For those of you who haven't heard, Amazon recently changed their policies with reviews.
As a reviewer and an independent book publisher. This hit me pretty hard.

Taken from the Amazon blog
Today, we updated the community guidelines to prohibit incentivized reviews unless they are facilitated through the Amazon Vine program.

I received notification that some of my reviews I worked hard on, Would be deleted. I receive products at a discount/free in exchange for an honest review. So this was disappointing. Luckily, though, Books aren't included in this...

The above changes will apply to product categories other than books. We will continue to allow the age-old practice of providing advance review copies of books.

Websites like AMZ reviewtrader, Updated their rules as well, To comply with amazon's policies. Now you can receive free and discounted items WITHOUT leaving a review!
This is interesting to see.

As a seller, I am on this website promoting my coloring books. I wonder what will happen with that; I am receiving triple the requests to "review" my books. But how many people will go to buy my book, and leave a review?

No one knows...

Amazon Vine program

This is a special program for only selected reviewers to be in it. It's similar to AMZ review trader, But only by invitation. From what I heard, Sellers have to have at least 10,000 or more per year, To be able to participate in this program. Pretty much excluding me amoung other people.

Amazon's goal

Amazon's goal through all of this, Was to fix the way they do their reviews, So they are more honest and have a less cheated feel. I understand this completely. But As A product reviewer, I have only given my honest opinions. Although that isn't always the case, I read on another blog that "incentivized reviews" are 1 and 1/2 star higher than non-incentivized reviews. This can make a BIG difference.

Is Amazon hurting us smaller sellers?

This is a complicated topic to discuss; I feel like this has hurt me as a result. But at the same time, Maybe I should have focused more on building my platform, Instead of relying on Amazon reviews to do it's job. If I had a bigger email list, I could ask them to leave me a review and they probably would.. I'm wondering if this will hurt us in the short term, though, Because getting reviews is hard enough as it is When no one even knows who you are.

What should Amazon do about this?

Should Amazon do what they can to help smaller sellers? Or should they let it play out? Will only bigger, more well-known companies are able to survive?

What have I been up to?

Removing... ALLL of my reviews from Amazon, I have over 700 and I'm at a 5,300 rank.
I am copying and pasting them into my Evernote, Because Amazon told me they were planning on deleting some of them.
I'm hoping by saving them onto my evernote, I can add on to them. Then Put them on my website. I hope to create a type of review website for all of my stuff.

What do you think about all of this?

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