The Strange Case of the Amazon Reviews

I was very interested to read an article on the Daily Mail online site about a row that has broken out about the authenticity of reader reviews on Amazon UK. You can read the article here if you would like to. In summary, it states that author Rosie Alison became so incensed by a series of critical and in some cases personal one and two star reviews of her book The Very Thought of You that she called in Kwikchex, a company that specialises in protecting online reputations because she suspected that the reviews were part of an orchestrated campaign to denigrate the book. Kwikchex's findings suggested that the "wording and the dates of the postings were indicative of a malicious attack."

The article also quoted the example of historian Simon Winder who earlier this year forced Amazon to remove a critical review of his book Germania after it was discovered that it had been written by an academic rival.

Further, one PR company freely admits providing favourable reviews of new books: "Nathan Barker, of Reputation 24/7, offers a service starting at £5,000. He said: 'First we set up accounts. For a romance novel we'd pick seven female profiles and three males. We'd say we like this book but add a tiny bit of criticism and compare it to another book.' He claims that this is common practise amongst publishers."

 Who would have thought it? Well, I would for a start. I'm not a cynic (I'm a romantic!) but surely any organisation such as Amazon that allows anonymous reviews and has no system of checking whether reviewers are authentic or have a vested interest is going to be open to exploitation. Whilst no doubt the vast majority of comments are genuine, sadly some will not be. Any academic with a delicate ego or thwarted writer with a grudge is able to post a review up there if they wish. And some do, just as Mr Barker's comments confirm that for the right price you can buy a good Amazon review as well.

I was brought up in an old-fashioned way that can be summarised in this context as "if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything." However, not everyone is like me and why should they be? If people dislike my books (and some are bound to – you can't please everyone) then they have a perfect right to say so, in public if they wish. To paraphrase Voltaire, I might not like what they say but I defend to the death (well, almost, let's be reasonable here) their right to say it. Last year I was very bruised by some reviews my books garnered on Amazon. My response was not to read Amazon reviews any more and to develop a thicker skin. I'm now as impervious as a rhino and approaching elephant hide. No, actually, I'm not, because the books are very personal to me but if someone doesn't like my writing I'm not going to obsess about it. I'll have a cup of tea and eat a cream cake instead.

 Oh, and I can't afford £5000 to pay for people to write fake positive reviews for me on Amazon and if I had that sort of spare cash I wouldn't spend it on that anyway.

I took a look at some of the reviews of Ms Alison's book on Amazon and was not surprised that many of the critical ones were written by people exercising their so-called literary credentials by comparing the book unfavourably with romance novels. Yawn. That's a cliché I haven't read before. The book sounds a great read to me. Given the dreadful stilted language in some of the books up for the Bad Sex Award this week, readers should be embracing romance novels as written by people who actually know how to write good sex. The winning entry compared lovemaking to "a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect." Yikes.

©2010 Nicola Cornick. All Rights Reserved.

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