Has Amazon declared war on authors?
It would seem so at first pass. Last week, I had 315 reviews spread out over my various and sundry projects. Honor at Stake, for example, had 63, 68 reviews.
Today, I only have 238 reviews over all of them. Honor at Stake in particular having only 45 now. When I ask Amazon via email, they know nothing. Could I be more specific? It's literally EVERY BOOK. They need a road map?
The mystery depends when I looked at reviews that I myself have written. They're all gone. Poof. Vanished.
What the Hell?
And I'm not the only one. In fact, one writer's group I'm a part of has had a lot of the same problem.
The Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance.
Funny that. And the one person outside of CLFA who had also had problems is friends with three of us.
However, I'm not about to declare enemy action just yet. For that, I need your help, that of the average reader. Because there is a problem. We can't ask people outside the group, that we don't know, if they have the same problem. Why? Because if we don't know them, it's hard to ask. And if we know them, it can be construed as guilt by association.
So, is this a political attack by Amazon on POCs? (People of Conservatism). Just a glitch? Or had yet another "woke" Amazon employee gone rogue, like when someone messed with Castalia House's Scalzi parody?
Honestly, I have no idea. But I do know one thing. Amazon prefers that authors have 50 reviews before pushing a book. Honor at Stake had over that, and I expected it to have over 60 by the rerelease in May. Removing JUST enough reviews to eliminate that edge might constitute restraint of trade, as well
I'm going to talk with Amazon today (Monday) possibly with a tire iron. But if anyone else had seen this, please let me know.
This blog post was from 2016 but I think it answers a lot of your questions: https://tracycooperposey.com/amazon-reviews-being-deleted/
ReplyDeleteIt looks like Amazon will sometimes delete reviews by 'friends' of the author e.g. people who are mutually connected on social media.
That's what I thought at first. But it wouldn't explain every review I've written being purged. I've reviewed movies and authors I've never seen online or on Facebook. Heck, John C. Wright isn't even on social media, so why should my review of "Iron Chamber of Memory" be deleted? Or any of my movie reviews?
DeleteAmazon may have incorrectly decided that you were a paid reviewer. There doesn't seem to be any kind of appeal process, which adds to the unfairness.
DeleteAll my reviews were deleted. Pretty annoyed.
ReplyDeleteI should specify that the ones I wrote are gone. The ones on my books remain.
Delete