Sorry all! We’ve been a little busy lately and haven’t been able to post everything we wanted to this week. But before we get into Amazon Reviews As Attack Weapons, we want to share with you a little piece of information.
You all remember our twitter stalker Amanda Welling, right? You know the one who sent us about a million crazy twitter messages while she was waiting in line for concert tickets?
Yeah, that one.
Well, we just received this screenshot from Carroll that he found on GenX’s blog. It’s a shot Gen took of her 10 cent donation to the STGRB treasury.
Athena informed me that out of all the donations we’ve received so far, only one was a ten cent donation (which Athena declined) sent from a Jonathan Welling (look at the dates on both shots – January 11th):
So, it appears that Amanda Welling (aka GenX) used her husband’s paypal account to waste 10 cents.
Carroll was right. Amanda is GenX. Good call, Carroll!
Oh, by the way, Athena wants all the trolls to know that any donation under a dollar will automatically be declined. We’re not going to waste our time with mentally unstable trolls who obsess over us while waiting in concert lines. Time to get a life, girls.
Anyhow, moving on…
Our post for today is about how reviewers have been using Amazon reviews to attack books and/or the authors that write them. And in some cases, to attack other reviews/reviewers. Here is an exchange in one our recent blog posts, between Anon-a-bus, Another Anon, and Athena.
If there is something brewing here you might want to check out. A relatively unknown author in m/m romance released a book about a week ago and now has like 40 five star glowing reviews. That never happens. One person gave it a one star review and questioned the validity of the other reviews…and the honesty. Now his “fans” are beginning to rally around him. What I think is interesting is that the reviewer is getting bullied…or might be getting bullied this time. I’m not sure yet. And the overall picture any way you look at it is amazon still promotes this kind of corruption.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/cr/1623803535/p=4/ref=aw_cr_p_books_g_4_3
Hmmn, maybe not bullying as such but something very close, which just reinforces what the reviewer said. There is no way all those other reviewers would know about the 1-star review, especially all at once, unless they were told or they all checked the book’s reviews daily. Who does that? There is no alert for reviews.
And Athena:
We know a ton of reviewers who are that obsessed. Wendy Darling for one. There are dozens more. Fans do check their reviews and they also check the books they’ve reviewed as well. This is how review wars on Amazon get started all the time.
Athena is right about obsessive fans/reviewers. As a result, it seems that Amazon reviews may be losing credibility, as Goronwy says here:
This article actually first appeared in the NYT, where it’s received almost two hundred comments. Check them out: it really looks like Amazon reviews are losing credibility, and not because of ‘badly behaving authors’
This was an article published on January 20, 2013 about a book written by Randall Sullivan, titled: Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson. Apparently a group of Michael Jackson’s fans who call themselves Michael Jackson’s Rapid Response Team to Media Attacks organized a planned assault on the author and his book through the Amazon review system. The article states:
In the biggest, most overt and most successful of these campaigns, a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews of a new biography of the singer. They bombarded Amazon with dozens of one-star takedowns, succeeded in getting several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale.
“Books used to die by being ignored, but now they can be killed — and perhaps unjustly killed,” said Trevor Pinch, a Cornell sociologist who has studied Amazon reviews. “In theory, a very good book could be killed by a group of people for malicious reasons.”
The article then goes on to say:
But the book’s publisher, Grove Press, said the Amazon review system was being abused in an organized campaign. “We’re very reluctant to interfere with the free flow of discourse, but there should be transparency about people’s motivations,” said Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic, Grove’s parent company.
And how does Amazon respond? Just as we thought they would:
Amazon said the fans’ reviews had not violated its guidelines but declined further comment.
What do we think?
We have addressed, over and over, this problem of people abusing the Amazon review system to attack others, a problem which has been largely ignored by Amazon. Instead, they seem to think removing five-star reviews with no rhyme or reason is improving their review system.
What we think is that Amazon needs to change it’s book reviewing policy. First of all, they should require that the reviewer has actually read the book, or part of it, before writing a review. Secondly, they should also require that the review stay on topic, that is, discuss the book itself and its content. Anything else (i.e. an attack on the author, or on another reviewer, or on another review, etc.) should be prohibited/deleted.
Book reviews should be about the book. Period.
While I agree that books should be read before they are reviewed, how can Amazon require that? How can someone prove they read it? A little quiz? Or will it turn out to be like Smashwords where you can only review books you actually bought there? I don’t like that idea at all… Do you have any ideas how Amazon could guarantee that a person had actually read the book? Because I can’t think of one that doesn’t absolutely reek of Big Brotherism… Just sayin’…
This sort of thing makes me so sad, because as someone who feels ethically bound to provide a fair and honest review, I, personally, am being made to look bad by these yahoos that post malicious reviews like this. It’s upsetting.
I don’t think Amazon can prove or disprove that someone has read a book or not, but they can delete reviews that state specifically that the reviewer didn’t read the book and is reviewing it based on something else, like the book price or how they feel about the author. I’ve seen so many reviews like that. Because of just that alone, I agree with STGRB that Amazon should require people to read the book before reviewing it and that the review should be based on the book only. But they don’t and that’s stupid.
This is right, Anon. You can’t prove it, but like you said, Amazon can remove those reviews that state clearly that the reviewer hasn’t read the book and is leaving the review for some other reason.
Oh, good point! But we’ve all seen how Amazon does these sorts of things. Haphazardly and badly…
I don’t think there’s any way Amazon can guarantee that the reviewer has actually read the book, or that the reviewer isn’t a friend or family member (or an enemy) of the author. It’s one of the problems of letting anyone with an account review anything, and I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it. The only solution is for the consumer to educate themselves and take reviews with a grain of salt.
Good point.
I knew she would give herself away sooner or later. Ever since her husband emailed me, I checked the ISP and compared it to the emails that GenX sent me and they matched! So I knew they used the same computer. The difficult part was to get other evidence and her blog (Something about hippies and oh my, books) and (which has since been taken down) was another give away to her identity. I am covering it on the Looking Glass on March 1st on the post titled “Amanda Welling”.
What possessed Amanda/GenX to donate $0.10 in the first place? I don’t understand what she was trying to do. Strange woman.
Yeah, I know. It doesn’t make much sense, does it?
I don’t even understand why she’s so fixated on this site. STGRB didn’t do a profile on her. As far as I know, she hasn’t really been mentioned here that much at all. What’s her deal?
She’s just angry because Athena banned her from the site a while back. You can read about what happened here:
http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2013/01/13/more-bully-reviews/#comment-111
In the service industry, leaving a tip of small coins such as a penny or dime is considered an insult. A way of saying, “Poor service. You don’t deserve anything better. This coin is me telling you I noticed.”
Maybe that was what she was going for?
Maybe she was hoping to get a receipt with the account holder’s real name.
She did. She got a receipt from Athena’s account.
The stupid thing is how Amazon is supposedly taking care of ‘problem reviewer’ in one particular aspect I see very little press on…
Amazon claimed they started coming down hard on abusers of the review system. Sockpuppet writers and fans who were writing positive reviews of one book while giving one-star reviews on competing books (At about the time several examples made the press). So, what did Amazon do?
They started stripping 5-star reviews according to a slash-and-burn algorithm that looks for certain criteria and behavior…
WHILE LEAVING THE ONE-STARS!
I have not heard one reviewer complain that their bad review on a book they didn’t like was stripped. I have not heard of one writer who has commented that one-star reviews were stripped.
Think about that for a moment. The sources of the problems were said to be doing both 5-star and 1-star reviews, and Amazon only went after the 5-star? How messed up is that?
So yes, you can’t trust the reviews on Amazon.
I think she did it just to be an ass. For whatever reason, it wasn’t very smart. Then to go onto her blog and brag about it was even more stupid. But all of her crying, “I’m not Amanda Welling and if you don’t stop calling me that then I am going to get a lawyer!” crap looks hysterical right about now. LOL
And no, STGRB didn’t mention her ever that I can recall. Neither had I. She appeared one day in my email inbox and then Athena’s. Completely out of the blue after leaving some heavily worded comments that went on forever and ever with all kinds of “legal” advice. Her and her husband have a habit of doing that. Now I understand why they are married.
Seriously, that woman ain’t too bright. Nor is Jonathon.
Well it turns out that Carroll Brynant was spot on!!! AMANDA WELLING is without a shadow of a doubt GENX!!!
Good man Carroll you were right all along! All jokes aside she does seem VERY unstable! I can only imagine the excuses she’ll come up with now to cover up her silly blunder! But the facts speak loud and clear! AMANDA WELLING IS GENX!
The the thing that I don’t understand is why was she so determined to hide her identity? If she is “responsible for what she says” then why didn’t she just say that she was Amanda Welling from the start instead of lying about it? She is obviously ashamed of her own behavior. Amanda Welling even got her husband to send Carroll a threatening email, Amanda’s husband swore that his wife isn’t GenX. Maybe Amanda’s husband doesn’t know that his wife is GenX! I imagine that any man would be very suspicious if their wife was that obsessed with an author! Ummm… I wonder what Mr. Welling will say when he reads this blog? There could be trouble in the Welling household tonight!
The truth is out now! There is no denying it! The truth ALWAYS comes out in the end. Lies are always caught out.
Well done Carroll Brynant and well done STGRB! Justice has been served once again.
P.S. Those Twitter comments that Amanda Welling left on STGRB’s Twitter page show just how unhinged she is……
This cracks me up! She’s still trying to deny it. Have you read her latest?
No. We don’t really read her blog. We published the information on her in this post because we wanted to show people that Carroll was correct. But other than that, we don’t expend too much energy on her. Like I said before, I think she has mental problems. She seems to be an attention-seeking nobody who thinks she’s a somebody. It’s very sad.
The Amazon book review system is not working. There are countless fake book reviews. There are loads of what look like fake five star reviews on books which can be very misleading. There is also an awful lot of vicious one star review which are generally attacks on the author and have nothing to do with the book. Sometimes it is easy to tell when the reviewer hasn’t read the book, but not always. In my opinion if you haven’t read the book then you can’t possibly review it.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you could only review a book if you had bought that book/e~book from Amazon? Why are people against that idea?
I find myself paying less attention to book/e~book reviews on Amazon all the time. Its becoming harder to tell the real reviews from the fake ones. I hope Amazon will address the problem sooner rather then later.
The reason I am against that idea is that I buy books from a variety of places, including brick & mortar stores, as well as receiving books for review. When provided a book for review, the point is for that review to be up as many places as possible, and if I cannot post on Amazon, well… that’s a major marketplace. Sort of defeats the purpose. Plus I try to buy books in other places just to avoid letting Amazon have a monopoly. They require you to have purchased a book from them at some point before you can post reviews, but to require you to have purchased that particular book before you can review it? No. That is not acceptable.
TJ Klune is not unknown in the M/M romance world. Their work The Otter Bear and the Kid has had a huge following for quite some time and a massive number of reviews. So there is a very good possibility (I’d say more likely than not) those 5 star reviews are 100% legit.
I recently saw a one-star review on a book I loved that said, “Shitty book, not good enough to wipe my ass with.” I reported it to Amazon for vulgarity and obscene language (which violates their guidelines). Their response? “This review does not review our guidelines and will remain.” I was shocked that they would let that review stand. So apparently, their rules mean squat, and they will arbitrarily enforce them however they choose, even if they blatantly violate their supposed guidelines. This randomness also includes arbitrarily removing legitimate good reviews, too, which many of my author friends have reported happening… with no action on Amazon’s side. Unless something changes, Amazon’s review system isn’t worth the dimples on my left thigh.
I know what you’re saying here. We’ve repeatedly reported reviews that violate their guidelines and like you, received the same response.
What? They wouldn’t let me post a review with the word “shit” OR “ass” OR dyke (even though that was the title of the damn book) but they refuse to remove THAT one? Report it again and copy & paste their exact ToS regarding profanity. That’s ridiculous.
LOL, have you seen Amanda Welling’s blog today? The bullies (Somerloon, etc.) are all fighting with each other! Doesn’t surprise me. We’ve seen it before. When you get a pit of barracudas together, they’re bound to eat each other eventually.
Again?! They did this before, didn’t they? I better go check it out. I bet it’s entertaining. I would totally do a new post and call it Looney vs. Amanda, Round Two. But Athena doesn’t want to waste anymore blog time on these nutters.
So true!!