Annamaria on Monday
I know. It’s the
holidays, and I am supposed to be writing something amusing and upbeat. But just yesterday, I made the mistake of belatedly
reading this Fall’s bulletin from The Authors Guild. It left me mulling over a thorny issue. Stick with me on this. I promise not to drone on with the subject
for very long. Besides, beginning next
week, I will be traveling for a couple of months, and I promise to take you
with me via photos. For now, I need your
thoughts on an issue that startled me when I read it. Maybe everyone knows about this, but I didn’t,
until yesterday.
In the Short Takes
column that starts off every AG Bulletin, there is a three-paragraph piece
entitled “Amazon Book Review Policy.” Here
are the first few sentences:
“Amazon has begun blocking users from reviewing books
written by friends and family—with those relationships determined by the
bookseller, based on social media activity.
If you follow an author on Twitter, for example, Amazon will consider
the author to be your friend or family and send you this message if you try to
post a review of the author’s book on its website: ‘We removed your Customer Reviews (sic) because
you know the author personally. Due to
the proprietary nature of our business, we do not provide detailed information
on how we determine that accounts are related.’”
WHAT???? my mind
screamed when I read this much. Every
writer I know, including New York Times and otherwise bestselling ones, spends a
great deal of time on social media in contact with readers. I enjoy much my time doing that. Many of my otherwise unknown Facebook friends
and Twitter and Instagram followers are interesting and amusing
e-conversationalists. The overwhelming
majority of them contacted me, presumably because they have read and enjoyed my
books. The Amazon practice described above could very well preclude them from
commenting on my books on the Amazon site.
Does Amazon have the right to block those people from expressing an
opinion about my books on their website—based on the bookseller’s assumption
that they are not “objective” (whatever that means)?
Stuff I think I ought to say before going further: My books have very few reviews on Amazon;
most of them highly complimentary. I
have never asked anyone to post a review for me. Leighton once wrote me a splendid one. As did one of my college classmates. As did Stan.
The rest are written by strangers to me.
Most important to note, the policy described above seems to
have first emerged last summer. I tried
to find out what’s happening with this Amazon practice right now, but nothing
more current showed up in my Google search.
I am not sure how I feel about counting those Amazon stars
anyway. I have been on or attended panel
discussions where one of the funnier and snarkier topics involved the writers
reporting on the most laughable one-star reviews they have received, many of
which seemed to have come from readers of highly questionable intelligence or
sanity. My answer, by the way, was about
the person on Goodreads who gave City of
Silver one star and as her reason: She read the names of the characters in
the front matter and found out that she did not like their names, so she never
bought the book.
Given the paucity of current information on this Amazon review
practice I decided to see what would happen if I posted a review of a book by a
real friend (Michael Stanley). I wanted also
to see what would happen if I then reviewed a book of a writer of whom I am
just a fan. But my ability to do that is
complicated because I buy on Amazon as Patricia King, but I am friends with
other writers as Annamaria Alfieri. So I
ask those of you who have only one name to help me test the policy. Go on Amazon and write of review of a book by
someone that you don’t really know in person, but whom you are friends with on
Facebook or follow on Twitter. And tell
us what happens. In this way we might
get some insight into the functioning of the Amazon policy.
By the way, Zoe and Caro, just so you know. The Author’s Guild piece noted that this Amazon
policy applies to readers of authors both in the USA and the UK.
