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Plug Your Book!
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spot, although reviews written by Top Reviewers carry more weight.
Subsequent reviews appear in reverse chronological order below the
Spotlight reviews. A maximum of six reviews appear on your book’s
detail page, along with a link to all previous reviews.
Negative reviews
Positive reviews certainly help your book, but negative reviews on
Amazon can have a bigger impact, according to a study published by the
Yale School of Management. Multiple glowing reviews for a book tend
to be dismissed by shoppers as “hype” generated by the author or
publisher, the study found. Negative reviews, however, are taken more
seriously because buyers usually believe they represent honest criticism
from disappointed readers.
Buyers understand that no book pleases everyone, and that any book
reviewed often enough will get an occasional thumbs-down. But in some
cases, a single detailed, critical review can devastate sales on Amazon,
particularly with nonfiction how-to books.
The study, The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book
Reviews examined random titles from Global Books in Print and
bestsellers from Publishers Weekly. You can read the entire study here:
Early on, Amazon’s decision to allow readers to post negative book
reviews infuriated publishers, chief executive Jeff Bezos recalls:
We had publishers writing to us, saying, “Why in the world
would you allow negative reviews? Maybe you don’t understand
your business—you make money when you sell things. Get rid
of the negative reviews, and leave the positive ones.”
Yes, negative reviews can hurt sales in the short term, but over the
long term, allowing criticism builds credibility and helps shoppers
decide what to buy, Bezos says: “We don’t make money when we sell
things, we make money when we help people make purchase decisions.”
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