Verified Purchases

“You’ll never hear so much as a complaint from me, as long as, baby, you don’t lie to me.”
-The Fratellis, “Baby Don’t You Lie To Me!”

It’s probably not the wisest decision to target a corporation that’s well on their way to taking over the world, but no one is listening anyway, so why not.

As you may be aware, I’m an author. If not, then I suggest you click on another menu item on my site. No, I don’t have food available. Stop multi-tasking while at a restaurant, you’re confusing all of us! Authors don’t make a lot of money—the successful writers are a misrepresentation of the general wordsmith mass. For example, I can probably afford something off a value menu at a fast-food restaurant while someone like Dan Brown is eating somewhere classy like, oh, I don’t know, Olive Garden or Chili’s. There are a lot more starving artists than there are successful ones. Don’t worry, I’m eating just fine, let’s not take that out of context and label me “insensitive” or whatever other terms people use to blow things out of proportion.

The over-saturated market has created two constants: an author needs quality reviews, and to hit social media harder than a teenage girl. Wait, the phrasing on that seems wrong. You know what I meant though. Regarding the former, the catch-22 is that you need reviews to get sales, but sales to get reviews.

There’s something I can tell you from experience: People used to take advantage of the system by paying for fake reviews. As a ghostwriter, a company once reached out to me to write multiple reviews for a wage for each post. I didn’t want to do that, no matter how much I wanted to join Dan Brown at Olive Garden. So Amazon cracked down on these trends and put into effect a new review policy. Good, right?

Yes. They became stricter on where IP addresses and email accounts originated, and also started fully implementing the “verified purchase” requirements. Still good, right?

Yes, in a way. Sure, people can buy your product, but not everyone gets to review it. Here are two examples that aren’t allowed:

-“A family member of the product creator posts a five-star customer review to help boost sales”: As many authors know, especially ones that are trying to break into the industry, your family will probably be the first people to know about your published work, and they will buy it, no matter how dysfunctional they appear to be. They will read it, some will be more honest than others, and then they will want to help you out. Fantastic! So Amazon is essentially saying that your mom can’t tell you that you’re the best at everything. However, this just says “five-star” which makes it possible for a jealous sibling to give a sub-par or slanderous review just because. How is that fair? Still, it’s understandable in a way.

-“You must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months”: This right here irks me a bit. I had two excellent reviews by people who bought my book off Amazon, but since they hadn’t spent $50 yet, they weren’t eligible to post a review. Why does it matter? They bought a product, and wanted to review it. Sounds like they were verified purchasers, but I guess Amazon just needs to get paid.

This is where I don’t think it makes sense. Say you’re a self-published author who has used Amazon’s service to put their book out. Amazon gets a hefty cut as part of the sale, so wouldn’t they want more verified reviews to gain more revenue? I’m all for making sure the reviews are valid, but when they obviously are, but Amazon wants even more money on top of what they made from the purchase, then I believe they’re crossing a line.

Here’s an eye-opener for you: If an author sells a paperback book on Amazon at $8.99 the author receives a little over $1. Yum, that’s McDonald’s money right there.

Here’s another eye-opener for you: Amazon’s sales of products, which includes books, rose 25.5% in 2017, to $118.5 billion.

But people can’t review something unless they spend $50? It doesn’t seem like Amazon is hurting that much to purposely hinder the sales of their own authors.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to not buy anything from Amazon because they had messed up my last 6 orders of 2017. That’s pathetic for a multi-billion-dollar, industry-leading corporation if you ask me. I will tell you this as well, their screw-ups accounted for more than $50 easily. Interesting.

Despite what I said, there are some exceptions to what I will buy now on Amazon, but I better damn well spend $50 before I can say what they are. Uh-oh, Is there a drone outside my window right now? Shh!

Oh what the hell. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. Hi Jeff!

I’m just saying there needs to be a little bit of flexibility here, but sadly, this isn’t all Amazon’s fault. If people were just decent to begin with then this wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, there’s no way to monitor that without it affecting everyone from the big guy to the little guy, from the fraudulent to the honest.