[heavycat]

I've heard Amazon is frowning these days on reviews for books gifted through their store and tends to delete them.

This isn't the first time I've heard this. In two different books on how to promote your Kindle titles, I've now read that Amazon is alternatively flat out prohibiting gifting a book to a reviewer (regardless), or saying it's ok as long as the book is the only "compensation" for the review (and that it's disclosed in the review, obviously, which is a whole 'nother discussion)

Then there's this, from Amazon's help page:

Yes, you are welcome to gift your book to as many people as you would like. In fact, this can be useful as you try to raise awareness of your title.

Uh huh, and then:

You may not write reviews for products that you have a financial interest in, including reviews for products that you or your competitors sell. Additionally, you may not provide compensation for a review other than a free copy of the product. If you offer a free product, it must be clear that you are soliciting an unbiased review. The free product must be provided in advance; no refunds are permitted after the review is written. Product review solicitations that ask for only positive reviews or that offer compensation are prohibited.

Now my company works very VERY hard to get reviews for our books. Must we now ask reviewers to buy the book in order to review it (to avoid any appearance of unbiased-ness)? Or must we alternatively send them a .mobi file? Aren't there rules regarding free distribution as well?

Shall we abandon the entire idea of soliciting reviews? Wouldn't this have a rather undesirable effect on the nascent (but fast-growing) web-book-reviews media? How many hard-won, honest, positive reviews must we risk for each new title?

Will it just be the case in the future that we upload our books to Amazon KDP and speak no more of them?

Has Amazon clarified this policy?

 

[Carol (was Dara)]

When you gift a book via the Amazon store, the recipient has the option of choosing not to accept the gift, in which case they receive store credit instead for the amount the gift was worth. My understanding is that Amazon considers this a potential form of monetary compensation for reviews, hence they sometimes delete reviews left as a result of the gifting. So with the "gifted" in your above quote, I wasn't referring to gifted in the sense of a book given away, but gifted in the sense of using the Amazon store's gifting system.

I should also mention the above info is just something I've gleaned by word of mouth and may be off base.

The seperate question of where Amazon stands in regard to authors passing their books out to reviewers remains slightly unclear, at least to me. In some places they state it's allowed, yet some of their recent actions regarding removal of reviews appears to (possibly) contradict this. Until I hear otherwise, I don't plan to change my practice of giving out copies to reviewers.

 

[dalya]

I only gifted a copy once, when a LibraryThing reviewer couldn't figure out how to side-load a book. (or so they said!)

I always email .mobi and .pdf and .epub. The review, if they post one, isn't verified, but ... it shouldn't be verified, really, since they didn't buy one.

 

[Edward W. Robertson]

It's not clear. My best guess, after reading a whole lot of accounts on the subject, is that Amazon only gives the stink-eye to gift-based reviews that are also part of a bigger commercial campaign--whatever that means--but that gifting a few copies for review is at least tolerated. It may even be perfectly fine. But their policy is inconsistent and their wording is unclear, so I don't know for sure.

 

[quiet chick writes]

Okay, this might be a dumb question but... I always wondered what is the advantage of gifting a book to a reviewer rather than just emailing the .mobi? It seems to me that emailing the book would just be a whole lot easier. Does it count on your sales when they accept the book, or something?

 

[Quiss]

I just received a review by someone in my Google+ group who posted in her review: "I received an ARC for an honest review. "
I had emailed her the mobi.

Guess we'll see if Amazon will remove that

 

[Steve Vernon]

Somebody at Amazon is thinking WAY too hard...

 

[heavycat]

If sending a .mobi file is the Right Way(tm) then that's fine.  I know there are also rules about distributing KDP books for free.  And up to now, nobody's ever said a word about gifting books to reviewers.  I find it tremendously convenient to just plug an e-mail address into the gift page and the book's delivered.

Whatever the mechanism, I want to make sure that delivering our books to reviewers isn't going to get legitimate reviews deleted.

 

[Fantasma]

Last time I did a Library Thing giveaway, I asked anyone who was kind enough to review if they'd put in some sort of disclaimer, like "I won a free copy at LT," & it seemed okay, like Quiss said. We'll see. I've had reviews deleted. Verified-purchase-reviews deleted. I have nothing helpful to say here.

 

[T. B. Crattie]

I thought it was ok to gift a reviewer as long as he or she states that a free copy was provided.

 

[Speaker-To-Animals]

It's legal to do so as long as they disclose. However, Amazon has been dinged really bad in the press over authors doing paid reviews and very dubious things like authors exchanging "objective" reviews. They've tried to pull fakes and like most things where you apply a computer program to millions of items, sometimes it goes wrong.