Reviewing - Exploring Amazon

So you want to be a top reviewer on Amazon?

If you want to improve your writing, gain motivation and experience, and see your name on the Web, reviewing on Amazon is not a bad option, but only in the short term. Long term, you need to decide what you hope to gain from the exercise and set yourself clear goals to make best use of your time and energy.
I set myself the target, in September 2004, of breaking in to the UK Amazon Top 10 reviewers by Christmas Day, 2005. I got to No.11, and stopped. Below, I offer my caveats on reviewing, my ideas on what constitutes a 'good' review, and some scurrilous advice on the manipulation of the system if you hope to reach the top ranks.

Beware the Prose & Cons:

• Reviewing is often recommended as a 'break-in' strategy for anyone wanting to write professionally - writing courses advise you to approach a local newspaper, a magazine you read, or a website and offer to write reviews. You won't get paid but it gives you a sense of achievement, and possibly a by-line.
• Reviewing on Amazon is independent of an editor: it's vanity publishing - you write it, Amazon publishes it. It's no measure of your prose skill or of your acuity in dissecting a book, film, musical performance, etc. You can write boring drivel, it will be published, and you end up conning yourself that your writing is sharp and is improving. Reviewing should encourage you to cultivate your self-critical skills.
• Begin by adopting a positive, professional attitude. Discipline yourself to write regularly. Check your spelling, your grammar, your facts. Doing that will teach you the basic professional habits of setting targets, meeting deadlines, completing work, and delivering a professionally presented product. In turn, that will enhance your self-confidence and self-discipline, vital skills for any writer.
• Set yourself a target - a review a day, a review a week … it'll vary depending on your interests and commitments. It takes a lot less time to listen to a pop record than it does to read (and review) the latest translation of Cervantes. Decide on a realistic goal, one which enables you to explore your interests, exercise your knowledge and tastes, and gives you a chance to gain in understanding. You want to learn from your reviewing! As your knowledge of a particular genre expands, you can write with more authority and confidence.
• Specialise - review folk music, horror films, literary fiction, psychology texts. Write about what you know and like: that doesn't mean that you only review violin concertos or travel books - cultivate a broad range of interests. Use your reviewing as a learning curve! Research the genre before you try to break in to reviewing it … understand what works in it, and you improve your own fiction writing as well as your own reviewing skills.
• The real pro of reviewing on Amazon is the opportunity to develop self-confidence and self-discipline and to focus on understanding and analysing your subject. Your review should be a critical analysis - not just a list of chapter headings, a brief outline of the story, or a simple statement that "I think this is great". Use it to explore and craft your writing skills. One liners are an opinion, not a review. And ask yourself, before you award the habitual five stars, "Is this as good a horror movie as 'Psycho', as good a novel as 'To Kill a Mockingbird', as good an album as 'Sergeant Pepper'?" Obviously, those are my 5-star yardsticks - you'll have your own. Think before you award 5, don't be afraid to award 1, or 2 for below average, 3 for average.

So, what are the cons?

• Writing reviews is time consuming. If you enjoy it, it's time well spent. But, there are opportunity costs - you could spend that time doing something else. Don't use reviewing as an excuse to postpone other tasks … like writing that novel! Reviewing on Amazon can become compulsive - you can find yourself caught in a cycle of massaging your ego rather than doing something productive. Set goals - write reviews for one year, write until your next birthday. Use the experience to fuel your writing skills, don't con yourself and become a slave to reviewing. You need to move on.
• Breaking in to the top 100, top 50, or top 10 will not prove that you're a good writer, only that you're a driven and organised one. Reviewing for Amazon is vanity publishing - you get published not because of the quality of your writing but simply because you have bothered; you get into the top rankings not because you are a good writer, but because you have written in bulk. There are some good reviewers in the top 100, but many are there because of quantity, not quality.
• Set yourself a time limit and an escape route. Once you've established the routine and discipline of writing regularly, as measured by publishing say 100 or 200 reviews, translate your efforts into breaking out and finding other publishing outlets … writing short stories, writing magazine or newspaper articles. Set yourself a self-fulfilling objective rather than locking yourself into an ego-prison. Don't become a slave to vanity, become a master of your own writing future.

So, what is a 'Review'?

• A review is something more than an opinion. You'll find comments on Amazon along the lines of "I really liked this", or "this sucks". Well, I appreciate the democratic nature of opinion, but simply saying you did or did not like a book is not a review. It's an opinion. One sentence is not a review … unless you can do a "Ulysses". I don't care if you got it for Christmas or it was a present from Auntie Flo, I'm reading the review to see if I might be interested in buying this book or DVD and I couldn't give a toss about the presents you get (unless she's also my Auntie Flo and it gives me an idea how much she might care to spend on me next time).
• A review can summarise what happens in the book, film or CD. Tell your reader something about it - without spoiling any surprises or giving away the ending … "it was obvious the butler did it". You can say the outcome was predictable, that this weakened the suspense, but don't give the game away.
• Put the work in context. Comment on the themes the film director employs, point out that the book is hard science fiction, tell the reader that while the artiste normally records Country & Western this is a rock album. If it's non-fiction - does it make an insightful new contribution to the subject?
• Consider style and themes. I've catholic tastes, but I don't like everything. There are crime writers I love, there are others who leave me in a catatonic state. Here you can give an opinion. Did it work for you? If not, why not? What are its strengths and weaknesses? What is there to enjoy about it? Your opinion should be a critical one - explain why you had negative or positive feelings (and, I'll labour the point, a review is an opinion, an opinion is not necessarily a review).
• Your objective in writing a competent, professional review is to inform. People read Amazon reviews for advice - your review can help people explore, discover new pleasures, broaden their reading, knowledge, or understanding. If someone is going to spend £30 on a cookbook, tell them if it offers value for money, tell them whether it covers the sorts of recipes or cooking styles they'll like. Your role is to inform, not to sell the book to someone who won't appreciate it. Be honest, don't be a slave to 5 stars.

Strategies for Climbing into the Top 100 … or worse:

Now, I set myself a target over a year. I did start writing turgid little two or three sentence reviews just to get the numbers up, but eventually developed a wee bit of professionalism and started writing more critical, more thoughtful reviews of what I was reading, watching, hearing. And I quickly realised there were strategies for climbing the ladder!

• If you want to use Amazon as a vehicle to gain writing experience and credibility, then set yourself clear objectives. Write regularly. Consider specialising - maybe DVD's, maybe mystery fiction, maybe medical textbooks. Pick a subject area and theme which interests you and about which you have some knowledge.
• Write regularly. Get disciplined. Develop an authority, a confidence … maybe even an arrogance about your task. But don't get too arrogant or carried away - as I point out above, it's vanity publishing. Don't simply massage your ego, hone your professional skills and be prepared to test them beyond Amazon.
• Look at the tactics of reviewing. You move up the Amazon rankings by getting positive votes. You could review classic works - people will visit your review for years to come and you get a steady flow of votes (I reviewed a dozen different publications of individual Shakespeare plays, giving a critical opinion of which text was best for students, etc.). Or review the latest blockbuster release - you could get a couple of hundred votes in a couple of weeks.
• If your review is the top one, it will be the first one everyone sees, it may be the only one people look at, the only one on which they'll offer a vote. However, no matter how good or how popular your review, it can suddenly disappear off the front page. I've had reviews which attracted well over a hundred votes suddenly disappear off screen, to be replaced by a review which has had only one positive vote. Your well-researched, considered, professional review can be relegated to obscurity by a "gee, this is real good" comment.
• Offer a 'professional' review. Check your spelling and your grammar before you submit (and yes, I'll admit to a couple of typos appearing in some of my reviews). Do a bit of research. What is the background to this film? What themes does its director regularly explore? How do you interpret what you see on the screen? Engage your reader, fish for a positive reward!
• However, most top reviewers have their own fan club. Some of the top ranking names have a score or more friends or family who systematically give them positive votes every time they publish a new review. Quite possibly, they have a dozen or more ghost accounts of their own, so they can visit each of their reviews and log on a dozen positives every review. It's galling, and it means that, if you want to get into the top ranks, you'll have to enlist the support of half a dozen people to click on the 'Yes' button for you. And, of course, cheat by creating a dozen ghost email accounts of your own.
• You'll also find that, once you start moving up the rankings, you'll experience a negative voting assault - presumably the guy you've just overtaken, or someone a couple of places above you, organises a negative voting campaign to rubbish your writing and keep ahead of you in the rankings. It's annoying, it's petty, but you have to expect this type of juvenile idiocy. Please, don't indulge in it yourself.
• If you want to break in to the top ranks, be professional. Your review is not going to please everyone. But the vast majority of readers respect a well-written, well-argued assessment. That, after all, is your task. Your objective may be to gain writing experience, or to promote your own website or whatever, but the best way to achieve this is by writing honestly and professionally - that is why you attract positive votes, and it's positive votes which propel you up the rankings.
• Expect a number of personal assaults - how dare I be critical of Alan Titchmarsh (I had a variety of comments made about my manhood and paternity)! Having read that there was an orchestrated campaign in the USA to rubbish negative reviews of Joss Whedon's "Firefly", I wrote an honest piece concluding that the series does have its limitations - within a day, I had something like fifty negative votes posted against my review! You'll get virulent attacks from little old ladies and retired bank managers who have never used language like that before! Suck it up. If you want to be a writer, you'll need a thick skin some time. You have to put up with some vile responses at times. That's their problem.
• Be honest! Offer a solid, well-written review, and aim to inform the reader, not to simply promote some actor, musician, or author you admire. At one stage the top 100 ranked reviewers were sent a large, hardback novel. I took the time to read it. I thought it was boring, I was not impressed, I was generous in awarding it 3 stars (average). Most of the rest of the top 100 gave it gushing 5 star reviews, hailing it as one of the great publishing miracles of the 21st century, etc. The novel sank without trace - can't even remember the name of the author or title. Don't be flattered into a distorted review simply by accepting a freeby. I am open to bribery, but only on the principle that if I'm dishonest enough to take the bribe, I'm treacherous enough to ignore it and offer an honest review.
• And my pet hate, my real pet hate, is the glut of American reviewers who dominated the top ranks of Amazon UK. I don't mind intelligent reviews from anywhere in the world, but the American ones often tend to concentrate on books, music, and films which are of limited or no interest to a UK audience. They simply dump their US reviews onto Amazon UK. You get American reviews which demonstrate scant knowledge of or respect for British tastes - the reviewer will inform you that Cliff Richard is a well-known singer in Britain, or will voice nudge-nudge outrage at Ronnie Barker reading "Titbits" in an episode of Porridge. You get American reviews which tell you how many dollars an item costs. Or which talk about 'our' country or 'our' president. I get really annoyed by all this. It is extreme vanity publishing. If you're going to review for a British public, have the decency and courtesy to talk to a British audience, not an American one. Sorry, rant over … but it galls me!

Build your Skills

In summary, if you want to become a reviewer on Amazon, get writing. Specialise in some area you enjoy and understand. Write regularly, write often, and be prepared for frustration. Set yourself specific goals in terms of the number of reviews you are prepared to write and what you hope to achieve by doing so. Be honest, be informative, be courageous, be prepared for the oddball response and unwarranted attack on you personally. Be prepared for outrage and fury at the number of American reviews which invade the space. But also be prepared to enter into occasional email conversations with authors and performers who appreciate your efforts, and to receive praise from people who've enjoyed your piece - it's quite a thrill to get positive feedback.
There are some excellent reviews on Amazon, there are some dreadful rants and awful swathes of illiterate, unprofessional garbage. Don't be afraid to give positive votes to other reviews you've read and appreciated - support those reviewers who take the effort to inform and help.
Take all this on board, but set yourself objectives and goals beyond Amazon reviewing, and that's going to depend on your personal interests and writing objectives. Don't neglect your objectives. Writing quality reviews on Amazon can stretch your skills and broaden your understanding of writing. However, writing Amazon reviews can also become habit forming: don't let it become compulsive, don't let it become your sole, exclusive writing outlet ... even if it does encourage you to read more or watch more movies, etc. Put it in context and be prepared to put it aside.