As regards #2, yes, authors should have been separating business accounts from personal accounts. Biz 101, so I had hoped it went without saying, but I’m glad you pointed it out so I didn’t have to sound (more) lecturing (than I already did). Expenses should be on separate credit/debit cards, one debit card used only for business, registered in the name of the company even if the bank asks for your real name so that you can enter the company name in the title field online, everything properly incorporated (those corporations registered using a New Mexico LLC!), etc.

I mentioned #3 when I was commenting on TPV. Yes, big publishers do plenty of bad acts, and Amazon needs to identify the perpetrators and put a stop to it. It’s not like Amazon can possibly instill any more animosity in legacy publishers than it already has, right? Just because corporations with more money do mean-spirited or unethical things doesn’t mean self-publishers and small presses should follow, I hope.

So, short term? Amazon made a lot of writers upset, and the trust level indie writers as a whole have for the corporation has probably never been lower.

I agree completely. The thing is, indie writers should not have trusted Amazon in the first place, or anyone else. Smart businesspeople reserve trust for their personal lives, never put all of their eggs in one basket, and never rely on any person or entity’s goodwill for their stability.

Anything that’s in a contract can be invoked, anything not in a contract can be used against you. I believe Dean Wesley Smith talked a lot about the dangers of trust in his posts about agents several times, and Kris Rusch and Passive Voice have urged people to read their contracts carefully.

People who were sock-puppeting were already using multiple accounts. Now, multiple accounts will simply become the norm.

I don’t have a problem with multiple legitimate accounts. The illegitimate ones are regularly reported and found out, and Amazon will simply write a new code to cross-check credit cards, names, addresses, etc. if the problem becomes too dire. It’s pretty expensive to form a different company for every sockpuppet you register just to have a different credit card.

I really believe that more people separating their personal lives from their business ones would have a positive effect for all involved. It’s not like there’s finite space for more pseudonyms; you can have as many as you want. Most people would probably only have two. It takes seconds to register a new account at any of the sites I use daily, and maybe a minute to set up a different email account.

Less personal liability, more freedom to say what you want, fewer chances of being shut down by corporations because of your opinions. Companies still have honest reviewers, readers get what they want, authors don’t worry about penalties. It’s a win/win/win! LOL.

Amazon has bungled its current attempt to clean house, as I said above. No arguments there. I feel terrible for people who earned reviews and had them deleted or wrote helpful ones and had them removed. But that is precisely why people should not depend on any one company to control everything. Amazon doesn’t owe us good reviews. In our current global marketplace, no one even owes us a living. A server warehouse could go down tomorrow and wipe out half of everyone’s sales reports. Amazon would probably say, “Sorry! Check back in a month.” We would have to deal.

The lesson here is to not count on anyone looking out for you but YOU. It may be cynical, but it’s a more practical approach to Internet commerce than leaning on everyone else.

1) You can still review if you are a writer. At a rough guess, Amazon pulled down maybe as much as 0.001% of author-written reviews. Important to understand: there is nothing in the review guidelines saying you can’t write a review if you’re a writer. There is just something in the algorithm which is culling certain reviews if they look suspicious; say, a case where a pair or group of writers review ALL of each others’ work with five stars.

2) You can always divide out your author and reader Amazon accounts. Many writers already do this, keeping a KDP account set up for their publishing work, and a user account under another name for buying things from Amazon. I didn’t do that when I started publishing, and in retrospect I probably should have. Dividing the household and commercial accounts would have made sense.

3) The most egregious offenders when it comes to reviews continue to be large publishers, at least some of which are hiring PR firms to place fake reviews on books. I think this is actually a more destructive set of activities than writers putting up reviews for each other.

So, short term? Amazon made a lot of writers upset, and the trust level indie writers as a whole have for the corporation has probably never been lower. I the long term? It did nothing. People who were sock-puppeting were already using multiple accounts. Now, multiple accounts will simply become the norm. It’s a little bit like the 2000 follower barrier on Twitter. Twitter made it so unless you have followers within 10% or so of the number of people you follow, you can’t follow more than 2000 people. They did this to trim back on bot users. Instead, they created a thriving business where people go BUY a thousand fake twitter followers so they can get past the barrier.

The solution made the problem worse.

By forcing users to get multiple accounts on Amazon for their writing life and reading/reviewing life, Amazon has in the long term just made the problem much worse.