This morning's tempest in a teapot was this article Indie Authors and Amazon Removing Reviews by Renee Pawlish, which suggests that Amazon is manipulating its book review system to damage indie authors. The question of the hour is whether or not self-pubbed authors everywhere ought to get their conspiracy mojo working and fight the (Amazon) power.
I worked an 11-month contract in Amazon's Kindle department, so I have an idea of what goes on there. And I am very, very sure that there is no secret Amazon compact with the big publishers to damage indie book sales through suppressing reviews.
This article is mostly conjecture, backed up by the author's own anecdotal experience. If Amazon says there are three reasons why it would remove reviews, then the reviews that are missing from her site are for one of those reasons. Frankly, having worked there (I'd never work there again, so I'm not in any way a supporter of Amazon's corporate policies), I can assure you that Amazon doesn't give a crap about what happens to individual books, indie or traditionally published, unless they're best-sellers. There's just too much content for that.
To assume that Amazon has started a secret campaign against indie authors is, frankly, foil-hat ridiculous. Amazon makes money from every book sold, no matter how it was published, and it has absolutely no incentive to damage the sales of indie writers. Most indie writers don't sell enough to come anywhere close to affecting the markets of big traditional publishers, so the idea that Amazon is responding to pressure from big publishers to nibble away at the reviews of indie books is similarly a misunderstanding of scale. No one at Amazon even looks at every book uploaded to the site: there are simply too many. The idea that there are Amazon employees dedicated to plucking away individual indie book reviews here and there presumes that there are cube farms full of Amazon employees who are paid to do this. I can guarantee you that Amazon would not spend the money to do something like that. There's no conceivable way that it could benefit Amazon's bottom line, and I guarantee you that's Amazon's primary concern.
Are reviews important to sales? Unquestionably. Should authors invest a lot of time and concern in managing those reviews? My feeling is, no. We're writers. We should be writing. I'm a big fan of Dean Wesley Smith's blog , and his advice centers on the importance of your backlist. The more books you have out there, the more there are for interested readers to buy. And even if one book doesn't earn enough to buy pizza, a dozen books earning the same modest amount might pay a power bill. Time spent obsessing about reviews could be better spent writing.
So take off that tin-foil hat, and get to work!
I worked an 11-month contract in Amazon's Kindle department, so I have an idea of what goes on there. And I am very, very sure that there is no secret Amazon compact with the big publishers to damage indie book sales through suppressing reviews.
This article is mostly conjecture, backed up by the author's own anecdotal experience. If Amazon says there are three reasons why it would remove reviews, then the reviews that are missing from her site are for one of those reasons. Frankly, having worked there (I'd never work there again, so I'm not in any way a supporter of Amazon's corporate policies), I can assure you that Amazon doesn't give a crap about what happens to individual books, indie or traditionally published, unless they're best-sellers. There's just too much content for that.
To assume that Amazon has started a secret campaign against indie authors is, frankly, foil-hat ridiculous. Amazon makes money from every book sold, no matter how it was published, and it has absolutely no incentive to damage the sales of indie writers. Most indie writers don't sell enough to come anywhere close to affecting the markets of big traditional publishers, so the idea that Amazon is responding to pressure from big publishers to nibble away at the reviews of indie books is similarly a misunderstanding of scale. No one at Amazon even looks at every book uploaded to the site: there are simply too many. The idea that there are Amazon employees dedicated to plucking away individual indie book reviews here and there presumes that there are cube farms full of Amazon employees who are paid to do this. I can guarantee you that Amazon would not spend the money to do something like that. There's no conceivable way that it could benefit Amazon's bottom line, and I guarantee you that's Amazon's primary concern.
Are reviews important to sales? Unquestionably. Should authors invest a lot of time and concern in managing those reviews? My feeling is, no. We're writers. We should be writing. I'm a big fan of Dean Wesley Smith's blog , and his advice centers on the importance of your backlist. The more books you have out there, the more there are for interested readers to buy. And even if one book doesn't earn enough to buy pizza, a dozen books earning the same modest amount might pay a power bill. Time spent obsessing about reviews could be better spent writing.
So take off that tin-foil hat, and get to work!
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