Product Reviews: Part 5

This past Thursday (May 24, 2012), my Amazon reviews hit two milestones: 1500 cast votes and a breaking of the Top Review Ranking of 2000 for the first time in almost 2 years, bringing it to 1967. Over the last 2 months, my ranking shot up about 500 spots due to the incredible response I have received for my review of Madeleine Albright's "Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948". The last time a review of mine generated anything resembling this interest was my review of Andrew Wakefield's "Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines – The Truth Behind a Tragedy" back in August 2010, bringing my ranking to just over 1950 (my highest ever) within weeks after publishing my review.

Since the time of this last breakthrough review, my ranking has consistently fluctuated between 2000 and 2500, and it was the experience of writing that last review that showed clearly the difficulty of writing reviews that appeal to a wide audience. The fact is that negative votes on this Wakefield review started pouring in after the book started gaining attention in the media, and Amazon visitors cast their votes due to political reasons rather than whether they actually found the review helpful. As I have mentioned in past blog posts in this series, this dilemma is really the true obstacle in writing reviews, at least on Amazon.

Casting a helpful vote for an Amazon review is intended to indicate that the review swayed the reader of the review in a direction that provided input to their decision to read the book, regardless of the direction of their decision to read. Unfortunately, it is common that readers vote based on whether they agree with the book, not whether the reviewer provided input to their decision making process. Amazon is an immensely popular store to purchase books, and the review system that it provides is one of its best features, but the nature of this system being open to the public unfortunately cannot prevent this abuse.

This situation just comes with the territory. Interestingly enough, just this past month an author who had reached out to me in September 2010 to write a review for their book on software architecture, which has since had its third printing, mentioned the following after first thanking me again for writing such a good review:

I do not understand Amazon reviews/reviewers.  For example, only 1 in 3 people found your review helpful?  Really?  I found it to be a nice mix of spelling out where you're coming from, what you liked and disliked, and advice for other readers.  For me, that's an ideal review.

Personally, I find such a compliment the utmost reward for helping readers decide what to add to their reading lists, especially in the technical space. I have mentioned in previous installments of this series of blog entries that I do not write reviews with a goal of reaching a high Top Reviewer Ranking. Quite frankly, I realize that I do not have enough time to read the significant number of books that would be required to reach lofty rankings. I have a policy to always actually read all of the books about which I choose to write, which might detract from my rank potential, but in my opinion keeps my integrity on this matter sound.