Last week’s post was about the influence of social media on branding. A related topic is the influence of social media on specific products. Today I’m discussing the impact of online reviews on book sales.
Amazon has made itself indispensable in a few ways. One of the main things is that they have just about everything you could want to buy, and if you have Prime, you can get it delivered in two days … for free. They usually have the lowest price, and they get a lot of customer reviews, which can be very helpful in deciding whether you want to buy a particular product.
After all, who wants to buy the DVD player with a 1-star rating?
So reviews can be very helpful. But only if you can trust them. A lot of monkey business goes on with online reviews.
Knight Kiplinger drew attention to the ethical and practical problems with online reviews last year. Things don’t seem to have improved since then.
Businesses manipulate reviews, but so do ideologues. Vox Day says that “Social Justice Warriors” post fake reviews of his book critical of SJWs, and The Darwin Report complains about a fake creationist review, which turns out to be rather funny because the review isn’t by a creationist at all, but by someone spoofing creationists — so it’s a double fake.
The point is, people use reviews for their own purposes and to promote their own agendas.
The author of a book critical of the Clintons alleges that Hillary’s campaign posted fake negative reviews of his book. And who can doubt that this sort of thing happens to every political book?
You don’t have to take my word (or my links) for it. Find a book on a controversial topic and read the reviews. It becomes clear rather quickly that many of the reviewers simply have an ideological conflict with the perceived position of the author, and you begin to suspect that many haven’t even read the book.
I’ve written a few books, and I love to get reviews. If I was unethical (and stupid), I would pay to get positive reviews. It’s an easy thing to do. Go to fiverr.com and search on “review your kindle book.” For $5 someone will write a glowing review of your story, presumably even if it’s awful.
This sort of behavior undermines the value of reviews, which is why Amazon is suing phony reviewers.
In the past, they’ve tried other methods to curb phony reviews — like blocking reviews from people who share the last name of the author. They also designate reviews from “verified purchasers” — presumably they are more trustworthy — and some people think they should limit reviews to people who have purchased the book from Amazon. I think that’s too limiting.
What else could Amazon do to make reviews more reliable? Well, for kindle-only books they could get reader data from your kindle to verify that you actually did page all the way through in a reasonable amount of time. That might help with kindle-only titles, but it won’t help with print books. What about people who borrowed the book, or who received it as a gift?
The bottom line is that reviews are very valuable, which is precisely why people try to game them. So … should you trust them or not?
It’s a hard call. But don’t worry, before too long reviews won’t be these subjective things based on our faulty memories of how we liked a book. They’ll be measurable, and based on data.