Why oh why is Amazon making it even harder to put up reviews for authors. First they curtail your reviews because you supposedly know the author or you publish the author or help them publish. Now Amazon is telling you to spend over $50 to actually put a review in place. That would be a years worth of books to me.
WHAT…. Yep you head me right. It seems they don’t want Indie Authors to be reviewed. If this really is the case then why are we all still selling through them? Why aren’t we using Lulu or Ingram Spark. Why aren’t we using Draft to Digital or Smashwords…they both do Mobi aka Kindle files. I’ve not seen or heard of Barnes & Noble or Kobo refusing your reviews so why is Amazon? What is their problem?
I have heard about biased reviews – nope I won’t give one to anyone let along an author I would call a friend. In fact I’m more inclined to be harsher on them than someone I don’t know. I’ve heard about paid reviews and farmed reviews. I wouldn’t use either. So coming down on people who are in the same social media group, chat on the odd occasion doesn’t mean they are great friends, after all social media is all about making connections. I mean you chat with your fans don’t you?
HERE IS THE ELIGIBILITY
Eligibility
To contribute to Customer features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers, Idea Lists) or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $50 minimum. In addition, to contribute to Spark you must also have a paid Prime subscription (free Prime trials do not qualify). You do not need to meet this requirement to read content posted by other contributors or post Customer Questions, or create or modify Profile pages, Shopping Lists, Wish Lists or Registries.
Maybe it is time we all left reviews about Amazon
and how bad they are getting!