Reviews help expose our books to readers and Indie Authors work hard to get these reviews. Amazon should not be indisciminately removing reviews, discounting all the efforts we made to sell more books on their platform. If their aim is to remove reviews that were bought, we support that, BUT this is not the way. There are legitimate reviews, even if not a verified purchase.
Dear Big Brother Amazon,
As an Indie Author, I know full well how hard it is to get reviews for our books. We give out ARCs, contact reviewers, and even give away the book we've spent months writing. This is so readers will take a chance on us unknowns.
Granted, Amazon, that there are business people who buy reviews for books that are trash, and that some unscrupulous practices exist, and we understand that this is what you want to stop. And we want that to stop too since it gives serious authors and all self published books a bad reputation. BUT the solution is not to indiscriminately remove reviews. Sure, it's hard to manually sift through reviews one by one, per author. But, why should this problem of yours affect all of us?
Indie authors should be given a chance to bring their books closer to the readers, and reviews are one way of doing that. It is not right for you, who earns from our sales, to be the one making it hard for us to do so.
Even your rule that we cannot review each other is a little silly, don't you think? If i buy a book, I should be able to review it as a reader, a consumer. We don't understand how you even decide that we know the author? Because we promote each other's work? But, we couldn't do anything about that inspite of petitions raised. So we lived with it.
However, this last move of yours is totally unacceptable. As an example, you removed ALL the reviews I made, even for verified purchases.
We urge you to reexamine your methods and not discount the efforts we're making to sell more of our books on your platform.
We expect support from you. Not this.
