I have always been grateful to Amazon for providing a tiny player in the publishing world a level playing field to compete against the big boys on the block.
But recently I have sensed a threat to this level playing field from unknown and obviously non-friendly clickers.
I was wondering why all the negative one-star reviews were jumping out at me when I looked for the Nod offs on Amazon. It turns out that they are ordered as to how useful the review is. The usefulness is determined by whether people found the review helpful or not. All my one-star reviews had lots of 'helpful' clicks to them. See the Spanish above. The one-star review has 6 out of 9 people finding it helpful. Meanwhile the five-star review has only 3 out of 18 people finding it helpful. That means there have been 18 negative clicks against the review sending it to the bottom of the two review heap.
Suspicious or what? It may not matter in the great scheme of things but it makes me think that Amazon isn't such the safe place that I once thought.
2 comments:
Coraggio, bella! I think you might be getting a little paranoid here. Your approach was always going to appeal to a certain type of buyer and strike others as improbable.
It’s easy to get seduced into taking these things too seriously. At the end of the day it’s just a handful of people idly clicking things and it doesn’t add up to a row of beans. In terms of stats, you can’t read anything into such a tiny sample, and in terms of worthwhile opinions, what matters is considered, detailed reviews by people who know a little about language. And in terms of sales, who knows whether either of these count for the slightest thing either way.
I do recommend the one-star Amazon reviews of The Da Vinci Code. “…and people are hailing it as a masterpiece! I'm sure these people find the absence of pictures almost intolerable.”
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