Amazon book reviews

March 19, 2022

I know this sounds like an odd question and more of a tweet/toot than a blog post, but seriously, what happens in people’s brains when they go to write an amazon book review?

Most products have this sort of review

“Product was excellent, delivered fast and works as described, would buy again.” – See nice, direct, simple and does the job.
“I cannot believe that product is this shit! Bad value for money. Do not buy!” – Hyperbolic, but I respect that.

Occasionally there’s a long post about the item, or someone who loves it SO MUCH. It’s like Jesus sent it to save them.

When it comes to books, however, it’s a whole different ~~ball~~ book game, people lose their fucking minds!

I recently read ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’ by John Scalzi (review coming, spoilers: I LOVED IT!) and decided to buy a physical copy for my daughter. Being available only in hardback right now, it was £11, which is steep, but I have no doubt she will enjoy it, so I was happy to give Mr Scalzi a little more of my hard-earned cash. Also, hard backs of new books are very cool to look at. I idly scrolled down to the reviews to see what people thought and I swear to the future ghost of Captain Kirk, these people are fucking nut jobs!

It’s like the moment a normal human wants to write a product review for a book, they are transported to the New York Times office and told they must be hard-hitting journalists. Not every fucking review needs a retelling of the entire plot! I swear some of them are longer than the damned book! Some interesting points are raised that may help people with purchase decisions such as one person pointing out how short it is for the price tag, but that point is way past the “read more” button because we get to see the persons credentials as a reviewer before they get on with it. Some other people are triggered by the fact that its “””woke””” whatever that means. I respect their right to bounce on a book for ANY reason they want. Hell, I once refused to read a book because hated how close to the edge of the paper it was printed. My issue is that the person decided to break down every science fiction work of the last decade to make the point in a damned amazon review. Madness!

Here’s a guide you can use when you write an amazon review:

Did you like it?
Was it a good financial decision in your opinion?
Was there anything wrong with printing/formatting of this book? (Assuming physical)
Have you read others by the author and did this fall in line with expectations?

THAT’S IT! That’s all you need to say! If you want to write ANY MORE go to Good-Reads, or make a blog post! It’s pretty likely I want to read your thoughts but NOT when I’m just there to find ‘add to basket’.

Rant over – I’m sorry. Had to get that out of my system… Maybe I should have posted this as my review of the fucking book on Amazon!

[!info] Note
This Was written by HexDSL, if this was liked by you, you can email him at Hexdsl@gmail.com or use this link to join Discord