Tag Archives: book buying

How Many Reviews Does A Book On Amazon Have?

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When purchasing books online most people will look at the reviews. One or more good reviews may encourage the potential reader to part with their money. Amazon have, fairly recently allowed reviews appearing on amazon.com to show on the amazon.co.uk site. This is to be welcomed, however matters are somewhat confusing. Take, for example my collection of short stories, “Sting In The Tail and Other Stories” (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sting-tail-other-stories-Morris-ebook/dp/B00DFK6R54/ref=pd_cp_kinc_0). As of today anyone visiting the UK site will, at first glance see that “Sting In The Tail” has received 1 review. However, read down the page and (under the review which was posted on the UK site) appear 3 reviews written by readers who have purchased the book on amazon.com. It might be argued that people should carefully read all the information about a particular book. However, in the real world potential readers will frequently just glance at a book description, note that it has (apparently) 1 review and pass on to the next title. The situation is worse for authors when no reviews appear on the UK site but books have been reviewed on the US website. Again one can argue that readers (if they look at the whole page) will see that the book has, in fact been reviewed on amazon.com, but how many readers will read so far?

My suggestion for resolving this issue is for the total number of reviews on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk to appear near to the top of the book’s page (after all a review is a review irrespective of which country it was written in).

As I said at the start of this post it is wonderful that Amazon do include reviews written on amazon.com on the UK site. However, in my opinion the total number of reviews should be made clearer ensuring that the potential buyer has the maximum amount of information at his (or her) fingertips and, hopefully helping authors to sell more books.

to kindle or not to kindle, that is the question

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There is a lot to be said in favour of Amazon from the perspective of authors. KDP Select enables authors to promote their book for free for upto 5 days in any 90 day period (during the recent promotion of my book, Samantha a total of 96 copies where downloaded during the promotion, 3-7 March), a statistic with which I am rather pleased. However there are other aspects of Amazon’s services for authors (in the UK) with which I’d take issue.

On amazon.com there is an option to give Kindle content as a gift. I would dearly like to provide family, friends and readers of my blog with gift copies of my books, however the service does not work in the UK (the country in which I live) so I’m not able to avail myself of this excellent facility.

To my mind authors should be eligible for the same high standard of service irrespective of the country in which they reside. At present those resident in the UK are not obtaining the same services as those living in the USA. I for one hope that Amazon rectifies this situation as a matter of urgency.

Limbo

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It is often said that if people are happy with a product or service they will rarely express their approbation. In contrast where individuals are dissatisfied they will complain vociferously. Looking at the sales of my book, Samantha during it’s free promotion in the Kindle store I see that 96 copies have been downloaded, however as of approximately 20 minutes ago none of those downloaders have left a review or rating. What am I, the author to make of this?

The promotion ran from 3-7 March so it is still early days (Amazon sends e-mails to customers asking if they would like to review books which they have purchased and it is possible that these will prompt purchasers to leave a review or rating), however I know from my own purchasing habits that although I frequently mean to review a book I’ve read I often don’t get round to doing so. When Samantha first appeared on my blog I received a number of likes and encouraging comments which where (and are) much appreciated, however the lack of feedback from purchasers leaves me in limbo not knowing what people think of Samantha. I enjoy writing and will continue to write with or without feedback. However it would still be nice to hear from purchasers of Samantha either via reviews on Amazon or by comments on this blog.

 

Kevin