An author friend once told me that when you get to 50 reviews on your book, Amazon will start promoting your book to it’s millions of subscribers. Other authors said they didn’t notice a difference once they reached or … Read the rest →]]>

An author friend once told me that when you get to 50 reviews on your book, Amazon will start promoting your book to it’s millions of subscribers. Other authors said they didn’t notice a difference once they reached or surpassed 50 reviews. At the time, I was a newly (self) published author, so I filed this information away for a later day.

For my first published book, The Many Lives of June Crandall, that day has arrived.

For several weeks now, June has been sitting at 49 reviews. Oh, it got to 50, but then suddenly that 50^th review was removed! So I ran a promotion for the book, which usually generates a few reviews.

And it did. I got up to 51 reviews. Woot! Now we’ll see how the power of The Zon really works. Right?

Wrong. With a few days, both of the new reviews were taken down. Again! I was outraged! I’ll bet they would never do this to James Patterson or Nora Roberts!

These were honest reviews from total strangers who received no encouragement or compensation from me for leaving their reviews! They did so out of the kindness of their hearts.

To put it mildly, I was not happy with Amazon. For a millisecond, I considered removing all of my books from Amazon and taking my business elsewhere. But, considering that 99.9% of my book sales come from The Zon, I quickly reconsidered.

So instead, I wrote them a letter asking them nicely why they keep removing the reviews for this book. Here is how the communication went:

ME:

Dear, Amazon. I noticed that every time I get to 50 reviews on my book, The Many Lives of June Crandall, the 50^th review disintegrates into Fairy Dust and once more leaves me with only 49 reviews the review gets removed.

 Is there some secret society you get to join when you have 50 reviews that only traditionally published authors get to join? If so, how much do you want to let me into the club? Would you kindly stop doing this? I fully understand your review policies and can assure you that none of the reviews you removed violated them. And by the way, can I have the FOUR reviews you stole from me back?

Sincerely,

Author Suzanne Whitfield Vince

AMAZON’s RESPONSE:

Hello Suzanne,

Customer Reviews are removed for the following reasons:

• The review violates our Customer Review Creation Guidelines (http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines).
• A customer can decide to remove their own review.
• The review is on a page that incorrectly links multiple items. We remove these reviews when we separate the items.

To learn more about this policy, please see our Customer Review Creation Guidelines (http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines).

Best regards,
Yorwin P

So, obviously there IS something to the 50^th review. Maybe once a book gets 50 reviews they have to spend money to help promote my book. And maybe they don’t really care about helping little peons independently published authors whose sales are, well, not enough to retire from the day job on. Yet.

Either way. We all know reviews sell books. And the more the better. They help people like me get ads on sites like Book Bub, who want a minimum of 50 reviews before they will even consider your book for their site (some say the minimum is 100, but I know some authors who got in at 50+).

And so, I am launching full scale war against Amazon a massive campaign to blow right past the 50 review mark. Whaddya say, are you in?

Let’s BLOW past that 50 review mark!!

Here’s how you can help:

Step 1: Download the book, which for a limited time has been reduced to ZERO AMERICAN DOLLARS. To download your FREE copy, just click on the image below.

Note: Free offer also available on Nook, Kobo and iTunes.

Step 2: If you can find it in your heart, please leave an honest review. You can do so by clicking this link. Note: you may need to sign into Amazon.

From the bottom of this author’s pea-picking heart, I salute thank you.

Sincerely,

Author Suzanne Whitfield Vince