No Reviews For You!

Let’s get this straight, before I go off on my rant: I like Amazon. I buy several items from them, including most of my reading material. On top of that, they are the key e-tailer for my books. My writing is sold through several different vendors, but Amazon has the broadest audience which translates into the most sales.


However, I do have a problem with one of their policies and how they implement it.

I ask my readers to write reviews, not only for my works, but for others as well. In turn, I feel it is my responsibility to write reviews also. Why?

1. I ask my readers to do it, so I should too.

2. As a writer, I crave feedback, so I assume others are the same.

3. I want to do all I can to support fellow Indie Authors.

4. A good book deserves praise.

5. A bad book deserves a bad review.

6. There are too many paid for reviews out there and the real reader needs to offset the bots.

Of all the reviews I have contributed, two of them were bad reviews, but all of them were honest reviews. Doesn’t matter. I received an e-mail from Amazon today stating that two of my reviews (the bad ones) do not comply with their customer reviews guidelines.

“Specifically, sentiments by or on behalf of a person or company with a directly competing product are not allowed in Amazon.com Customer Reviews. This includes reviews by authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product.”

Understand, I am not arguing the validity of this guideline. I like it, to a point. There are pros and cons to it, but the Customer Review is broken, and not just with Amazon. More on this later.

The problem I have: They only removed the two bad reviews. If Amazon was honestly removing my reviews because of the stated guideline they would have removed ALL of my reviews.

“…sentiments by or on behalf of a person or company with a directly competing product…”

If I am in direct competition with the authors who received my bad reviews, I am also in competition with the rest of them that received more complementary reviews. (by the way, I seldom give 5 stars…er, gave)

My reviews were removed because the author of the book that received my latest review complained about the one star he deserved. It stood in stark contrast to the many 5 star reviews he paid for. Just FYI, the book had an average rating of 4.2 on Amazon, while on Goodreads and Shelfari, its average rating was 2.

As I mentioned earlier, the customer review process across the Web is broken. It is no secret that companies pay for good reviews. Authors are no different. There are companies that sell reviews to authors. To achieve a four or five star rating on Amazon is easy; you just need the money to do it. This is one of the reasons I do not give five star ratings for anything, not just books.

Amazon is trying many things to combat this issue, but it is a losing battle. The only way to combat this issue is for actual customers to post honest reviews of products, be it a book or cellular phone. Right now, I believe the best way to find honest reviews of books is to find them on Goodreads. For the most part, the reviews appear honest.