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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

” 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