You’ve finally gotten your book written, edited and published. No one (except perhaps your writing coach or collaborator) will ever know the struggles involved in getting those words on paper, or how much of yourself you’ve poured into your work. But that doesn’t matter because, finally, there it is on Amazon. And then, out of nowhere, you get hit by a one-star review. If you’ve self-published the book, you know the so-called reviewer hasn’t read the book because you actually know who has bought the book. But you would have known that anyway because the post makes no reference to the book’s content, spitefully focusing on the cover—and the book’s subject matter—instead.
The uninformed ramblings of someone who hasn’t even cracked your book shouldn’t matter. But with Amazon edging into monopoly status, a one-star review can have a seriously negative impact.
So what do you do?
Most of us would probably grit our teeth and swear a lot. If we’re Web savvy, we might call on everyone we know to write great reviews for us, thereby burying the bad one. Cynthia Toussaint, author of Battle for Grace: A Story of Pain, Redemption and Impossible Love took another route. She asked Amazon to remove the abusive and groundless review, and then refused to take no for an answer when they balked.
It should come as no surprise that a woman who spent more than a decade fighting one of the world’s largest and most powerful HMOs in order to get the care she needed would not be afraid to take on Amazon. She emailed and called Amazon not once but several times to no avail, even though the person she contacted agreed that the review wasn’t legit. “The kind man I spoke with yesterday at Amazon’s Author Central department is at a loss because in his words, this reviewer broke not only the spiteful guideline, but also the not-reading-the-book guideline,” she explained. “He used to work in the review department and told me that the review never should have been posted.”
So she mounted a campaign, asking her friends and professional associates to rebut the review with comments. Under each Amazon review, you will find a question asking you if the review was helpful along with Yes and No buttons. Once you click on the button, a field for comments pops up. She also asked people to report the offending review to the Amazon authorities via a link on the Amazon page and to email Amazon using the following address: community-help@amazon.com. It took a week, but in the end Cynthia—with the help of a lot of the people around her—prevailed and Amazon removed the abusive review.
Cynthia should never have been forced to wage this battle, but her tactics have shown us the way to challenge inappropriate reviews. As published writers, we will all experience negative reviews at some point and we will likely feel that we’ve been stomped on by someone wearing spiked shoes designed to aerate lawns. That’s just part of the game. Accepting negative reviews by someone who hasn’t even made the effort to read what we worked so hard to write is not. Thanks to Cynthia, we now have a battle plan—and a precedent—should that ever happen. Let’s just hope that we never need either.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.