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Thank you Iola for the info. This is me! I recently lost all my reviews- hundreds of books and also all my other product reviews. I thought I was following the guidelines. I truly enjoy reading and reviewing books. Authors appreciate my reviews, and. nowthey are gone. What bothers me is that there seems to be no effective way to contact Amazon about this to get my reviews back. I have called customer service and was given an email to contact Community Guidelines. I know that some of the authors have also contacted Amazon. So my first question, is what can I do? And my second question is, if I’m ever allowed to review again- what is a “friend”. I interact with many authors on social media. Thank you!
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Hi Jena
I know of some reviewers who have appealed to Amazon and had their reviews reinstated, but I also know others who have asked and their appeal has been rejected. I suspect it’s a matter of patterns: if you’ve reviewed books or products that Amazon has found fake reviews for, then your chances of being reinstated are lower.
When it comes to building a reviewing platform, reviewing on Amazon is like promoting a book through Facebook – it’s great when it works, but it’s not your platform. Someone else makes the rules. For that reason, I’ve always reviewed on a blog as well. If you’re not currently reviewing on a blog, you could start – that still helps authors. You can also review on a lot of other platforms e.g. BookBub, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble.
As to what is a “friend” … well, that’s the question no one knows the answer to! I’m also social media friends with a lot of authors. I think it comes down to Amazon’s definition of a “promotional” review, which is something I’m planning to address in a future blog post.
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Great article, I agree with all the information you presented and am happy to see it laid out so clearly
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[…] Reviews are a major part of marketing. Frances Caballo tells us how to get new readers and reviews with free book promotion, and Iola Goulton explains how to prevent Amazon from deleting your reviews. […]
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I’ve had this. All my reviews on my regular Amazon account deleted- and hardly any of them were of review copies. I think there were barely 7 that were, out of like 50 product reviews left over years.
Not only that, but they won’t let me leave anymore reviews, or comments. No explanation given, just gone. Ironically, Amazon still invite me to review recent purchases too.
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Two things: as a reviewer, I find that logging into my Amazon account BEFORE posting any revis me to review and get round the ‘you have to buy something first. command. Speaking as a reviewed, it does stop the malicious reviews, wherby someone with a grudge can post nasty one-star reviews out of spite. A friend who DARED to criticize J K Rowling’s books in a blog had this happen to her, and was nped by her publisher.o, it is a pain, but there are upsides.
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Interesting article. However, what I see seems missing from this article is the following: “To contribute to Customer features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers, Idea Lists) or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $50 minimum. In addition, to contribute to Spark you must also have a paid Prime subscription (free Prime trials do not qualify). You do not need to meet this requirement to read content posted by other contributors or post Customer Questions, or create or modify Profile pages, Shopping Lists, Wish Lists or Registries.” https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201929730
The same thing is on the UK site: To contribute to Community Features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers), you must have spent at least £40 on Amazon.co.uk using a valid payment card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the £40 minimum. You do not need to meet this requirement to post Customer Questions, create or modify Profile pages, Lists, or Registries, or to read content posted by other customers. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201929730
The only ways I know of to bypass this is if you’re already a VINE reviewer of theirs or if you have your own blog and you are a member of the Amazon affiliate program.
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You can ask reviewers to follow the pattern of mentioning that they received the book for free, and not say it was an exchange, but you do NOT control what reviewers actually do or write. Them’s the breaks.
I know I have several reviews, nice reviews, where the current ‘rules’ are not observed, and that they may disappear some day. When you have only 40 reviews, it shows when one disappears!
Stewing over the problem isn’t useful. But it is hard for those of us who go to a great deal of trouble to approach individuals who blog or review, to then find a good review removed. The answer is to put in the effort to generate more reviews (if that’s what you want), but the energy for that comes from the energy I use to write, and I don’t have much every day.
Not complaining, just saying.
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It’s too bad they refuse to delete reviews by a family/friend who reviewed out of malice. Seems only good reviews are removed if it’s someone you know
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I agree, Sara. Amazon has a ‘report abuse’ button though they rarely do anything about it. I have the same situation with several reviews of my books where they are outright ad hominem attacks and have nothing at all to do with the books. I’ve talked with Amazon and they say they’ll ‘review,’ but take no action. It is what it is. That’s the nature of the platform.
Good news: there are so many more positive reviews and readers are smart. They can see a personal attack vs. an actual critical review. Just keep writing and moving forward. x
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