Amazon’s Response to Author Reviews
This is somewhat in response to the following articles:
- Amazon Removes Reviews by Joe Konrath
- Amazon Bans Authors from Reviewing Books? by Teresa Frohock
Word on the street seems to be indicating that reviews written by authors, for other authors, on Amazon have been, or are being, removed. I’m not sure what to make of that. There’s undoubtedly been gross abuse of the Amazon review system by certain parties to promote books. Groups of authors have reviewed each others’ books and given glowing reviews without having read them.
Even at its most egregious though, how many reviews are we talking about? I have no idea. I feel confident though that the larger problem is an author’s ability to create ‘dummy’ accounts to review his own work (Stanek, Robert), or the work of his friends. Nothing in Amazon’s new policies will get at that problem. This is the internet, you can’t fix those things.… Read the rest