TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Amazon deletes reviews written by people who self-promote too much

By Robert Nagle

Breaking News: Recent reports show that authors write reviews and articles for free—all as part of a secret scheme to  promote their own  books.

Who would had ever thunk it?

Author and book promoter extraordinaire Carolyn Howard-Johnson describes in her blog how Amazon.com has been deleting reviews by self-promoting authors. From an email by Canadian suspense author Cheryl Kaye Tardif:

A week ago I found that all 85 of the reviews I’ve written for other books had been deleted. It has been a very difficult and stressful week dealing with Amazon. They are not very accessible and I was given at least 3 different reasons why my reviews had been deleted. After numerous e-mails, this is what it’s come down to:

Their final ruling: ‘Please know that our participation guidelines don’t allow customers to promote their own titles in their reviews.’ If you sign your review with anything other than your name, your reviews could be deleted.

If any of you are in the habit of signing your reviews with something like "…, author of Whale Song", which has been common practice for years, Amazon has deemed this as "inappropriate" and will be deleting them. It seems they’re on a campaign to go through reviews posted.

Amazon recently made changes to the Amazon Connect program and all our blogs were temporarily gone too. Most are back up.

Amazon will delete your reviews if you have added the book link (that they supply) and directed it to your own book title’s Amazon page. Many authors have used links like that in their signature line. It can lead to deletion and suspension, according to Amazon’s latest e-mail.

I argued the that thousands of authors sign their reviews like this,and that it’s common practice in our industry. I was told by my last publisher to sign my reviews like this… . It made no difference to Amazon that this is what my publisher wanted me to do; they aren’t accepting signatures with titles.

Amazon is starting to take note of such practices and you’ll get no notice; they’ll just pull all the reviews you have written. That’s what they did with me, even though many of my older reviews were signed with just my name.

So to clarify, according to Amazon, when posting a review, you are not allowed to have a signature of anything more than your name, and NO links to or mention of your books whatsoever in the review or sig line.

I am giving you the heads-up now so you can go in and edit your reviews if you choose. That’s what I’d do, to be honest, because fighting with Amazon is not easy. There is no one who will talk to you by phone, and waiting for their response is not easy.

Howard-Johnson comments: 

Recycling reviews this way is a great way for reviewers and authors to get more exposure for their favorite books. They need only get permission from the reviewers to reprint their work. Reviews must be submitted according to the guidelines in the left column of the blog where they’ll find the e-mail address for submitting, the format, etc.. I need submissions to be pretty much a copy and paste process because, unlike Amazon (ahem!), I’m not automated.

BTW, I’m not going back to fix any of my Amazon reviews. I’m a Vine review for Amazon and will be cautious about credits in the future but as for back reviews. Nope. Not going there. It’s time consuming and I have better things to do with that precious commodity.

A few years ago Amazon deleted all my Listmanias with the same excuse, too commercial. It seems they don’t know that THEY are in the business of SELLING books, too! I even used my Listmanias as references for the classes I teach at UCLA (so of course they had to include my books. I mean, they were texts for my classes!).

(Carolyn Howard-Johnson writes a great blog Sharing with Writers and Readers and sends a weekly newsletter of book promoting tips.  In addition to some books about book publishing/promoting, she has published an autobiographical tale, a novel about Mormons, several story collections and several poetry volumes.  See her hilarious account of an author who was chastised by Oprah magazine for name-dropping .She also has started a book reviewing blog for indie authors).

(The thought did occur to me by the way that Howard-Johnson and Tardif were drumming up the controversy as a marketing ploy for their books. If so, kudos to them).

I’ve written before how because of the declining number of book reviews,  bloggers will be writing more reviews about books  by their friends. So far, Amazon.com has been pretty good about balancing  crass commercial interests with its desire to foster a free-spirited  literary community. For example, they allow all sorts of negative and even derogatory book reviews.  From Amazon’s  standpoint, reviewers already can set up a review page which they can decorate. (See for example My Amazon profile page—or Newt Gingrich’s profile page). They even allow published authors to set up Amazon connect blogs.  For heaven’s sake (say the Amazon people), isn’t this enough?!!!

But  the profile page for Amazon reviewers isn’t really that interesting (especially when compared to the  much richer librarything profile page (here’s mine).  Second, Amazon.com needs to make each  review privately available to authors even a review isn’t  ultimately approved. I’ve submitted a few book reviews to Amazon over the years. Most were published, but a small number just disappeared without explanation. For a writer, losing anything they write is traumatic. Third, Amazon.com needs to recognize that an author’s website depends on Amazon.com’s website (and vice versa). It is not awful for the reader/customer to wander away to the URL of an author or Amazon reviewer. Don’t worry; they will return. I use librarything and wikipedia  and google to do basic research about authors and books. Yet I still spend about 90% of my initial Internet research browsing through Amazon.com reviews.

Perhaps one simply needs to reconcile oneself to the fact  that spam will pollute any social network, and that users  who are too spammy will incur the wrath of readers. The underlying problem is that user-generated-content sites like Amazon don’t  recognize contributors well enough when in fact the reviews are a good reason why book buyers keep returning? Why for example shouldn’t Amazon be able to affix a short tag line and URL to each review? Or give a css hover box to the person’s bio when the web surfer hovers the mouse over the reviewer’s name?   Amazon  treats book reviews like signs in a market place (with Amazon.com serving  as the neutral arbiter). In fact, I think once people identify reviewers they like, they will follow their recommendations religiously.  What seems to one person like annoying self-promotion may actually interest an author’s diehard fans.  

I don’t fault Amazon for trying to standardize the user experience or to  prevent individuals from trying to game things too much. On the other hand, private entities have different interests  at stake…and are not always aligned with the interests of literature itself.  Which is why we need a noncommercial repository for user reviews (which companies like Amazon can syndicate for commercial interests all they want). Can a noncommercial entity do this fairly? Well, only a few years ago, if people had said that  the most comprehensive  encyclopedia would be one edited by thousands of amateurs, people would have scoffed.

But can’t wikipedia fulfill that function? I’m afraid not (as I’ve noted elsewhere).  Wikipedia’s core mission is designed precisely to prevent individuals from adding links to their own pieces. But surely variation of the wiki concept could work. Also, a few years back  Technorati was pushing microformats such as hreview  which sites like Technorati could crawl and compile. If hreview were better implemented on blogs, aggregators could gather these reviews and store them for easy retrieval.  We live in an age where web services and databases are only a ping away.

Other entities like Shelfari and Librarything  (or even Worldcat) are posed to collect reviews and to serve the literary community, so either one of them (or both) could probably be custodians of user-submitted reviews which Amazon.com could then syndicate onto their site. These are just random ideas.  But it boils down to one question: can we trust Amazon.com to take care of user reviews?

Robert Nagle’s latest  essay collection Noncrappy Things from my Blog will be published in the fall.