The Sad Truth about Amazon Reviews: Observations of a Book Reviewer

Many book reviews on the Amazon platform are not genuine. This is a sad fact the average Amazon shopper may not realise. Dozens of five star reviews will often magically appear weeks before the release of an A-list author’s book, regardless of its quality. There has also stories of sockpuppets, rival authors giving one star reviews on books that compete within their genre. Authors will also create fake accounts to sockpuppet five stars upon their own work.

The Problem of Bogus Reviews

Amazon has tried to crack down on bogus reviews via algorithms that detect connections between the author and the reviewer, which might be the IP address of the computer, a home address or if there has been communications between reviewer and author online. For any of these reasons, reviews will disappear, but sadly, the review system on Amazon remains badly flawed.

The Stakes of Being a Vine Reviewer

Vine reviewers and highly-ranked reviewers have a lot at stake. Helpful votes will enhance and unhelpful votes will mar. Consider that a positive review is more likely to receive helpful votes than a negative review. Getting unhelpful votes will lower the reviewer’s score. For this reason, a reviewer that goes round giving four and five star reviews all the time is more likely get lots of helpful votes. Valued reviewers will also steer clear of controversial books or books they dislike, causing the posting of a ‘correct’ rather than an ‘honest’ review. Big publishers will give away hundreds of free books to the ‘correct’ reviewers, and if any of them don’t like the book, the review will not be published.

Popular Negative Reviews on Amazon

There are exceptions to this rule, for instance the ‘worst book ever written’ (I won’t say what the book is, but look it up) where people in their droves voted up the negative review. And on that matter, helpful votes are also given to a review simply for being funny.

Having produced books since 2006 have I learned one simple truth about Amazon. Your average honest and humble book lover simply will not leave book reviews. They just don’t want to – and I can’t really blame them. Book lovers like to read. Writing is a different matter. I have sold thousands of books. I’ve received my share of one-star potshots from rival authors and unfair reviews, but only a small amount are genuine reviews. In fact, I have received very few reviews overall. This is why I am always suspicious of a book tailed with dozens of book reviews weeks on its release.

Marketing a Poor Book Breed Success

This is the effectiveness of marketing prowess of huge book publishers. Even if the book is very poor, so long as it is backed by sponsors and those with a vested interest and those who receive freebies for being a ‘valued’ reviewer, it will get sales and reviews. I have yet to see a book published by the Big Five without a rack of reviews within a week or so of its release.

How to Tell if a Book is Any Good

The best way to determine if a book is any good or not is not to take Amazon at face value, but look at other sites. Some might consider Goodreads. Goodreads is owned by Amazon, and unlike its main platform, Amazon will not remove reviews or ratings there but it is very easy to set up several accounts and leave yourself lots of reviews. Goodreads is a system begging to be abused.

Platforms of lower caliber that have nothing to gain and nothing to lose are worth looking at. This is why I will often surf other sites for honest reviews. These include Barnes & Noble, Ibooks, Kobo, discussion threads, book review blogs or even Google itself.

When a Book Review is not a Book Review?

When it is posted on Amazon - boom boom. No, but seriously...

When a platform becomes competitive, when there is something to win or lose, when someone’s livelihood becomes dependent upon it, when sales are at stake, the system become corrupt. The same applies to everything else. Amazon has yet to crack the problem, but from where I stand, most of the reviews on Amazon are not a true reflection of a book’s quality, only of a political agenda.