Amazon Customer Review Quotes: Good? Bad? And How to Get Them?

Folks,

I’ve browsed around and haven’t located a similar thread; hence this new topic.

You know what I’m talking about if you have been selling on Amazon for a while. Amazon’s system has a automatic digestor that aggregates customer reviews posted under a book continuously; once the “overlapping” index of these reviews hits a threshold, Amazon’s digestor posts three quotes that best represent most shared an opinion and present them with eye-catching quotation marks. This feature increases the impact of customer reviews and makes them — pardon my oxymoron here — visually audible.

In the case of my book KDP’s Best-Kept Secret Revealed: How to Embed Videos and Widgets in Your Book Description, the Customer Review Quotes looks like this:

My experience is that a book sells better with the customer review quotes than without. However, this is one area I do not have any solid statistics and I would really love to hear what other authors have to say.

In terms how an author can get these customer review quotes, I’ve learned the following, after publishing on KDP for a few months:

1. The Customer Review Quotes normally do not kick in until a book is about one-month old on Amazon. This may reflect an Amazon safeguard mechanism that prevents the auto digestor from jumping to a conclusion. If Amazon does indeed have such a mechanism as I suspect, it is a good measure that prevents authors and publishers from gaming the system with “arranged” or solicited reviews.

2. The Quotes are not triggered by the count of the reviews received. For Amazon’s review digestor to abstract quotes, there must be three distinctive opinions that are shared. Each of these opinions must be shared. Amazon’s auto digestor must be able to states under each quoted opinion that at least 1 (one) other reviewer made a similar statement.

3. The minimum count of reviews received to trigger the digestor quote abstraction appear to be 5. This is another healthy sanity measure on the part of the auto digestor. If a book has just received a mere three or four reviews and they all say exactly the same things, they reviews are suspiciously too uniform.

Here’s my conclusions:

1. Amazon’s Customer Review Quotes generation algorithm is brilliant and effective.

2. Try to satisfy the minimum requirement for the auto digestor to generate quotes from your book’s reviews (the age of the book, count of reviews received.)

3. Do not ever purchase, guide, arrange reviews or write your own reviews and have someone post it.

Related to point # 3, I am strongly against authors paying so-called “professional reviewers” for their uppity reviews. A real paying customer delivers a gutsy review that is a thousand times more likely to resonate with another paying customer. If you are feeling generous about your money, have a free giveaway to capture that particular group of readers. A fraction of those readers may just return you with a few reviews that instantly build the Amazon Customer Review Quotes!