From The Bookseller:
Amazon has come under fire for removing reviews from its online book listings, with some customers having had all their reviews removed or being blocked from posting further reviews on Amazon.
Authors, bloggers and publishers have criticised the development, with many sharing their frustration through the #giveourreviewsback hashtag. Amazon has blamed temporary “technical issues”.
Author Isabella May told The Bookseller that she had had a “hellish week” of losing reviews for her two novels, published by a small independent Crooked Cat Books. “I have lost a whopping 11 reviews for my two novels in the space of just a week,” the novelist said. “Everything I am doing now as an author is about raising my profile and following my long-term vision, so as you can imagine, it’s quite upsetting to see one book plummet from a very respectable 55 reviews down to 49, and the other (more recently published title) fall from 36 reviews to 31. For a high profile author who may no longer feel the need to check their reviews, this is but a drop in the ocean. But for a new voice, it’s everything, and very distressing – particularly as my publisher retail solely online and solely via Amazon.”
Another reviewer and novelist told The Bookseller that some of their own positive reviews for other writers had been taken down from both Amazon.com and Amazon UK, noting that books from Amazon’s own publishing arm, such as its fiction imprint Lake Union, attract significant numbers of positive reviews. One title White Rose, Black Forest garnered 2,960 reviews on Amazon.com within three months of publication.
The reviewer, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “Is this removal of reviews from other authors part of Amazon being at the top in terms of publishing? Because whilst we all suffer, their authors seem to have review numbers the rest of us can only dream of.”
Despite emailing Amazon May was told the reviews would not be reinstated because they were “in violation of our guidelines”. She was not told which specifically but was directed towards its lengthy community guidelines microsite which includes various sections which includes a section on how the company “may restrict the ability to submit a review when we detect unusual reviewing behaviour”.
The retailer has developed tools and policies to combat fake reviews amid problems over “reviews for hire”.
. . . .
HarperCollins’ commercial publisher Kimberley Young told The Bookseller that the removal of reviews enables Amazon to promote its own books “at the expense of others”.
“Writing an honest review on receipt of a proof copy of a book is both an established practice and also a very modern tool,” she said. “Reviews drive word of mouth and help readers find the right books for them. We know algorithms favour well reviewed books and I can’t see how the removal of reviews across so many titles on Amazon can benefit the consumer – it narrows the range and discoverability of books and is another step in Amazon supporting their own books at the expense of others.”
Another senior publisher who wished to remain anonymous told The Bookseller: “This is an example of a megalithic global corporation heavy handedly trying to manoeuvre in the complicated, interconnected world of the modern book publishing community where relationships between people count not algorithms. The fact that someone follows you on twitter or Facebook does not reveal a conflict of interest for their reviews on Amazon and does give the book buyer a really good service.” The publisher added: “I suspect this another move by Amazon to favour titles published through their own publishing channels or through their massively profitable self-publishing lines. Amazon have a real problem because while none of their titles published physically through their publishing imprints are carried by any high street retailers and while they continue to sell smallish quantities of millions of titles at 99p in digital, for instance, and making lots of money from that, very few of those authors generate real commentary, hit the bestseller lists, have any media profile or generate enthusiasm among normal book readers.”
Link to the rest at The Bookseller
PG notes that HarperCollins and other large publishers also fit the description of “megalithic global corporation[s]” who have tried to manipulate the book market.
PG further notes that Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster plead guilty to illegal price-fixing for ebooks. So HarperCollins is a self-admitted manipulator of the book market “at the expense of others”, including purchasers of books.
PG understands that this is old news for long-time visitors to TPV, however he reminds one and all that the major US publishers have willfully violated the law in an effort to force purchasers of books to pay millions of dollars in higher prices. PG thinks their sense of entitlement and commitment to market manipulation extends to the terms they offer the authors of the books they publish.
So my reviews have actually begun to re-appear again:
https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/571485/page-2#post-2254874
As I stated there, this looks less like a penalty and more like an IT error after Amazon tried to integrate my Goodreads reviews using misaligned dates.
If anyone else was affected around this time, I wonder if their reviews have also returned? Have you seen any chatter about this @PG?
I get all sorts of organic reviews of my books. I should be above 600 reviews on one book on Amazon. Over 300 on another. But I hover around 580 and 240. I’ll get a review or two. My review count goes up. And then a week or two later my review count goes down. It’s not the new ones but some review somewhere in the list.
The only thing I do to promote reviews is to put a link at the back of the book saying if you liked the book, please review.
I’m happy Amazon is policing the reviews, but it’s odd to me that reviews that passed muster for months, maybe years, are suddenly removed.
Last week Amazon removed every review I’d ever posted: https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/571485/
I can understand their reasoning, but I still think it was a bit harsh.
How long before it happens on GoodReads as well?
Review problems aren’t limited to books. Twice recently I’ve tried to review products (one was a movie, the other was a router), but when I clicked the stars to begin my review I got a message saying my review couldn’t be posted. There were two or three reasons given as possibilities (one being what was in this article about there being problems with the reviews for that product). I emailed customer service about the movie I wanted to review. They checked, found that there was a problem with that listing, but they fixed it and I could then review it. That worked. But then I emailed them about the router review I wanted to post and they have emailed me four or five times — saying there’s a delay because people who work on that sort of problem are overwhelmed (my word, not theirs) and unable to take a look at the issue. The most recent email (Thursday) said they expect to get back me on Tuesday.
I also noticed that one of my reviews was no longer posted when I tried to update the review with new information.
“And Amazon’s profit margin is thin in some areas – so cleaning up scams is important for profit as well as reputation.”
But is it worth losing all the ‘honest’ writers the scammer sweeps will net? Like any other type of lose, Amazon has to balance it against losing even more in gains.
“In my own mind, though, the ability to publish as an indie at all, with the reach and access, still amazes me.”
Me too! 😉
Because whilst we all suffer, their authors seem to have review numbers the rest of us can only dream of.
Of course they do. They have promotion the rest of us can only dream of. Sales, too.
It’s called forced exclusivity.
Since nobody but Amazon wants to sell APub books, the coop money (and sales) that would’ve been spread across thousands of newstands and bookstores is spent at Amazon.com and on Kindle First promos.
Law of unintended consequences.
Or as Nieztche said: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
What did they expect? Amazon to roll over and play dead in the face of the B&N and ABA boycott? Not in this universe.
Consider the source; it’s simple ADS: Amazon can do NOTHING right, EVER.
And the traditional publishers never do anything wrong.
The authors whose reviews are removed, or the readers, have never done anything contrary to the terms of service. Etc.
I’m sure many books get caught in schemes not of their author’s making, but most of the time what I read about each case leaves an awfully large number of unanswered questions in my mind about the details of the individual cases being cited as terribly wronged by Amazon’s machinations. And without full details, it is not possible to determine innocence.
Scams abount. Stuffing is a scam. Click farms are a scam. People have slippery ethics and morals.
And Amazon’s profit margin is thin in some areas – so cleaning up scams is important for profit as well as reputation.
In my own mind, though, the ability to publish as an indie at all, with the reach and access, still amazes me.
Ah, what would we do without our weekly offerings of ADS from ‘The Bookseller’? 😉
“The retailer has developed tools and policies to combat fake reviews amid problems over “reviews for hire”.”
Which upsets those gaming the system, and like everything else it will catch a few ‘honest’ reviews in its net.
As we’ve heard before, ‘X’ wants something Amazon isn’t correcting ‘fixed’ and then cries foul when the fix catches ‘them’ as well.
(One of the bosses at one job just knew people there were surfing porn on the job, so he had the computer room add filters and tracking software. They did manage to catch one guy surfing porn at work – that boss …)
That’s disingenuous, at best.
Sure, removing legit reviews helps no one. But removing scammer reviews means the would-be buyer who wants to consult a book’s reviews does not have as much work to do, discerning which reviews are legit and which are not.
Agree. But my eyes glaze over with these complaints in general because they never seem to come from people who:
1) Bothered to read the manual,
2) Carefully avoided doing the stuff on the Do Not Do This list,
3) And still had their reviews taken down.
We seem to keep hearing from authors who never read the TOS. I get it, because so many companies have a TOS that isn’t intended for humans to read, so users are primed to ignore them***. With Amazon, think of their TOS as a contract, which your pocketbook is affected by.
***When I was testing features for my old company’s mobile app, I would put the new features inside the TOS section. My department head laughed when I showed her, because our metrics indicated that nobody read that section. Any oddities resulting from my beta testing would go unnoticed.