Stupid Beyond Help

8:01 pm 5 March 2018

So, an author posted this somewhere in the bowels of GoodReads yesterday:

 

"I feel the same. Amazon is extremely controlling about who can post a review. A very good friend of mine bought a paperback copy and has tried posting her review multiple times, but Amazon keeps booting it off. For some reason they think she's not a verified purchaser so they won't allow the review to post. And good luck on trying to contact them. You'd have better luck trying to get a sunburn on Antarctica than to get anyone to understand what you're trying to ask them."

 
So, I took a deep breath and responded:
 
'Amazon doesn't require people to be verified purchasers in order to post reviews. So that is not the reason her review is not being allowed to be posted.

They do not allow friends and family of an author to post reviews, for reasons I think are pretty obvious. That would be why her review is not being allowed to be posted.

I do not consider this prohibition by Amazon "extremely controlling" in the least. I consider it reasonable, understandable, and I'm quite thankful for it.'
 
I also posted this:
 
 
Her response today? You're all gonna love this:
 
"Amazon has no idea she's my friend, and yes, they do only post verified purchases. They don't care if it's your friend, grandmother, aunt or a perfect stranger as long as their system verifies the purchase was made with a credit card bearing the same name."
 
Sigh.

 

And in another conversation a different author stated this:

 

"For perspective, I am aware of many many indy authors who solicit almost all their reviews from relatives and Facebook friends. That's far more misleading than an RF reviewer posting one review. All this appears to be somewhat the nature of self-publishing for better or worse."

 

Believe me, there are still many authors out there thinking like this.  Thankfully they're mostly very small potatoes, but they're all chatting each other up about how this sort of thing is perfectly fine, and there are more out there than you may see.  Of course thankfully they're still a minority, or at least only a minority is dumb enough to say things like this in public.

 

you can t fix stupid review manipulation