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How do you tell a bogus review from a real one, except by having it actually read by a human? This would be pretty expensive.
Expensive or not, Amazon has an obligation to make sure their review system has high integrity and is not "gamed" or no one will trust Amazon reviews anymore.
I'm not sure they can. There are things Amazon seems able to do well, but this certainly has never been one of them. And I don't know that anyone else at half Amazon's scale or larger has done much better.
Anything with less than a real critical mass of reviews (less than hundreds) is way too easy to entirely game on Amazon. I wrote a book quite a few years ago on a niche tech topic. To be entirely honest, very few people read it. The positive reviews of the book were almost all from people I knew personally. Then the 1-star reviews started coming in. Each 1-star review had no actual content in the review. It was clear…
I haven't really thought this through, so I'm open for arguments here.
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You make significantly more than 5% of the cover price if you self-publish. There isn't much reason to use a publisher, unless its a reputable one who fronts you an advance and knows how to market your book for increased sales.
Again, it depends on why you are writing the book. I have heard that you make $10k on avg if you use a publisher, vs $50k avg if you self-publish. If you are doing it for the money, self-publishing might be the way to go. I'm using a publisher because: - They have the resources to market the book. The book's not done yet and I've already sold ~2000 advance copies. I'm trying to reach as many people with this book as…
(To be fair, they were awesome with me and I had a blast, but damn, 2000 advance copies?)
What's the topic of the book?
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I don't think it's that easy. My book on Amazon currently has one 5-star review that's just one word and two 5-star reviews with two words each. I am the author and the publisher, and I know for a fact that these reviews are not fake. But they probably come across as fake. I think that there some people who just want to share their opinion of a book without making an effort to write a good review. Personally, I'd pre…
I have noticed an increase of reviews that typically contain a subject of " Stars", and either no review body, or a very short review body, such as "good book". I too hate reviews like that, but I think it's due to Amazon nagging customers to leave reviews for things that are purchased on the Kindle. I am beginning to suspect they have an app or form somewhere where you tap the number of stars and write your review i…
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Yelp has a system. It doesn't seem to be perfect; I've seen what looks like both false-negative and false-positive classification of fake reviews. But it seems to work decently well. One thing I do like about their system is that you can click a link to read the reviews they consider "not recommended." Here's what they say about it publicly: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/11/yelp-recommended-review...
Let me just say that Yelp's classification system is complete crap . Until a user starts actively using Yelp, their reviews get filtered out, which excludes most people who only post a review because they loved a certain business. Sometimes, five star reviews will vanish after months of being up, all because of a change in the algorithm. And the Yelp business team is extremely unresponsive when there is a clearly ill…
And frankly, I don't have seem to have a lot of tastes in common with the hardcore Yelp users.
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Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move. Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy. If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn…
They do this - Was this comment helpful? Click no and you can report it along with a brief message. It's either ineffective or doesn't do anything at all, can't tell.
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It was Adobe Flex 3 for Dummies. Niche book on a tech topic that flamed out after a few years. If you've never written a book I'd still probably recommend doing it once. But don't expect to make any money, besides whatever advance you get. But it's still damn cool to be able to say you wrote a book.
Wow, that one's super niche haha!! Sure, I'm self-publishing. Just glad to say I'm an author and hoping to make a little bit of cash too, we'll see.
I.e. improving your resume, looking prestigious to potential consulting clients, or landing paid speaking gigs.
The other thing I notice is the titles are Kindle. Why are dead-tree products, arguably a more liberal format, mixed with a e-book products that are proprietary and closed?