Great idea, great blog.
An open letter to Amazon:
Dear Amazon,
I should be your Holy Grail. I’m the real deal, an actual reader who goes through books carefully, thinks about what they mean and how they’re written, and then writes a considered, thoughtful, and hopefully helpful analysis—in other words, I’m a book reviewer.
Writers, potential customers, publishers, and oh yes—you, Amazon—should be jumping for joy and giving thanks that I’ve taken hours to read and yet more hours to craft reviews for hundreds of books. Instead, Amazon, you’ve decided to punish reviewers like me.
In the name of discouraging “fake” reviews, your new policy requires reviewers like me to spend $50 on Amazon’s US site and even more, £40 on Amazon UK before I can share my review. Have you thought about other solutions, or the effect this will have on legitimate reviewers?
Amazon has figured out how to conduct millions of legitimate…
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lucinda E Clarke 
Just one more reason why I Hate Amazon. I’ve had numerous good reviews on all of my books, all from legitimate readers. Then I get a one star review from someone who received a corrupted file. Will they remove the review? Pigs they will. Yet they do something like this. It can only do themselves harm in the long run.
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It’s all run by robots who only do what they have been programmed to do with no options to think and reason. It’s the intelligence of the future – heaven help us!
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I got a really nasty email from Amazon stating that I had breached their rules?? Even after several emails I was unable to discover which rules I had breached. I could get no reply to my question. I was simply referred to their site!! I have always like writing reviews as I think if an author has taken the time to write a book and I enjoyed it then I can spend a bit of time giving feedback. I took a bit of time off but have started writing reviews again – so far so good. I’m simply a reader who wants to review. Amazon should be ashamed of itself and of its reluctance to properly answer questions.
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It’s so frustrating. Even when you manage to speak with a human, they usually can’t tell you which “rules” you’ve broken. Now on top of all that, we have this restrictive policy which punishes potential reviewers who may have borrowed a book from a library or friend, or who might not have been able to meet Amazon’s spending requirements.
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I believe that rule has been there for some time, but not for different marketplaces. It hurts us more in Europe as we can’t post on dot.com and that’s the biggest buying public 😦
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It’s the lack of sensible feedback that gets all of us.
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Thank you SO much for your help in spreading this message. Hopefully, Amazon will reconsider this restrictive and damaging policy.
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We can but hope Barb
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I’m not an Amazon apologist, but I do know the company is getting scammed left, right and centre. This is a rather ham-fisted attempt to stop scammers from gaming the system. Unfortunately, the devil’s in the details, and the details are draconian.
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It’s amazing they can set up such a sophisticated online shopping market and not plug these very obvious holes in the system.
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