guess any information they read on the Internet (including Amazon’s labeled customer reviews), the better their chance of not getting scammed, so it’s a win-win that if for just a few dollars, someone, one time, falls for a dishonest customer review and buys a bad book, causing him or her to learn an excellent lesson that will serve no matter where he or she later wanders the web. I wonder whether the bullies who have dominated the discussion boards when I wandered in, and who probably played an influencing role in Amazon creating this rule about associates not being able to review each other’s books, have swayed Amazon towards a solution more problematic than the problem it hoped to solve. After all, authors desperate for reviews can easily pay a couple hundred dollars to a “promotional” company to generate and post shill reviews—when the “reviewing” employees haven’t even read the book.
At least, with the book I was attempting to review, I had purchased it, read it and I wrote as honest a review as I could. Even friends and family reviewers likely read the book before posting their review. I suspect that they are still far more honest in what they write than much of what one reads in the purchased reviews that seem to dominate some of the indie-author book pages I’ve encountered over the last year or so. Regardless that these hired small-time book/author promoters may operate more crudely than the old professional industry (agents and peer reviewers), their game is much the same. Complete objectivity is not possible in reviewing books, even more so when the motivation is money instead of genuine affection for an author.
Amazon: don’t block reviews by readers who seem to know the author. They’re probably authors themselves. That said, they’re writers who have reputations to maintain, and positively reviewing someone else’s badly-written book potentially affects their own professional credibility. Even if writers review under a pseudonym different from their pen names, many people in their network can easily figure out the connections; and often these are people whose opinions are possibly the most important since they are readers who also buy books. Don’t ask authors to out themselves to review other authors’ work. It’s great when the famous ones do it, but many of us can’t afford a public connection between our real Amazon accounts and our author pen names. At the moment, if I got outed to my employers and students as a romance writer, I’d likely lose my job. My book sales might go up, but I know I don’t want my curious teenage students reading the explicit stories I write. They’re underage and any action that leads them to pick up one of my publications would be morally wrong.
In fact, good reasons exist for Amazon to give up the gate-keeping of reviews by other authors. Here are just two:
- Authors make great reviewers because they know writing.
Amazon desires customer feedback apparently, as long as it’s not from someone knowledgeable about books? Why not appreciate when authors want to review each other’s work. Writers are as close to reviewing experts as the indie market can get. Few street team fans and bloggers understand the true challenge of writing a full-length novel. Only other writers who have climbed that hill understand the true shite or greatness of a fellow writer’s work. And they’re taking precious time away from their own work to write up that review with little personal gain, which probably means it’s sincere, and you can trust it. Even if the courtesy is expected as a returned favor, the review is no more tainted than reviews earned through the exchange of ARCs and/or other swag and incentives common with bloggers and street team members.
- Authors need to be able to be anonymous in their reviewing habits, if they so choose.
Unless Amazon revokes anonymity for all its reviewers, it shouldn’t demand that information from anyone. Making me reveal myself as an associate of one of the authors in the book I was attempting to review felt invasive, and had Amazon required I “out” my author pen name, I’d have had to abandon the review completely—I’m still working on getting it posted. Asking bloggers to do it isn’t much of a hardship for them since it’s also a way for them to publicize their own blogs. But authors choose to write under pseudonyms for important reasons. Don’t play around with that. (It makes me nervous that entry-level retail employees actually have access to this information.)
Unless Amazon demands to know the affiliation of every reviewer on every product, they’re creating unfair access to the opportunity to review. As a private company, that’s its right, of course, but then as a book buyer who reads reviews on the site in order to make my purchasing decisions, I can’t really trust the balance of the reviews overall now because a giant corporation with incentive to sell me books is filtering them according to a personal criteria that is based on pretending that reviewing books with objectivity is even possible. Now I wonder, how many positive or honest reviews got banned because of Amazon’s insider knowledge? Pure objectivity in book reviewing has never been a reality, and I doubt it ever will be. Even professional reviewers with the major newspapers are tainted by association (since they are getting paid for the review as well). Amazon needs to trust readers themselves to distinguish which reviews are most helpful. (Although I’d love to see it get rid of the “no” button for whether a review is helpful or not. My run-in with the Amazon board bullies might still sting a bit. If Amazon wants to improve their review service, it should strip away the means in which it’s too easy for people express themselves in petty ways.)
Is this the future gate-keeping question all customers will face when attempting to post a book review on Amazon?
Before writing a review, please declare whether or not you are:
1) related by blood to the author,
2) friends with the author,
3) currently or were formerly ever in a sexual relationship or in love with the author,
4) a blogger who sells ads/makes money providing reviews on your blogging website,
5) an author competing for book sales in the same genre,
6) a street team member for the author,
7) a competing author or street member of a competing author with a personal vendetta against the author you are attempting to review,
8) A reader predisposed to enjoy this author’s work,
9) A reader predisposed to hate this author’s work,
10) Anyone who might, for any reason, be subjective regarding the quality of the book (some common examples: you were once the victim of a crime and this is a crime story; you were once dumped by a person with the same name as the protagonist in the story; you hate writers who use adjectives and this story had lots of adjectives; your high school teacher or university professor made you read this author’s work against your will).
If you answer yes to any of the above points, please exit the reviewing screen immediately or prepare to have your access to the reviewing platform permanently terminated.
Gosh, feeling really restless and itchy now. Are we at the beginning of the end of objective customer reviewing? Did objective customer reviewing ever even really exist? Amazon can only guarantee its own objectivity by making access to reviewing fair and equal to all customers, to all readers. Maybe Amazon’s decision to block reviews by author “acquaintances” wouldn’t be such a big deal if it wasn’t about books, ideas and reading, but it is.
I wish Amazon smooth sailing through this tumultuous sea of review chicanery–but I also wish they’d recognize that all reviews, whether written by professionals or written by an author’s mother, are in fact all forms of advertising, and are inevitably subjective. Most intelligent adults know (or should know) that advertising exaggerates. Trying to prevent such exaggeration in customer book reviews (both negative and positive) is like trying to stop a wayward tanker from plowing into the docks. Seriously, the act of banning speech and the selling of books will never make for a happy landing.