Top 10 Reasons for Negative Book Reviews on Amazon
According to Amazon community guidelines, a customer can write a review if he/she has spent $50 on Amazon.com in the last 1-2 months. Considering this, you might want to know why a customer who spent some dollars on your book would give a bad book review on Amazon, after you had spent days and weeks before publishing. This article provides top ten reasons for negative book reviews on Amazon KDP.
Poor delivery services: Customers complain about torn pages, dirty covers, poor ink color, and shipping delays which are totally out of your control on Amazon. This is an Amazon issue where you can directly report to them.
Poor book editing: Have you ever struggled to read a book fluently because of poor punctuation and grammar errors? Poor proofreading, grammar, and punctuation checks will get your customers on their nerves to write bad reviews on your book.
Poor graphics: If your book contains so many images, customers will react negatively if the image quality is low. You do not want your customers to squint their eyes every time they glance at the images in your book. Try upscaling images before submitting your manuscript to Amazon.
Poor book description: A customer's buying decision is influenced by your book description. When your book description does not match with the contents, it becomes a misleading buying experience which most buyers complain about.
Bad competition: Due to competition, some authors pay people to make negative reviews on a book in order to divert the attention of customers. In such cases, simply observe the reviewer to see if he repeats that action in another book and reports to Amazon. Amazon today has informed the community through its Anti-Manipulation Policy for Customer Reviews to report any suspected review manipulation.
Non-ideal readers: Not every writing resonates with some customers. On Amazon, there are your ideal readers who value whatever you write, and the non-ideal readers who are pros in criticism. Your winning ticket is the positive reviews from your ideal readers.
Customers’ abuse of the review system: Some reviews on Amazon are hilarious and unnecessary. Since Amazon is a community-based platform that prioritizes the needs of its customers, the review system allows all customers to express their personal experiences on Amazon. Besides, Amazon rarely takes down customers' reviews even though the comments are reported. This has led to—not just freedom to comment—but unnecessary trolling with negative reviews.
Title and cover guile: Most authors make the mistake of luring readers with a captivating title and cover design that does not directly relate to the contents even though they are great pieces. This causes customers to make this complaint about your book.
Repetition of points: While repeating points for emphasis is important, some new readers of your book may not appreciate long reading with repeating information. Avoid overly repeated ideas. For a case where you are sure of the need to emphasize repetition, simply ignore those reviews.
The experts: Some customers purchase books for their friends or relatives as a gift, and not necessarily for themselves. In the case of their expertise on your book genre, they're likely to constructively criticize your book if it does not satisfy their taste.
Conclusion: (Unsatisfied Customers)
You can edit properly, write good descriptions, and have good covers that resonate with your book's content with yet a few customers giving negative reviews. Most times, the reviews may not be influenced by jealous competitors or the experts who expect excellence; it is just the customers who are so difficult to satisfy. You have to understand this and move on as a self-publishing author.