Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
Most have a bias (83% according to a study) but this is to be expected. You want to have sex tonight then you better give your spouse's book a positive review. Avoid WW3 at the next holiday dinner; click five stars often. You want to keep your friends; write that good review. Continue receiving free samples; be praiseworthy.
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If people disclose upfront bias/potential conflict of interest, then I respect that. Saying outright that "I really enjoyed this wonderful book by written my friend, whom I give 5 stars, I never suspected s/he had such amazing talent!" or will make me dismiss the review as a "friends and family" harmony-keeping thing, but won't make me subtract marks from the perceived potential-value-for-money that the author brings to the work (if one is sufficiently insecure to require such praise, probably the work is not good enough to merit it in the first place, though there will be exceptions). Nor will trying to accentuate the positives and downplay the negatives on an "I received a promotional copy for free in exchange for a review", since most people generally want to be "nice" when reviewing stuff they've gotten for free direct from the author/publisher which didn't suck outright.
Even author cluelessness in reposting positive reviews from other venues on Amazon under their own name (but giving credit to the original source) is a bit of mostly harmless gaucherie I can give a minor pass to, as long as people are reasonably upfront about it. Though it got creepy in that case that happened to an MR member who had her Goodreads reviews re-posted by someone doing "marketing" for the author who created an account with her exact same handle to make it look like she'd herself gone and posted such praise in more commercial venues, since that was a kind of identity theft.
It's deliberately trying to conceal any affiliations/relationship and pretending not to be the author/author's family and serendipitously stumbling across someone totally brand new and excellent when reviewing/directing people to a "deal" (even when sharing the same last name/exact same location details) and/or justifying the practice as "what us poor indies have to do to get noticed" (as often happens on the Amazon customer discussion boards) that gets the automatic DO NOT BUY, MAYBE NOT EVEN SKIM, DON'T BOTHER LINKING TO AGAIN.
And in the end, the fakery messes things up for everyone. "The Best Book I Ever Read!" will net the reviewer a reputation of only having read really bad books or having very poor taste, so people stop paying attention to their reviews. The "friends & family" promotion plan nets the author who does it, and all indie authors in general, a bad reputation as someone who needs yes-men to sneakily prop up their probably-shoddy work and suspicion directed towards their future offerings. And even now, people are becoming much more suspicious of customer-supplied reviews in general as astroturfing; we've already seen posts/articles about people not trusting the Amazon system any more and getting their recommendations from Goodreads, etc. instead.
1-star backlash can and already has hit works with disproportionately stellar rankings, especially those of authors who went and KDP-freebied their book so that unrelated readers could actually go read it. And the disgruntlement goes even higher with people who spent actual money for the book based on pre-existing 5-star reviews and I'm seeing a lot more "am I reading this in the negative mirror parallel universe than those people who live in the alternate world where this book didn't suck gave it all those 5-stars?"
Trying to game the system may net short term gains for some people who do it, but the long term result is a loss for almost everyone involved.
Except Harriet Klausner, who's apparently Teflon-coated and will survive unscathed like cockroaches after nuclear armageddon. And Cassandra Clare, who's demonstrated what I'd consider an impressive ability to parlay a reputation for plagiarism into book deals were it not for the fact that publishers seem to be rather lax about checking or caring about rip-offs of other authors' works and glorified numbers-incompletely-filed-off fanfics taken straight to press, as long as the original creative parties don't sue and the repackaged books make big enough profits.