Two Scores on Amazon

Early this year I noticed something different on the pages for my books.  The number of reviews suddenly skyrocketed.  Not because people were actually giving me new reviews.  Nope, instead, Amazon was adding international review numbers to the US review numbers.  So now if you go to the page for Chance of a Lifetime, you'll see that where it was at 42 reviews, now it's at 50 reviews for the 8 international reviews.

Before

After

But at least for the moment, when you look at the "Books in This Series" list, it still shows only the US reviews, which means the rating it shows doesn't even agree with the one on the rest of the page.

It's probably confusing for readers to see one number of reviews on one page and another number on another page--or another section of the page.  Really it seems like Amazon should decide which way they want to do this and be consistent.  But it's Amazon, so it's not like you can tell them what to do; you just have to hope that eventually they'll figure it out.  Or not.

The other thing going on with Amazon reviews recently is that now you don't even have to write a review to rate a book.  In the old days you had to write like 20 words.  Then they rolled it back to one so idiots could give a book 1 star and just write "ok."  Now cowards don't even have to write a single word!

Check out the page for A Change Will Do You Good by my pseudonym Jessie Love.  3 "ratings" but not a single word written!

I'm not sure how this happens because on the site I think you still have to write a word.  It's probably if you rate it through your Kindle or Kindle Fire.  Kinda sucks that now you can get drive-by 1s like on Goodreads that just drag down your book's score without telling the author anything of value. And it makes it even easier for trolls to attack authors without even having to use a generic name like "Kindle Customer."  I'm sure Amazon wasn't thinking about that when they did this, but I'd say it's just a matter of time before someone starts running a troll campaign on an author famous enough for people to give a shit.

If you think about it, if the "ratings" come from Kindles/Kindle Fires, all you have to do is buy a copy, give it a 1-star "rating" and then return the thing--probably.  That would allow trolls to troll books without even having to spend any money.  If that's how it works.