Quote:
Originally Posted by Canuck_in_Japan
I'm disappointed to hear about this news but can't quite put my finger on why. I suppose I have very little faith in the "paid for" reviews over on Amazon and I'm a little worried that that will spread to Goodreads. If Amazon wants to get data on what people are reading then that's fine with me. I just hope it doesn't get any worse than that.
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It took me a couple of days to sort out my own unease, but in my case it comes down to this:
I actually don't mind people being funneled from GR to Amazon, provided that users can continue to specify additional store searches. (For those that don't know, the search links available on a GR book page are selected by the user,, with the exception of the first button, which was designated by the current sponsor for the user's region.)
What I don't want is Amazon funneling their own site traffic to GR. Many people discover GR after running from the chaos that is the Amazon forums.
Another thing that concerns me is "Goodreads as marketing venue". I hope the authors reading will read all of it before getting mad at me, because it's probably not you that I'm talking about.
Some time ago, the powers that be at GR decided to make the site more friendly to authors, and market the site to authors. All well and good, except a lot of bad advice got passed around that resulted in some authors going kind of crazy in a spammy manner. Here's the thing - I don't blame (most of) those authors because GR was initially very wishy-washy in their statements to authors. (I.e, "you might want to think about not doing that because people may not like it" as opposed to "that behavior is considered SPAM on GR and is not to be done".) People need consistent rules in place in any venue. There is also a lot of really bad marketing advice that flows around the internet in general, and sometimes new authors don't see why it's bad advice.
Many of the worst offenders are also KDP Select participants. I really fear that Kindle services integration will be a big green light with a billboard saying, "Goodreads is here to help you sell your Kindle ebooks!" and it will turn into the Amazon forums.
Note that I'm only worried about a specific type of author behavior, not authors in general. These are the people that send out 300 friend requests a day with a note "buy my book!", who constantly get posts moved or deleted for violating group SPAM rules, then go whine about how they should be able to promote any way they like.
We don't yet know what level of increased commercialization will take place on GR. We can assume there will be some, simply due to the integration of Kindle services. That may be the extent of it, which would be lovely provided that it's user selectable so that the non-Kindlers don't have it in their face 24-7.
But I don't know what we will end up with. I'm certainly not going to delete my account and negate my personal investment in GR based on conjecture. I will wait and see, and if the direction it takes comes into conflict with my use of the site,
then I'll decide what to do.