Cyberbullying’s Latest Frontier: Amazon Book Reviews

[soleiltropiques]

Popular vampire novel author Anne Rice has signed on to a petition demanding that Amazon disable anonymous book reviews after Internet trolls began ganging up on her in a section of the website normally reserved for critical but comparatively mild commentary

Correction appended, March 10, 2014The creature with which Anne Rice is most commonly

Comments

[sio]

may i suggest the "oh shit the internet is here" tag as well, OP?

And if these authors can't handle criticism of their work (because i highly doubt that Rice and her ilk want this to just be applied to actual trolls who post BS "reviews" that harass an author), they need to get out of the business.

[soleiltropiques]

Done!

The problem with Rice and several other authors is that it seems that their dislike is not only of actual anonymous trolls but also of people who simply and legitimately didn't like their book and dared to say so. And Rice is particularly horrible with this (to wit the awfulness surrounding a review of 'Pandora', linked to below).

As the article points out, many professional reviews are problematic these days (e.g. people being paid to give good reviews). Sometimes the only way to know if a book is worth it (i.e. as a person who is not rich) is to look at the negative reviews (i.e. because there is ALWAYS a preponderance of positive reviews on Amazon and Goodreads).

[moonshaz]

Good point about the preponderance of positive reviews. I tend to look at the negative reviews first myself, because they're usually much more informative than positive ones. (Not all of them, of course, but taken as a whole, I learn a lot from the negative ones.) Too many positive reviews consist of not much more than "This is a good book and I love it, and you should read it, too, because it's such a good book rah rah yada yada yada!" The negative ones, otoh, often tell exactly what the reviewer didn't like about the book, sometimes in considerable detail.

I take both the positive and negative ones with a large grain of salt, but the more details the reviewer gives about their reasons for their opinion, the easier it is to tell whether they're full of crap or not.

[maladaptive]

I usually just look for longer reviews. I am generally not looking for "it was good, had a nice style" and more things with setting, character, or plot beats that might hook my interest. I've seen complaints that astroturfing gives false impressions and how do people pick a book when they're being given fake 5 stars, which puzzled me because... uh, I read the reviews. I've put down a ton of (deserving!) five star books.

[nesmith]

So Madame "You're interrogating the text from the wrong perspective" can't handle anything but fawning. Not surprised.

Edit: Which doesn't mean that there isn't a point about trolling and harassing, but I don't believe for an instant that Rice--who has shown more than once in the past how thin her skin is--wouldn't want this applied to even the mildest critical reviews.

[sio]

Edit: Which doesn't mean that there isn't a point about trolling and harassing, but I don't believe for an instant that Rice--who has shown more than once in the past how thin her skin is--wouldn't want this applied to even the mildest critical reviews.

bingo. not to mention authors like her, such as that chick who wrote the crappy YA novel The Selection and got caught on twitter calling a goodreads reviewer a bitch over said reviewer's 1-star posting.

[deadsong]

Wasn't it her agent who called the reviewer a bitch, making it worse by involving more than one person in the back-and-forth public bashing?

[ginger_maya]

Do you have a link to all of this? I'd love to read it! I love literary wanking.

[blondebeaker]

I went from strong dislike to outright loathing of that woman ever since she got her fans to bully a blogger who read Pandora, didn't like it and decided to recycle it into some decoupage because it was a busted up copy from a thrift store.

http://www.themarysue.com/anne-rice-poor-review/

[ladycyndra]

Oh man I remember that. She's awful.

[wuvvumsoc]

I remember that. I guess she doesn't cry as loudly for the people her own fans abuse. Typical.

[booksforlunch]

But, but ... she only posted that to ~facilitate discussion~.

Jeez, that whole thing was such a mess.

[thepikey]

Eh, I've also seen video footage of some GOP/tea party activist telling a classroom of people how to go into rating systems and look up liberal/left titles and just go down the ranks to give them 1 star reviews in an effort to get those titles taken off the lists that track good and popular books. And then go through the conservative/right titles and give them 5 stars, all to try and win the war of perception and popularity. Kinda effed up.

*decides to go look for video, finds it!*
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2010/10/training-tea-party-activists-in-guerilla-internet-tactics/
"Eighty percent of the books I rate I don't even read."

[soleiltropiques]

Wow. That is incredibly gross and fucked up.

Not surprising though, at all.

[wuvvumsoc]

I think they have some statistical engines to tell if some reviews are shills like this, but I forget (usually if a company is trying to inflate its own product). I wonder if there could be a good way to weed out efforts like those. :/

I do read the negative reviews on amazon because sometimes they have nothing to do with the product or book. People may 1-star something because they never received it in the mail.

[maladaptive]

Ugh this ticks me off when they do that. How is that supposed to help anyone figure out if the product is good if you're like "the box it came in was banged up, 1 star."

[sunhawk]

Oh Anne, still barking up that tree? How will you ever find the time to write your new Lestat novel if you spend all your time scolding the internet?