A Note to my Goodreads Friends
I had to go in today and delete my entire friends list on Goodreads, and will not be adding any new friends. I apologize if you were a GR friend and I removed you. It was nothing personal. This is what happened: today, 14 reviews for my new book disappeared from Amazon. The book has been out just two weeks. The reason the reviews were deleted is because I was "friends" with those reviewers, either on Goodreads or on Facebook, and Amazon is now enforcing their policy of not allowing reviews by "friends" of an author.
What they fail to realize is that I created my GR and Facebook accounts specifically for my readers. No one who knows me "in real life" is friends with me on these accounts. So basically, I was penalized for keeping in touch with my readers.
GR and social media are among the only ways I can let people know when a new book is coming out or promote my work. Amazon's policy fails to take into account the fact that authors use social media for these purposes, and our "friends" on these sites aren't our mom, our neighbor, our boyfriend, and so on. They're our valued readers, the people who buy our books and are often kind enough to leave a review.
Reviews are the life blood of any author, perhaps even more so for an independent author like me who relies on them heavily to bring in new readers. Since I want my readers to have the opportunity to review my books, I went in and deleted my friends list in order to remove what Amazon preceives as a conflict.
I believe it's still fine to "follow" an author on Goodreads. Only people in our friends lists and their reviews are affected by Amazon's policy.
Again, I'm sorry if you'd been in my friends list, and I hope you understand.
What they fail to realize is that I created my GR and Facebook accounts specifically for my readers. No one who knows me "in real life" is friends with me on these accounts. So basically, I was penalized for keeping in touch with my readers.
GR and social media are among the only ways I can let people know when a new book is coming out or promote my work. Amazon's policy fails to take into account the fact that authors use social media for these purposes, and our "friends" on these sites aren't our mom, our neighbor, our boyfriend, and so on. They're our valued readers, the people who buy our books and are often kind enough to leave a review.
Reviews are the life blood of any author, perhaps even more so for an independent author like me who relies on them heavily to bring in new readers. Since I want my readers to have the opportunity to review my books, I went in and deleted my friends list in order to remove what Amazon preceives as a conflict.
I believe it's still fine to "follow" an author on Goodreads. Only people in our friends lists and their reviews are affected by Amazon's policy.
Again, I'm sorry if you'd been in my friends list, and I hope you understand.
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April
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Dec 18, 2015 04:00PM
Wow, that is stupid of Amazon to do that! They need to worry about all the paid reviewers, not the friends!!!
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omg, THIS is why GR changed the thing! THIS is why they introduced automatically following an author, and not being able to friend them. And then we all freaked out and pointed out that friends were different to followers, and we were friends with authors. So we barracked for them to change it back. But this is why they were trying to make the distinction. They just didn't tell us. GR knew that Amazon would start cracking down on reviews by "friends" and they were actually trying to prevent this happening to authors.I'd heard of one or two reviews going before this, but 14? This is insane.
I wrote to Amazon complaining, but I'm sure they won't care... It's annoying. Everyone knows that social media "friends" is an entirely different thing than personal friends. Also--Why shouldn't friends of any kind be allowed to review? Most actual friends aren't traceable anyway. It's just ridiculous.
People can mobilize their "Followers" to review as easily as their "Friends"...!!!
