• By Jeff Davidson, breathingspace.com

    An insidious trend is impacting authors, writers, poets and all creative individuals everywhere. As a result of the Amazon.com review process, virtually anyone can post anything about any intellectual property at any time. Such postings can be made independently of whether or not one has actually, say, bought and read the book, or has anything coherent to say about it. In Amazon’s quest to provide a “forum” for users, all reviews, those thoughtfully written as well as those that represent vicious attacks on the book or author himself, are considered fair game.

    Amazon’s belief is that a diversity of opinion benefits all. Does it? Suppose you have written a book that’s taken you months or years of your life. You’ve painstakingly researched and/or experienced everything that goes into every page. On a bright, sunny day, your book is finally listed on Amazon.com for all to see. Several reviews begin to appear. Suppose they’re all favorable: you receive ten 5-star reviews.

    Online Axe-grinders
    Along comes someone who, for whatever reason, has an axe to grind. This person gives you a one-star review, saying that your book is garbage, offering nothing of value to readers, and shouldn’t ever have been published. “Okay,” you say, “this is one nutty reviewer out of 11. My average is still five stars. How much can it hurt? Other site visitors will see that this person has some hidden agenda.”

    If only it were that simple. First, you no longer average five stars. Worse, Amazon has a feature associated with its reviews called “The most helpful positive review” and “The most helpful negative review.” When visitors click on the reviews to your books, a box pops up. On the left they see the positive review that people have deemed “most helpful.” On the right, they see the one scathing review that somebody posted about your book.

    Why does this one negative review appear when there are 11 other highly favorable reviews? Because the only negative review, by default, serves as “the most helpful” negative review. Amazon essentially gives equal weight to all of the good things said about your book and the one bad thing said about your book, so that site visitors can have “an informed opinion.”

    Oddity and Curiosity
    It gets worse. Many site visitors who see your book and look at the posted reviews reflexively will click on the 1-star review to see why one person’s opinion is at great odds with everyone else’s. Then, site visitors can cast a vote: “helpful” or “not helpful.”

    A scathing review about your book that has little merit, posted by someone with a hidden agenda, is going to make a greater impression on many visitors than 10 other sterling reviews – it’s simply human nature, and people love gossip. People like to read fan-zines to see what celebrities are up to, and what dirt people have dug up on them. Likewise, people want to see what dirt there is on your book.

    In some cases, the one scathing review begins to metastasize. Your book could have as many as sixty 5-star reviews, and perhaps the most prominent among them includes 20 people who comment as to whether or not the review was helpful. Oddly, the one scathing review, often, will end up having more comments.

    “Your Book is Useless”
    Suppose your book is 250 pages and is self-help in nature, with at least two or three tips on every page. Over the course of your entire text, you’re offering readers more than 700 tips. A reviewer comes along and says that all the tips are useless. Can this possibly be true? Or, the reviewer says “nothing new here, it’s all been said before, none of this is practical,” etc. Such broad sweeping “critiques” of your book’s information and tips are unfair to you and all subsequent site visitors.

    Yet, Amazon will take no steps to police agenda-driven reviews unless there is foul language, an ad hominem attack on the author rather than the book material itself, or extenuating circumstances. Meanwhile, agenda-driven reviews remain in place not merely for this week, this month, or this year, but forever.

    The more people who click on and indicate that the review was “helpful” or “unhelpful,” the higher the probability that the review itself will appear in the Google rankings when someone enters your name or the name of your book.

    Loose Cannons Online
    Who exactly posts such inaccurate or irresponsible reviews, and why do they do so? Hopefully, rival authors and publishers aren’t resorting to such tactics, but in some cases this has proven to occur. For most authors, however, scathing reviews come as a result of someone who:

    • has personal issues
    • is at odds with your publisher or your topic
    • objects to your credentials or affiliations
    • has a personal vendetta against you.

    A personal vendetta could arise from an employee who you let go last year, the lover you broke up with, someone who wants something that you have, someone who feels slighted by you, or someone who is simply jealous of your success. I am not making this stuff up–you only have to visit a handful of books on Amazon and follow through on the observations. The more popular a book or its author, the greater the propensity for agenda-driven reviews to appear.

    This Amazon-fostered process of being able to post a review regardless of merit, and then allowing others to vote–“helpful or not helpful” or “like or dislike”–obviously has been mirrored all over the web and is now a standard feature on tens of thousands of shopping sites, blogs, artistic reviews, and social media sites.

    So, everyone gets to “vote” about everything, at any time, with few barriers to entry. You can create an anonymous email account and begin posting away. The Tower of Babel has been re-built online, and it’s not pretty.

    No Remedy In Sight
    Suppose you want to address the agenda-driven reviewer who, without merit or conscience, has completely gutted your book. If you reply in the comment section, you are likely to start a chain of counter-replies that will actually increase the Google ranking of this particular review. Your name and the name of your book generally rises and falls based on how many others link to it, regardless of the quality of what others might have to say about you.

    As long as anyone can anonymously post reviews regardless of merit, particularly on the world’s most popular websites, even if the comments border on libel and defamation, they stay.

    I don’t advocate that all email addresses be verified and that no one be permitted to have an anonymous email address. Reasons abound for having the ability to make inquiries without revealing oneself. Yet, Amazon, Google, and all the other top vendors ought to be more rigorous in what they allow to be posted. The ramifications of even one mean-spirited, agenda-driven review are global and, as far as we know, eternal.

    Jeff Davidson is The Work-Life Balance Expert® and the premier thought leader on work-life balance issues. Jeff speaks to organizations that seek to enhance their overall productivity by improving the work-life balance of their people. He wrote Breathing Space, Simpler Living, and Dial it Down, Live it Up.