Over on Reddit they had an interesting discussion regarding negative book reviews (you can check it out here) and it reminded me of my own personal book review horror story.

As an independent author, I very much appreciate and love when readers take time to review my books. Thankfully, the bulk of the reviews have been positive and, again, I so very much appreciate it.

However, there was this one time I had a review on Amazon.com for one of my novels that really set me off.

While I don’t have the exact quote (I’ll explain in a moment) the reviewer stated something to the effect of: “This was not the book I wanted to order” and gave my novel a 1 star review.

The reason I don’t have the exact quote is because I wrote to Amazon and requested they remove this review.

What the reviewer was essentially saying was that they somehow mistakenly ordered my book instead of whatever they wanted, were pissed off -I can only suppose!- that my book was out there confusing them, and therefore I deserved a 1 star review for being a pain in the ass… or something.

I told Amazon.com that the review made no sense. They were not reviewing my actual product but were somehow upset by their own actions and were taking my book down (the overall stars went down as the book had just been released and had few reviews) with their 1 star review.

To give credit to Amazon, they took the review down.

But I know there are many other bad reviews out there that make no sense.

Perhaps the one I see far too often involve giving 1 star reviews for delivery of books, where the package is mauled or wet or the book is damaged in transit… and that somehow is the fault of the author of the book how?

Ah well.