Amazon is now offering two new services: the ability to access galleys of upcoming books, reserved for top-tier reviewers, and the opportunity for customers to have their works sold through Amazon and also be printed by the company. Amazon will now offer self-publishing through it’s On Demand service, and self-published books will have the same features “as other titles on the site, including Search Inside and Amazon Prime.”
The listing of used copies of book on the same page as the new books themselves caused a minor uproar – will there be any reaction to the self-pubbing, or galley access for elite online reviewers chosen by Amazon?
Gentle curtsy to Karen Scott for sending me the link.
Does top-tier reviewer mean number of reviews or quality thereof?
I’m personally not thrilled at the thought of Amazon going into the vanity publishing business. I already have enough to slog through on there to find new but interesting stuff to read.
Wow, this seems like a big deal in the self-publishing world… Amazon is Big and Powerful and for them to get into self-publishing seems pretty significant.
True that, Sonja. And for self-pub books through their press to receive the same web-page treatment as any other book is a big step as well.
They asked me to be a Vine member. I have a little more than 50 reviews, and a reviewer rank well into the four digits. Most of the reviews I have written get some helpful votes—usually averaging around five or so, but that’s misleading because some reviews got 20 or 30 and others none at all. Who understands the Amazon public! I think my average review is three stars. I give one-star reviews. I give five star reviews. I give everything in between. I think I’m a pretty fair, but harsh reviewer.
I don’t know what their algorithm is for determining who got offers, but I was surprised to see myself considered a “top tier” reviewer.
Yeah, I’ve never considered myself a “top reviewer,” -I’ll go long stretches of time without reviewing, I get plenty of unhelpful votes, etc- but I got a Vine invitation. I think I have around 70 reviews, and am ranked somewhere between 3,000-4,000. So . . . if I got an invite, my guess is quite a few people got invites.
I joined the Amazon vine thing just to see what it was. I’m hovering about 900 rank. The Amazon algorithm for the ranking doesn’t just count helpful votes. For instance there used to be a premium for being the first person to review an item. Also there is a point where number of helpful votes from one person stops counting. They really do try to stop campaign voting although they don’t mind if every friend an author has does a five star review. I asked about that in particular a while back.
I also like to review things in addition to books, e.g., computer peripherals and vacuum cleaners.
I’ll bet it’s just the number of reviews, but maybe they also count number of purchases.
Amazon bought out the Booksurge print-on-demand company. Nice deal for them—half the cover price commission, plus the printing fees.