Have you gotten your invitation to Amazon Vine yet? Many of Amazon’s Top Reviewers have volunteered to review advance copies of books after receiving this e-mail:
Dear XXXXX:As one of our most valued customer reviewers, we would like to offer you a special invitation to join an exciting new Amazon.com program called Amazon Vine. As a member of this exclusive community, you will have free access to pre-release and new products, as well as the opportunity to be among the very first to review them.
We know how hard you work to ensure that your reviews are accurate and detailed, and our customers love you for it. Your candid and unbiased critiques are essential to making Amazon.com a great place to shop, and have a major impact on whether a customer purchases a so-so product, or a whiz-bang one that they will rave about for years. We understand that there is nothing like the adrenaline rush of knowing that your glowing review contributed to the success of a product you discovered on Amazon.com. Heck, we get that warm fuzzy feeling ourselves.
Amazon Vine is our way of showing you how much we appreciate your efforts. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to review products for Amazon.com. As part of this community of influential voices, you will have access to products before the rest of the market, so the reviews you write will be among the first that our customers read. Critical or glowing, it’s your opinion that matters.
Here’s how it works–simply opt into the program, and each month we’ll email you a newsletter of new products that our vendors have submitted for Amazon Vine reviews. Browse through the newsletter and visit the Amazon Vine website to order items that appeal to you.
We’ll ship those items directly to your doorstep free of charge, and they’re yours to keep. Once you write your review, we’ll post it on the product’s page on Amazon.com. Not only will Amazon Vine member reviews be noted as such so they stand out (you’ll turn your friends green with envy), but they will be the only reviews displayed on book and music pages before release date. As always, Amazon will not edit or modify your opinions, nor share your personal contact information with vendors.
Amazon Vine is an invitation-only program for our most valued customers.
Thank you again for providing Amazon.com with excellent customer reviews. We hope you will join Amazon Vine, and enjoy all the benefits that this program can offer.Sincerely,
The Amazon.com Vine Team
I asked one of Amazon’s Top Reviewers who has already joined Vine for her opinions on how this will affect competition among reviewers on Amazon. Her reply:
The program gives me an edge on new reviewers. The reviewing system at Amazon may no longer be so equal, unless longtime reviewers don’t join [Vine]. I have a feeling most will join, but time will tell.
And what about the ethical issues, with publishers paying fees to participate? Will this taint the review system, and put small publishers at a disadvantage?
My opinion won’t be swayed by free books, but will that be the case with others? Amazon says it is OK to have critical reviews but HERE’S THE KEY POINT: Amazon Vine reviews will be the first ones printed in most cases, before other reviewers. How many of those reviewers will continue to get books if they write bad reviews? I can’t see how bad reviews would be good for Amazon’s bottom line but maybe I’m missing something.Maybe this is one advantage that Amazon feels is duly earned by people who’ve written reviews, UNPAID, for years. Our only pay has been the free review copies from enterprising authors and the comments and appreciative emails we get from readers and authors.
I can see both sides of this. Amazon wants to encourage their strongest reviewers to keep it up and is “paying” them with free material to review. Makes sense from that perspective.
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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors
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5 Comments
Steve, I'm afraid the reviewer you quoted has been too quick to swallow Amazon's hype. They are not running this program to "reward" reviewers, they're running it to charge high fees to participating vendors. I assure you, they'll make a fortune off this, just as they do off their product pairing and email programs.
I agree, Aaron.
Also I think Vine, combined with Amazon's new display of customer reviews (which obscures recent reviews) will make it nearly impossible for "real" reviewers to break through . By "real" reviewers, I mean casual book reviewers who happen to be extremely knowledgeable/passionate about a particular book.
In other words, there's a danger that Amazon customer reviews will become too uniform, too "professional," too positive. They might begin resembling newspaper book reviews — with similar catastrophic results.
I just blogged about what happened to me today and my suspicions about this new program.
I am an Amazon Vine member and a top 500 customer reviewer on Amazon.
I am curious what you think of what I found.
http://thethinkingmother.blogspot.com/2007/08/amazon-vine-suspicious.html
Reviews have never been guaranteed to be “real”. Publishers have been sending free review copies out for a long time. In addition, authors often have friend and family members who are willing to write a good review in Amazon and other location. I am the author of a couple of books, Church Website Design: A step by step approach and Searching for Mom. I have had several people tell me that they “enjoyed reading Searching for Mom and did not want to put it down,” but I am hesitant to ask these people to repeat their comments on Amazon because they may not be considered “real” reviewers. Even so, there have been significant sales that have come from what these people have told their friends. There will be people reading my book who are the friend of a friend of a friend. If this person chooses to write a review, is it any more real that one written by someone who received a free book? I think the idea behind Amazon’s program is valid. By focusing the program on the top reviewers, they are helping to give creditability to the reviews that it produces. The top reviewers will want to write a good review to protect their status. The average Joe review may be a good review, it may be biased in favor of the author or it could be the person has a bone to pick with someone. It is hard to tell.
The Vine program also addresses a longstanding dilemma that Amazon has had with pre-release reviews. Amazon doesn't allow reviews to be posted before the product's release, because highly anticipated products would be deluged with non-reviews by people who have not used the product. Movies (DVD and VHS) are the exception to this rule. Amazon opens those product pages up for reviewing before the product's release, because Amazon links reviews from the theatrical release and previous editions to the new release. This works fine when the movie has reviews of a different format or edition. But for those DVDs that don't (e.g. older films and TV programs), the customer reviews fill up with junk along the lines of "I looooove this movie! I can't wait for the DVD!" Amazon wants to avoid this in other product categories. So no pre-release reviews.
But Amazon wants pre-release reviews, because they want pre-orders. The Vine program enables Amazon to offer pre-release reviews while ensuring that the reviewers have actually read the book or used the product. They hope this will translate into more pre-orders.
Vendors undoubtedly hope that pre-release reviews will generate "early buzz". But there is always the chance that the Vine program won't go over well with vendors. Pre-release reviews did help give "The Stolen Child" and "The Meaning of Night" (in the UK) an early sales boost. But those reviews were accompanied by big, expensive product placement and Recommendations campaigns. Without a publicity blitz to lead customers to the product page, how much difference will pre-release reviews make? It won't take long for marketing departments to determine if the Vine program is cost-effective.
-mirasreviews
(Amazon.com Customer Reviewer)