What better way to know the quality of a product than to read the reviews, right?
Not so fast.
Reviews can be more, or more aptly put, less than what they seem.
In the past, traffic of any sort indicated success (unless it involved penitentiary admittance or firing squad access). Offline or online, traffic in the door moved inventory. As a former musician, I know that the goal was always to get ‘listens’, whether at the venue you were performing at, or via some form of online medium. When it comes to music and video, that still remains the big ticket to success. If you’re Bruno Mars, you know you’re doing well when your Youtube videos have more views than the population of the planet.
But with other items such as toilet-bowl brushes, hair removal kits, and books, reviews both in number and rating are the Eldorado, the motherlode for sales. However, like view counts, these measures are sometimes heavily exploited to ensure that your product gets purchased, regardless of its quality.
No more so than with ebooks.
I’m officially a published author. Yes, yes, thank you. You are too kind. No, I can’t buy you a coffee, for crying out loud! I can’t buy myself a coffee. Did you not hear? I’m an author! The only way I can ever hope to afford to buy us both coffee is to rack up a bucket full of shiny four or five-star reviews in order to get my book appearing in the right places to sell more copies and get more royalties.
But what am I willing to do to get there? Is my book able to stand on its own merit and all I need to do is market it properly, or do I lack the tools to get there because I am 1) not a good writer, 2) too lazy to fix it, 3) too broke to fix it, or 4) too broke to do any marketing, so I’ll just launch it and pray due to budget constraints or, if I fall under category 1 or 2, trick the reader into buying it by jigging the system?
I am inundated with various schemes, tricks, and methods to get more reviews, many of them legit, some more nefarious. Why? Because every author knows that having a reservoir brimming with stars means more book sales. Good, bad, or ugly.
On Amazon, the number of reviews dictates your visibility as much as sales. And Amazon rules the book nest.
Amazon used to have an equal share of the global ebook and book market. But over the course of the past several years, it has grown to the point where it has little competition – a near monopoly – accounting for the lion’s share of every ebook sold in the world. Last year, it sold over 80% of all ebooks in the US. Because of this, it is now coercing – no, let’s be fair – let’s call it it ‘nicely nudging’ authors toward exclusive contracts with Amazon by not paying more but actually paying less, but allowing those authors the ‘privilege’ of accessing Amazon’s preferred tracking algorithms that put that book in a better position to get noticed and gain reviews, along with other exclusive ‘perks’ and ‘benefits’ to reel an author into signing. At the same time, Amazon alienates its own authors who don’t opt in to the Amazon-only program by making it more difficult for non-exclusive books to get noticed. Some would call it extortion; others call it free enterprise. Call it what you will, today’s indie author is the modern equivalent of the 1980’s bank teller who got ‘bonuses’ for how many customers they got to sign up for ATM cards, right up until they were laid off and replaced by ATMs (of course, ATMs can’t write books – yet. Give them time).
Even as you go down this spiraling drain into the abyss that is the Amazon monopoly, you as an author will still need reviews if you ever hope to sell enough books to make any kind of dent in that lowered royalty you are getting.
So how does one go about rounding up a bunch of reviews in enough time to get the book noticed while it is still considered ‘fresh, ‘new’, and surrounded by ‘buzz’?
Many give their book away for stints of time, or use one in a series as the ‘loss leader’ by permanently having it offered for free – say, book one in a trilogy. For a while, this strategy worked well for many authors, getting more eyeballs on the book and thus more reviews organically as they established a loyal readership. Now, due to the sheer volume of books out there that are all doing the same thing, the bar has been lowered and far fewer people move enough books while making less and less. If they do move a lot, it’s usually because it’s free, and the author might rise up the bestsellers and get name recognition – and not make a single penny in revenue, going so far as to lower the price on all the others in the series because reader loyalty is directly proportional to free access. In fact, there are websites offering tens of thousands of ebooks to readers for free. Some authors have reached the point of listing all of their titles for free just to get noticed, hoping that with higher volumes, they’ll be able to put out a future book with a price attached to it. But they have now spent all their valuable time and resources attracting the very group of readers who rarely pay for books. Authors are slowly being turned into free entertainment providers and more readers expect more books for nothing. Kindle Unlimited has exacerbated this by offering all signed-up authors’ works for free for a monthly subscription, advertising to the readers, “read an unlimited amount of books for free!”, lowering the payout to all of the authors in the pool.
Because of this, getting enough reviews and ratings and still make a penny for a book has led some authors to simply cheat. Unfortunately, all indie authors suffer when this happens.
Raise your hand if you have purchased or been gifted an ebook that had dozens of five-star ratings and reviews and was complete and utter swill, full of typos, painful grammar, and massive developmental plot-hole potholes? Haven’t you ever wondered, “what the hell were all those people thinking who gave this piece of tripe a five-star rating?”
Was it from their mother? His neighbour Reggie? Their best friend and all her friends who the author promised to take to the next Fifty Shades movie for free if they rated her book? Possibly, although Amazon does do a half-assed job of blocking anyone directly associated with the book such as family, editors and publishers, etc. It is more likely that they used one or more of the techniques described shortly.
Let’s face it – Indie ebooks get a bad rap. But any reader who voraciously reads a lot of books will tell you – a large number of indie books simply don’t measure up to the quality of professionally published books. However – and this is a BIG however – there are tens of thousands of unbelievably good indie books that are not only equal to but far superior to what the Big Five publishers are pumping out. The problem is finding them, and the measure that we’ve come to trust to do so is no longer as reliable because of the cheat tactics employed by so many to try to sell more books.
Oh, I know. Many will cry foul here. “You’re being unfair to indies.”
I am an indie.
I hope that every review that every indie publication gets – including my own – are honest. In a perfect world reviews would all be judged at face value. They’re not. A reviewer or enemy of an author who is pissed off can arbitrarily post a one-star hate review. A next door neighbour can create ten Amazon accounts and top-review an author they are trying to invite out on a date, posting ten five-star reviews and then sending them chocolates, never reading a single page of the book. All of these things influence how a book is perceived, so the opposite can happen to an author and a perfectly good book can get ostracized by horribly low or spiteful people. But let’s take a good look under the hood at all those five-star reviews piling up out there that were deliberately created by the author to ‘beat the system’.
1) The Swap – Amazon discourages this and if it finds any indication that swapping is occurring it is swift to delete and/or limit the perpetrator’s account. Still, it happens, and it happens a lot. Amazon knows that its system is in trouble, and it is pulling out all stops to try to protect the numbers and star review game that is supposed to be generated by real, genuine purchasers with honest intentions.
The swap gig goes something like this: author one contacts author two. Both agree to review each other’s book and give each other a great rating. Bang! We now have two, five-star reviews out there for masterpieces, entitled, “I dun up did like loved my mama” and “Five hundred decorating ideas for your toilet.” This is repeated umpteen dozen times, often staggered over time to avoid the Big Brother crawlers of Amazon, and TADA! Dozens of five-star gems for shite.
2) Piranha promotion groups – many of these are paid promotion sites and they feed on one another like swarming fish, giving each other accolades, free book copies, and lavish reviews and ratings. Again, all of the ebook resellers – Amazon, iBooks, Google, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc – are tightening the noose around some of these setups to protect their review system integrity but, for the most part, they are failing. Then again, there are others: Facebook reader/writer groups and promotion companies that put authors in front of professional reviewers, paid readers, etc. that do nothing but raise the caliber and bar on book reviews. Unfortunately, the less reputable ones are growing in number.
3) Book Review Clubs/Groups – to be fair, there are many review clubs out there that do an amazing job keeping things honest. I’m in two. But even those face pressure from within and from Amazon. This is more about the shady ones.
This is how it is supposed to go: A bunch of authors form a club, invite readers to join, encourage members to either gift or purchase member authors’ books and then give them honest reviews. Sounds great, and for some – like the ones I researched and chose to join – they are. The two that I am in require verified purchases (no gifting), strictly enforce anti-swapping, and demand honest reviews only.
But think about this for a moment: if you purchased a book from a fellow club member and you start reading it and it is absolute poo, would you give it a two-star? A one-star? If no association or ties existed to your own book, you would nail it with a one or two-star without thought, or would simply not post a review at all. You might contact the author, politely tell them that you won’t post a review in order to avoid damaging their reputation, etc. That’s cool, but that’s not what usually happens. The more common outcome is that, to avoid conflict or an uncomfortable altercation, the club member gives a three or four-star just to stay on ‘good terms’ with fellow club members. Because hey, you’ve got your own book out there, right? What if they get mad? They could easily post a revenge review of one-star without even reading your book!
Go honest here. If you sign up for a book club or group, use it to better your writing, do everything you can to support your fellow club members. Buy their books. Review them. Promote them to your friends, but be honest with your reviews. If you read it and you feel it’s poorly done but feel uncomfortable about roasting the author, no problem. Don’t post a review. Just don’t lie. You’re lowering the bar for every indie author out there. If it’s okay, proudly post a three-star because it is not that bad. In fact, based on how Amazon operates, it might be really good for the author and book you’ve given it to (more on that in the next blog).
4) Hire a company to generate reviews for you – although this sounds the dirtiest, surprisingly, this can be the most legitimate way to get quality, honest reviews in larger numbers.
But, like all things, it can also be one of the low-brow, slimiest ways as well.
If you are going to go this route, like with a book club, take the high road. Don’t go with the ones that simply sell you a cartload of reviews from some review mill where 200 people read the book description or a synopsis provided by the author and ZINGO – 200 five-star reviews for your book pop up, where ninety-percent of every sentence in the 900-page tome starts with the word ‘Billy’.
Dead giveaways of mills?
a) Large number of reviews with no verified purchase.
b) Many of the reviews are produced in starving countries exploited for their low labour costs, often where English is a second language: “I good book love! The monster go ate the goat and the woman saved hero by!! Will next buy book, definitely!”
c) The reviewer has submitted 148 ebook reviews since last Thursday.
If we all want to keep the bar on reviews higher, stick to the verified purchase companies who do NOT guarantee anything but honest reviews. Instead, they will provide a specific number for a specific price. These companies are getting real readers of the style or genre of your book to buy it and say what they really think. If you don’t have a strong, well edited book, you might want to stay away from this option because your book might get butchered. Or, then again, maybe it’s time to test your book’s mettle. I think you should do it, address what comes up, with your ego gently clipped to a coat hanger in the closet, and then resubmit a better book to the world in the future if it bombs.
So why not the old-fashioned way? Why all the subterfuge? Just get people to read your book and post an honest review. What’s the problem?
As any indie will tell you, that ‘simple process’ requires tens of thousands of marketing dollars to reach enough people to buy the book and review it, in order to trigger the algorithms with Amazon that snowballs a book’s sales. Only the big publishers can usually do this, and even then, they only do it for their top four percent of established authors. The rest are left buying reviews from Frankie’s Overseas Book Review Parlour because their own publisher won’t spend a single penny on a long-shot new author.
So how can one tell the crap reviews from the good ones?
Three things play a huge role in a book’s visibility on Amazon. Each one, if scrutinized, can separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to honest reviews. In my next blog I’ll talk about these clues, about the numbers of reviews needed to hit the ’zone’ honestly, and the power of the Verified Purchase.
Thanks for reading. Until next time…
Happy Trails!
Simon Lindley is a former publisher and Luddite of old-world printing, and has been banging out ideas since the days of correction tape and typewriters (hey, it wasn’t that long ago). He lives in the Canadian Rockies with his wife and two dogs, and spends most of his time daydreaming, playing music, chopping wood, hiking in the alpine, and hammering on the keyboard, usually with a little too much fervor. You can order his new book, Mannethorn’s Key here. He is currently working on Book Two of the Key of Life Trilogy and a new urban fantasy series entitled, Gaia’s Assassin.
You can follow Simon on Twitter: @Simon_Lindley, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AuthorSimonLindley
Original article can be found at Simon Lindley’s website at: https://simonlindley.net/a-review-review/
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