This morning I woke up to a phone call from Terry Brooks.
It was a bit odd.
He gets up at dawn to write and never calls me that early; I let the sun enjoy an hour or two without me as I snore. But since being diagnosed with cancer two weeks ago, all of a sudden I have multiple sets of parents who are looking after my well-being—no matter the time.
Terry, of course, was doing just that. Checking in on me. Also letting me know a few things that are going on in his life, professionally and otherwise. After getting off the phone, I realized I had a few things I had to get done, namely finishing his website’s redesign for the release of his forthcoming book, The Measure of the Magic (publishing August 23). It will require me sitting in a chair with a laptop, expending very little of my own energy.
I smiled at the irony this morning. The very thing that cancer has a tendency of reducing people to is sedentary non-movement. Which means I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands to do website stuff!
So this morning I reinserted most of Terry’s 30+ books back onto the website—summaries, reviews, excerpts, covers and purchasing links to the various online bookstores. But when I got to Dark Wraith of Shannara, his graphic novel that was released in 2008, I came across something that actually angered me quite a bit on Amazon.com.
Like most online booksellers, Amazon gives their customers the ability to write reviews. This is a good thing. People often like getting feedback from people who are not biased (the biased being publishers, authors, agents, etc.) and its that fan feedback that helps someone decide whether or not to buy the book.
But I saw something very different this morning while updating the page for Dark Wraith of Shannara and using the information on Amazon. There were seven 1-star reviews.
Curious, I delved into the one-star reviews to see what people didn’t like about the graphic novel—and none of them had to do with the actual book itself.
I rolled my eyes more than once.
The one-star reviews for Dark Wraith are customers angry that either 1) the Kindle doesn’t display the graphic content of the book in a clear way, or 2) the customer thought they were getting an actual prose book despite Amazon stating clearly that Dark Wraith is a graphic novel.
No mention of the artwork. No mention of the writing. No mention of the story or the pacing or if they liked it or not. They hated things out of the control of Terry Brooks and Del Rey Books.
Those seven 1-stars help drag the overall rating down.
And the sad thing? If those customers had merely read a bit closer to the production description or tried the excerpt before buying, they would not have been annoyed—and those 1-star reviews would likely not exist.
In short, their own idiocy is hurting innocent people.
Before you say anything, yes, I’m biased as well. I’ve been a Terry Brooks fan since I was 13—22 years—and I hate seeing fans not like something. But if that hate comes from valid reasons that are associated with Terry’s work, I’m fine with it. People have different tastes and not everyone will like everything Terry does all of the time.
But Amazon has no filter for these kinds of reviews, reviews that hurt the very authors the online bookstore depends on to make a living.
So this begs the question:
Does something need to be done about the Amazon rating system? In this time-constrained culture we live in, can the initially glanced at overall star rating hurt an author who doesn’t deserve it? Does Amazon and other online booksellers who rely on similar systems lose out on sales because of their own system? Does the author?
What do you think?
Perhaps what hurts the most is that not enough people are using the Amazon review system. From what I have seen people only use the star ratings by exception, the exceptions being that it was the best book they had ever read or something happened to make it a bad experience. You are not getting a truly random sample, you are getting a sample from the extremes so the average score based on the reviews is unlikely to be true average score.
I read a lot of books and I write my reviews for fantasybookreview.co.uk, I have only ever rated one book on Amazon and it was exceptional circumstances – i truly believed that I needed to get the word out about this author in as many different places as i could (Moses Siregar III if you were wondering). I dont buy my books from Amazon so I don’t feel the need to comment on their site.
What I think the rating system needs to be is something like metacritic.com where the rating score is based on all the different reviews from all the different review sites around the internet. It would be much more representative of the population.
Of course, any rating system that gives that much freedom to the reviewers is flawed. the question is: whats the alternative? are the cons bigger than the pros? there could be more supervision from amazons side, but they are not really interested and why should they bother.
so power to the people…
“There could be more supervision from Amazon’s side, but they are not really interested and why should they bother.”
Ahh, the crux of the argument. Time and money spent patrolling these reviews versus saving their bottomline. Well put. For me, Amazon and other online places should bother because it’s being professional. It’s protecting the establishment. And it could actually increase their revenue if these kinds of reviews did not exist. Course, that wouldn’t be the easy way out… Sad, but true.
Ryan, I think if there was an increase in the “random sample” that these kinds of reviews would still come up in about the same percentage they do now. Which doesn’t address the issue, unfortunately. What would be interesting to know is: How many people base their purchases on Amazon’s star-review versus reviews they read on blogs such as the one you write for?
Yeah, it’s not a perfect system, but I think people who are seriously considering a purchase will read the reviews and quickly discover that the low rating has to do with something unrelated. It’s happened to me a couple times.
I wish that were the case, Tyson. It was for you so that’s a good thing. And I’m sure others do it too. But 7 people out of 29 (24%) didn’t do that. 24% is a huge number, in my opinion. How many others saw the low overall star-review and didn’t buy the book? How many sales were lost, I wonder, because 1) Amazon doesn’t police/remove these kinds of reviews that have no basis on the actual product, and 2) these reviewers are idiots and are using the star-rating system as a angry customer service phone line?
I agree; I think that Amazon should do something about this, namely putting into place a system where customers are advised to keep their reviews relevant to the content itself of the book that they’re reviewing, rather than the superficial aspects. Of course, with the second example, customers should also read more attentively the description. In these ways, irrelevant reviews that could possibly harm the author’s reputation could be avoided. Of course, not everybody is going to like the book and I agree, everyone has different tastes and different people like different things, but if (for example) the artwork isn’t clear enough on the Kindle, is it too much to ask that they buy the actual book?
For some purchases, I find the one star reviews to be just as helpful as the 5 star reviews. I /want/ to know what the problems may be before purchasing something from Amazon. At the same time, reading any of the amazon reviews requires responsible filtering. Sometimes the reviews are padded by friends of the author, or people with a personal emotional investment in the product. Sometimes, they are just using the review to complain about the pricing of the product rather than the content of the product. Sometimes, they are giving a review to a book that has not even been released or written yet. Some of the top reviewers on Amazon give 5 stars to everything, which, in my opinion, eliminates the value of their reviews. I think any responsible buyer is smart enough to filter out the “noise” in the comments and find the valid comments and reviews.
I always find this criticism of Amazon unfair as 1) its not unique to Amazon and 2) Amazon goes to great lengths to curate reviews.
Amazon does several key things to help bring the best reviews to the top. First, they let everyone indicate whether or not a review was helpful/good. Those reviews are then featured on the product page. If you go back to the Dark Wraith of Shannara page the three featured reviews are 4-5 stars. Unhelpful reviews are pushed off the main page and hidden from view.
The next thing Amazon does is provide badges which indicate if the reviewer purchased the item on Amazon.com, is a Top Reviewer, a member of the Vine program, or other such information.
These are all tools Amazon provides its users to help get a feel of the book beyond a simplistic star system. This is well beyond what many competitors offer.
So, criticizing Amazon for not deleting brainless one star reviews because it hurts the average star rating is pointless…especially because the ultimate result of this logic is that you’re assuming brainless consumers won’t buy a book unless its four stars on Amazon and will not bother to do any research. In other words you want Amazon to protect us idiots from ourselves. No thank you, I can think for myself.
P.S. I would buy a Terry Brooks book even if it was one star!
This is one reason I prefer using Goodreads to find books. You aren’t buying on Goodreads, but reading and reviewing the book.
The most recent thing on Amazon and Barnes & Noble are ebook buyers posting one star reviews because of “Agency Pricing”. The publishers regulate the price of the ebook but not the hard cover. Often the new release hard cover edition is within a few cents of the ebook.
It’s one of the many reasons I no longer bother with reviews.
Sorry to say that when I look at reviews on the web I tend to only look at the bad ones. I know this sounds strange at first, but think about it. Personally the few times I can remember writing a review on anything happens to be when I am dissatisfied with the service/product that I purchased. So when I look at reviews on products/services I look at the bad reviews and pick the produce/service with the fewest bad reviews. When I do look at the good reveiws they seem to me to mostly be highly praising the produce/service with no faults and to me it almost seems like a marketing ploy.
Now with books it is different, I never look at the reviews. I know what genre I like and I have a core list of authers that I religiously buy the books they write. For authors not in my core list I look at the story discription and if it sounds interesting to me I try to get it from my local library and see if it truely is any good before purchasing.
So reviews, either good or bad, need to be analyzed for their worth. Anyone who just looks at the rating on anything without actually reading the reviews that generated that rating deserve what they get or miss what they don’t get.
I’m so glad that Shawn put up an opinion on Amazon and the ridiculousness that is their review policy. I find the reviews on Amazon a little bit of a joke to be completely honest. There are so many people that put out reviews on Amazon just to destroy the credibility of authors or books in response to poor planning/quality/pr by the publisher. Its ridiculous. I’m with LaserWraith, goodreads generally gives me a better idea of the quality of the book but to be completely honest I avoid both of them when looking at purchasing a new book. When looking for honest opinions of a book I’m looking to buy I’ll hit the brick and mortar stores and ask them for someone that reads in that particular genre heavily. Those people will honestly give you a very unbiased opinion of the majority of the books in that section and can point you to a better option sometimes. They are much less likely to give bad information.
” Sometimes the reviews are padded by friends of the author” is an interesting subject all in of itself. Todd does that mean that if you know the author at all you shouldn’t review any of their work? I have a hard time with that as an idea or concept. I for one know many published authors very well. Often times I read their books well in advance of actually making a friendship. So does that make my opinion of their book any less valuable. I would say I could see how it could be viewed as me trying to “hype” the book, at the same time I’m well read in that genre so I have an opinion as both a friend, an aspiring author, and a reader. Obviously writing a review as the friend is wrong but doing it as an aspiring author and reader is a valid reason for putting up the review. Some not all have a hard time differentiating their roles. I for one have not had that issue yet recently I put up a review on Amazon about a book I enjoyed yet was slammed for writing a review because I was a friend of the author. It got to the point where one user started cyber harassing me on my personal blog/twitter account and even went to every single review that had 4+ stars to harass that reviewer. When I asked Amazon about this they just said that they can’t monitor the reviews or comments on them. Very unfortunate in my opinion. I for one will not ever put anything up on Amazon until they fix the broken system. At one point we called people that harassed others like that Forum Trolls, now days these trolls have a blog, call themselves “professional reviewers”, and get ARC copy from publishers. I still call some of them trolls, not all but some. So let’s not feed the trolls any more
I have several thoughts on this:
1) If Amazon were truly protecting its bottom line, they’d police this, since irrelevant poor reviews likely impact a consumer’s purchase decision, meaning fewer sales and thus less money back to Amazon. The likelihood here is that they’ve adopted a high-minded attitude that on-balance the review system is fair, despite the cases where consumers are rating based on things like agency model pricing, etc. Mostly, I think they’re at best lazy, and at worst irresonsible. In the evolving world of epublishing, these loose practices are detrimental to writers, who will have other outlets to distribute their books, and will start to go around Amazon if they don’t address the issue. Writers can exhibit amazing solidarity, and a concerted effort to not publish to Amazon’s Kindle platform, when platforms like the Nook are gaining amazing marketshare might cause Amazon to once again pay attention to the business that gave them their start, rather than the increasing diverse businesses they launch that seem mostly to fail.
2) One simple way Amazon could fix this issue would be to institute a rating system that allows the reviewer to rate across several principle areas, giving one to five stars in each of several categories, e.g. plot, characterization, book production value, price, etc. WIth some simple usability, they could dial in the five key areas a reviewer would like to give feedback for. This would be far more useful to prospective buyers.
3) I don’t find a lot of value in things like Amazon’s Vine program. If you read the bylines by most of those folks, they’re writers themselves. Essentially, this means two things, they’re likely using the review system as a way to build their own platform, and (at the very least) they have a conflict of interest in posting reviews at all. Writers, for the most part, shouldn’t review; there’s inherent tension and competiveness in them doing reviews. And beyond these Vine writer-reviewers, you have those who aren’t really reading the books they’re reviewing very closely; that’s easy to see after reading a few from their op rated reviewers.
4) And one commenter here mentions rolls, which I liken to griefers in gaming. Those lazy, piss-in-the-manger folks who stand at areas in a game where your character respawns after dying, and shoot you dead before you can begin playing again. It’s sad to say that some of this new set of online
eviewers are part of this tribe. They believe their opinion is somehow elevated above the rest of the fantasy-buying community because they have a blog and get ARCs from a publisher. Also, sadly, these are by-and-large wannabe writers trying to build a platform. They’re blind spot is that they are reviewing prospective colleagues, should they be lucky enough to get into print. And writers don’t forget. Plus, again, they’re bias as writers actually make their reviews less helpful, since they’re not reviewing as a consumer, but more like a workshoper. And this tribe largely makes sure to put their review up not just on their blog, but on Amazon, too. While it may sound snarky, I think this new breed of blogger-reviewer mostly likes to see their words in black-and-white, with their byline, and to seem somehow smarter than the average bear. The point being, their reviews on Amazon have their own set of issues. (Note, they often link back to their own websites. ‘Nuff said.)
For my part, I ask friends or booksellers at my favorite bookstores for recommendations.
Considering Amazon is at 3 stars, Goodreads at 3.7, Google Books at 3, Shelfari at 3, B&N at 3.5, and Libary Thing at 3.5…there seems to be consensus among book recommendation sites that this book is a 3 to 3.5.
This hardly leaves credence to the idea that one star reviews are materially impacting an author when all of the major review sites are basically within half a star of each other.
All of the book recommendation sites have issues with one star reviews or reviews consisting of a single line of text. None of them delete these questionable reviews. At least Amazon attempts to bring good reviews to the fore, rates the reviews and lets you know how many other people liked the review. Compare this versus Barnes and Nobles who is content to let single star reviews with single line responses sit on the first page of Dark Wraith of Shannara.
S. Eric Rhoads, if you remove the 7 stars (24% of the reviews) for Dark Wraith, that overall 3-star review bounces up to 3.5, maybe even 4 stars. So it does matter.
As for the other reviewers, I actually agree the book is a 3.5-4 star effort. Therefore the Amazon system is low and it is low because of those 1-star reviews that have no basis on the actual book’s content.
Now that a few of you have commented, I really think that Amazon should just GET RID OF the overall star rating and force possible customers to read several reviews to make up their own minds. Amazon is perfectly set up for this. People already judge reviews and rate them directly. Therefore reviews that are written well and have valid comments/criticisms have the most ratings by other customers as being good reviews. Those higher rated reviews are pushed to the top where they should be.
Therefore new customers would see well written reviews first.
If they’d just get rid of the overall star rating, it could be great for them and for authors — or at least improve sales since those people with a short attention span and just pay attention to the overall star rating will be forced to do more research up front.
I haven’t read all of the comments, so I don’t know if someone has mentioned this yet. Amazon does have a way for you to report abuse/spam/etc. Or did they remove that? I know one of my reviews got taken down because an author got mad that I hated his book, which tells me that Amazon abuses the complaint feature.
Beyond that, I completely agree with you. I’m a uni teacher and we have to deal with evaluations that say things like “your class required too much writing.” The problem? The university sets those standards; I don’t. This is not unlike an author who ends up with a bunch of bad reviews that have nothing to do with the author’s work, but with either other parties (I’ve seen 1-star reviews in which the reviewer was complaining about the publisher doing something they didn’t like, which had *nothing* to do with the author, whose book had been published *before* the incident occurred). The sad truth of it is that we don’t have much recourse to this other than to ask people to review honestly. And then report bad reviews to Amazon…in the sad hope that they’ll do something about it.
Shawn, I definitely read the bad reviews specifically when a book/item/etc. has an odd pattern of stars [like a 'c' shape, or a lot of 5 and 1 and fewer 4/3/2], and if they’re irrelevant criticisms I ignore them and go for it. I suspect many people don’t do that and just use the star rating, but realistically how many people buy books – particularly Brooks’ books – based on the star rating? Bad reviews have helped steer me away from books I won’t like, but the sort you quote are simply irrelevant.
I absolutely disagree though that Amazon should do any sort of actual removal of reviews. That would be catastrophic. First off, some of these are effectively reviews of Amazon [the lack of displaying graphical content on the Kindle]; sure, people should preview, but perhaps Amazon should display that information more clearly? Second, if Amazon starts deleting reviews [for non-bad language reasons], they start down a slippery slope. They might start deleting reviews that are noncomplimentary of Amazon, or just deleting bad reviews in general. See the outrage over Yelp possibly getting cash for downgrading bad reviews, for example… Who’s to determine which reviews are applicable and which reviews are not? Particularly when Amazon has lots of non-book items where these metareviews are helpful [like, 'Amazon's box doesn't properly protect the product', or 'This [non-Amazon] seller does not give good customer service’]…
Finally, Amazon does a good job of dealing with this, as others have noted. The most helpful reviews are brought to the top [based on votes]. If you actually pay attention to the reviews at all, you’ll see at least those few.
Re, removing the star rating entirely… I see your point, but frankly if people want to use the star rating, who are you to stop them? Those of us who use the reviews will continue to do so, and those that find the star rating adequately useful will continue to use that, their choice. I find it’s a useful filter for some things; I’d generally assume that several identical items have the same percentage of ‘junk’ reviews, so a 3 vs a 4 star item, the latter is likely to be better; but of course I can always look at the reviews. If I’m comparing 2 items i’d do that anyway; but if I’m comparing one of 70 items [say a kitchen pan or something], I prefer to do an initial sort or filter by star and then look at reviews.
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I see reviews like that all the time. Like the musical, Into the Woods, many people gave the product 1 star ratings because of the condition of the tape/cd (who uses tapes anymore? Lol). … But one review gave it a 1 star because the video was not wide screen.
Even worse than wrongful reviews are the people who harass others for liking something they, themselves, didn’t. I’ve gotten several menacing replies, and it’s really one reason why I seldom do reviews. I don’t feel like arguing with a bunch of bitter people about books they paid .99 for.
One person, I looked at her profile (because she looked at mine and had to critique everything I liked to read).
What I found was she had posted her own scathing review of the book a full month prior, and then proceeded to write comments to every single person who gave the book a 4 or 5 star, including myself. She had been doing this, along with another man, for a month.
I wrote customer service and gave them the links. I doubt Amazon will do anything though.
A year later and your comments are just as relevant since there have been no positive changes to Amazon’s rating system. I discovered this issue when a college roommate of mine recently wrote his first novel and published an eBook on Amazon. His work was well received and downloads were flying out over the web…until his book got a 5 star review by another author who was being trolled. The trolls assumed he was in some sort of review swap with others, which is ironic because he’s way too reserved and afraid of technology to engage in that way. What happened to him next was criminal, in my opinion.
He came to the attention of a troll attempting to make connections in the publishing world by reviewing a lot of books. Anna Karenina is her screen name on Amazon, but in reality she’s a wannabe writer known as Noel Russel from Lithia, Florida. With the support of shill accounts and her boyfriend, doing 2 years in jail and plenty of time on his hands, she brazenly brags about being the “Queen of Persuasion.” She listed my college buddy’s book under the heading of “badly behaving authors” and then linked his seller page to several forums on Amazon and Goodreads. Other career reviewers then followed those links to down vote the author’s good reviews and left several one star reviews with nasty comments, all without having read the book. Even after the author removed his book from publication, Noel’s buddies continued to harass him by leaving ugly reviews on Goodreads and putting his book on shelves labeled “Never read.” I encouraged the author to continue to sell his work, he said, “What’s the point? No one is reading it anymore because they see all the one star reviews and ugly comments and don’t bother to read further.”
This upset me! I’ve never met a person less aggressive and less deserving of such vile treatment than my friend. Wanting to learn more about his detractors, I searched the history of several well-known reviewers on Amazon and found they organize in the book site’s forums and also on Goodreads. The group consists of many authors and writers acting as reviewers, to manipulate ratings in favor of sales, but also to destroy the livelihood of anyone who speaks against their threatening tactics. These reviewers use anonymity to crush the efforts of those artists and authors who spend their time actually writing, rather than trolling the internet. It would appear that some in the publishing field are taking notice of those who are willing to assassinate another author’s work and reputation. Penguin publishing employees are following several of this particular group’s reviews.
Forget about writing the next great novel. Online review systems have created a new model for success. Any hack can write a lot of blogs and review a lot of books in order to build a successful career in the publishing industry. Look to those reviewers screaming the loudest in defense of their hate-filled insult-slinging and there you find the source of an ugly problem.
The bigger problem is that Amazon does NOTHING about spurious reviews. I have reported one-star character assassinations that remained untouched. In one case, a Brit attacked an American for his political book. Not only did it have no relevance for the Brit, but he has a long-standing, established hatred of the American. And obviously, he did not read the book. The “review” was libelous.
More recently, a friend of mine who had a book on Amazon was attacked by an atheist trolling party. The book had been available for over 3-1/2 years, and in one day, several one-star “reviews” appeared. I reported them, but they remained. These people obviously did not read the book. When I challenged them in replies to their fake reviews, they did not show any indication of reading the book. Instead, they attacked me, personally. My own favorable review of the book has been attacked as well (”not helpful”), and I have a stalker who has followed me around the Internet, including Amazon.
So, not only does the overall approval rating go down by these petty, illicit one-star “reviews”, Amazon does not respond to complaints. Like other commenters here, I use the one-star reviews in my decision-making process. But to have to wade through the junk, even having to guess which ones are valid, is time consuming and can cost people sales of what may very well be an excellent book or product.