Tuesday, December 15, 2015

A Note to my Goodreads Friends

I had to go in today and delete my entire friends list on Goodreads, and will not be adding any new friends. I apologize if you were a GR friend and I removed you. It was nothing personal. This is what happened: today, 14 reviews for my new book disappeared from Amazon. The book has been out just two weeks. The reason the reviews were deleted is because I was "friends" with those reviewers, either on Goodreads or on Facebook, and Amazon is now enforcing their policy of not allowing reviews by "friends" of an author.

What they fail to realize is that I created my GR and Facebook accounts specifically for my readers. No one who knows me "in real life" is friends with me on these accounts. So basically, I was penalized for keeping in touch with my readers.

GR and social media are among the only ways I can let people know when a new book is coming out or promote my work. Amazon's policy fails to take into account the fact that authors use social media for these purposes, and our "friends" on these sites aren't our mom, our neighbor, our boyfriend, and so on. They're our valued readers, the people who buy our books and are often kind enough to leave a review.

Reviews are the life blood of any author, perhaps even more so for an independent author like me who relies on them heavily to bring in new readers. Since I want my readers to have the opportunity to review my books, I went in and deleted my friends list in order to remove what Amazon preceives as a conflict.


I believe it's still fine to "follow" an author on Goodreads. Only people in our friends lists and their reviews are affected by Amazon's policy.

Again, I'm sorry if you'd been in my friends list, and I hope you understand.