Amazon reviews: an update
Sales of our four LabourStart books (both paperback and Kindle editions) depend in part on there being positive reviews on Amazon’s websites.
Our recent effort to promote the book resulted in just five days in 2,442 downloads and hundreds of new readers.
But these have not generated new reviews, despite my mailing earlier this month to the 1,537 people who clicked on links in the previous mailing promoting the free Kindle edition — even though 830 of them opened that message and 88 clicked on the links to review the book on Amazon.
Despite that effort, the total number of reviews remains tiny.
Having checked Amazon’s 12 websites today (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, India and Japan) here are the total number of reviews:
- Firefox OS – 8 reviews
- Global Labour Movement – 6 reviews
- Campaigning Online and Winning – 5 reviews
- Solidarity – Dan Gallin – 4 reviews
The largest number of reviews appears on the amazon.com website (13 reviews), followed by UK (6 reviews), Canada (2), Germany (1), Spain (1).
No reviews of our books appeared on the Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Japan or Italy Amazon sites.
By comparison, a friend of mine recently self-published a little novella on Kindle. His book has 27 reviews. The reviews of all 4 of our books together is just 23.
If anyone has any good suggestions for how we can increase the numbers here, I’d love to hear them.
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Not sure how Amazon would handle a bunch of identical reviews but: e-mail the people who purchased and provide text for a positive review which could be copied and pasted?
They almost certainly would reject it, and would ban the user from posting further reviews. That’s what I’d do. What we need is genuine, original, and individual reviews.
A contest? (half joking)