Amazon, What Is A “Top Review?”

Is An Amazon “Top Review” Really What It Implies?

To my mind, the best portal into the mind of the reader is the review. Writing and posting a review requires an extra effort. This extra effort is often emotionally driven, whether out of enjoyment and excitement, or from distaste and disgust. It reflects the truest experience of the reader. Reviews posted by readers on platforms like Amazon and GoodReads are unique in that respect.

But reviews have another side, a darker political side.

Do reviews matter? Self-publishingschool.com says yes. According to an article by Scott Allan, published April 2, 2018, the way Amazon ranks my book is by the volume of downloads and the stack of positive reviews it accumulates.

Amazon wants to sell our books, right? So wouldn’t it profit them to put my best review forward?

But Amazon will sell books whether my books are there or not, right? Would Amazon rather sell 100 books by individual authors or 100 books from a large New York imprint? I think we know the answer, and the answer is green in color. Because it’s not just about selling books, it’s also about pleasing all the businesses that benefit from the sale––advertising firms, large brick and mortar retailers, airport stores, shippers, agents––people who draw their salaries from the copious funds a big publisher can spend. While you could argue Amazon is so huge that pleasing all these people doesn’t matter to them, the practical response is why would they pass up the opportunity to make even more money? Isn’t that what the company went into business for in the first place?

Why do reviews matter to an author? According to the Scott Allan article:

The more reviews you get, the more visibility your book gets. This means more sales and potential organic reviews.You create a stronger relationship with the reader.A boatload of reviews adds credibility to your book and brand.

So how do you get reviews? On a level playing ground, reviews come from people who read a book and are so moved by it (either pro or con) that they go to the not inconsiderable trouble to express their feelings at the book site. For that to happen, the reader must see the book, be drawn to it, purchase it, and feel something about it. On the other hand, if the reader can not see the book she/he certainly will not review it. If that review is not written, the book isn’t visible. To see a book on Amazon, it needs to be at least in the top 100 in any Amazon category.

Amazon currently has two categories of reviews available to customers in a drop-down menu: “Recent Reviews” and “Top Reviews”. If the “Top Review” on Amazon is so-so, or worse, it will not draw readers. This also adds to the decaying cycle.

This designation of “Top Reviews” is somewhat ambiguous. Does it mean “best reviews” or “most read reviews”? In the review section for UNDER DESERT SAND, Zack Tolliver, FBI # 5, the “Recent Reviews” are accurately listed. Under “Top Reviews” the first listing is a 2017 4 star review, largely favorable but listing an editorial glitch, something that must give a potential reader pause. True, this review has five people who found it helpful. Fair enough. Yet under it are several very positive five star reviews––including one which six people found helpful. Why is that one not at the top? Isn’t that the “top” review?

Lest anyone find this complaint nit-picky, I will point out this confusing practice continues with several books in the Zack Tolliver series, to a degree seemingly beyond accident. For instance CAT (#4) under “Top Reviews” leads off with a 3 star review, unsupported. The next two are glowing five star reviews, with support. I can not think of a justification for this order. Nor is this a recent or momentary glitch; it has been this way for some time now.

Is there some reason beyond my understanding, or is this deliberate? Is it because the review points out problems? Is the analytic machine of Amazon scanning reviews looking for those that mention such errors and posting them first as warnings?

I just finished reading a very enjoyable novel by a favorite author, Elmore Leonard. The book VALDEZ IS COMING is not new, but I read it recently on my Kindle. Leonard is published by an imprint of a large publisher. Yet on one page, an entire paragraph was repeated. It was a very confusing moment. But no matter – it happens. On you go. My point? I never saw a review mentioning it for that book. And if, in fact, there is such a mention among the 360 reviews for that e-book, it certainly isn’t listed first under “Top Reviews”.

Does Amazon decide certain reviewers have more authority or expertise than others and promote their reviews over those of the average reader/reviewer? Frankly, I don’t believe any particular reviewer is more qualified than another to review my book in the simple context of enjoyment, no matter how many in my genre the expert has read and critiqued. In one case a “top thousand reviewer” apparently didn’t read very much of my book; the comments the reviewer made could be applied to any book.

This isn’t the New York Times. These are every day readers telling other readers whether they had a pleasurable experience, or not, and why.

So Amazon, get it right. These are not “Top Reviews” in the sense of most positive – these are reviews deemed by your people to be most meaningful for some reason. So call them “Reviews By People We Trust Most” or some such similar title. Truth in advertising, right?

And while I’m at it, please allow the “Most Recent” reviews to appear as the first option of the dropdown list. These are the impressions by readers of the most recent editions of the work. Why not allow the author the chance to correct mistakes, to improve, to grow? Reader reviews should be of value to authors too, shouldn’t they?