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.
