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Rated: E · Other · Reviewing · #1948479
Did you ever wonder how terrible books get good reviews?
Before I buy any product from Amazon, I always read the reviews. Especially the one and two star. When people knock something, are they doing it to be different or noticed? Does it make them feel superior somehow to the producer of the product? Probably a little of them all.
When I published with create space, I noticed it took a couple of weeks for anyone to even notice my book. It was written for a niche market of real estate agents so I knew it would have limited appeal to the masses.
It hasn't done great, but it hasn't done bad. Since the second month of publication, I have sold between 20 and 30 copies a month for the last 42 months. I have noticed that it takes about 80-100 sales to actually get an honest review. So I have 13 reviews. For a while, there was only one other book competing with mine on subject matter. There are now about 7 books similar to mine.
I noticed that a few of these books had 13-15, 5 star reviews. Pretty impressive. Then I noticed that all the reviews were given in the first 6 weeks of publication when sales are usually the worst for unknown authors. I also noticed that there had been no reviews after that 6 week period.
I read many of the reviews. 2 admitted that they hadn't begun to read the book yet, one said she wasn't a realtor but bought it for her daughters birthday and hadn't given it to her Realtor daughter yet. I searched the internet, curious about this phenomenom.
These findings don't apply to established authors or ghost written celebrity books.
You want a five star review for your book? You can have one for 40-50 bux. There are many wannabe writers out there that will give a five star review for cash. You can even write the review yourself. Amazon caught on to this because people were reviewing the product that there was no record they purchased it. Now you must also have the reviewer purchase the book they are supposedly going to review. The reviewers aren't afraid you won't pay. They can always change their review to one star if you don't. They won't change the review if you pay because they want future "easy" work from you. There are some people now making their living at this.
Just so you know, I have never been paid for a review and have never paid for one.
Is this where I should offer 300 gift points for each five star review from any of you?
That was a joke. No points. I'm not a great writer so I suspect the 11 five star reviews I got out of the 13 reviews were more for the content than the writing.
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