Quote:
Originally Posted by Pulpmeister
What to the following have in common:
George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Kingsley Amis, Gore Vidal, Anthony Powell, Anthony Burgess, Anthony Boucher, James Blish, Clive James, Henry James, John Mortimer, George Orwell, etc etc etc have in common?
They all wrote reviews....
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Did they write reviews on Amazon? Did they write reviews for bookstores selling their books, or for independent magazines/newspapers? Do you think people already knew that they were authors? Finally, do you think that they may have already had sufficient success that they weren't dependent on reviews from other authors?
I think that the answers to these questions are quite different for those established authors than for many authors on Amazon.
And no one is saying that authors can't write reviews. Amazon is saying that the authors can't write reviews *on Amazon.*
The real problem isn't Umberto Eco writing a review on Amazon (assuming he would do such a thing). The real problem is when you look at a self-published book and find that it has 10 5-star reviews. You then check out the reviewers and find that each of them is a self published author, and each of their books has a positive review by the person who wrote the book you originally looked at. This is a real problem with the credibility of Amazon's reviewing process, and Amazon should stop it. Most customers want to read independent reviews, not reviews written by other authors in the hopes of getting reviews of their own books. That just looks like marketing.
None of this implies that Amazon's reviews are perfect now, or that their implementation of this process is ideal. However, the idea itself is a good idea, and overdue.