Like any author I both love and hate reviews. I love reviews which are great even if they say, “hey I thought your book’s cover was sensational” which has nothing to do with the contents and obviously I hate reviews which are negative because they tend to deflate my ego and tell me that I cannot possibly please everyone.

Today I started the day with my first negative review on Amazon.co.uk. You can go over and see it by clicking on the link here or you can read what it says below:

Pretty damning, I admit, particularly when the reviewer has chosen to title it ‘Save Your Money’ and give himself the moniker ‘Demand Better’ – the title does sound bad for my book and the moniker  sets the reviewer up as some kind of uncompromising, guardian of consumer values. Ok, normally I would contact Amazon and see if the review can be taken down (yes, you can do that!) on the basis that it really says nothing about the value of the book itself and it is factually inaccurate. But I won’t and actually I will keep it there. I believe that if I am prepared to listen to all the good reviews no matter how inaccurate I should also be prepared to take into account the bad ones even if they are trite.

‘Demand Better’ did actually go into the trouble of addressing me directly, presumably because he wanted to help me write a better book so I will return the courtesy by looking in detail at what has been written.

First of all I totally agree. Three weeks to get delivery of a book which you need to optimize your website and get it to the first page of Google is, to me, totally unacceptable. I do not know why amazon.co.uk would need that length of time to deliver the book but it is something I, as the author, will be writing in to complain about and I hope ‘Demand Better’ does too. Quite rightly, it is only by pointing out corporate inefficiencies that we can ever hope to change them.

Now I will focus on ‘Demand Better’s’ disappointment. I understand that he would be disappointed by the delivery time of the book but he also says that “many of the sites the book suggests you point your browser over are now closed”. He is decent enough to point out that I could have had the book amended by now seeing how it is just over a year since it was published and it has been on the Amazon SEO best-seller list constantly since then.

His remark made me go through the book itself again, in detail. Something, which I admittedly have been putting off because it is not the most exciting work in the world and my day really is full with many other things. I went through every single page of SEO Help. There are 103 links listed throughout the book. Many of them are online tools to help you carry out SEO tasks faster and with greater accuracy. On page 37 of the book, there is a list of social bookmarking sites and of those listed four (which at the time the review was written it would have been three as the fourth only just announced its intention to go offline) no longer are active. So, let’s do the maths: out of 103 links four are no longer active. That’s less than three per cent. So, 97% of the links given in the book are valid. If  just 3% constitutes “many of the sites…” it would suggest the ‘Demand Better’ is either not very good at mathematics or that he has failed to really check any of them and simply assumes that, somehow, they do not work, for whatever reason, which also means that he has neither really read the book nor applied the steps designed to help get his website to the first page of Google .

He finishes that sentence with “…and much of the content would have little effect on getting your website to Googles #1 page” – given the fact that SEO Help is a book written to help you optimise your website like a pro, it is extremely practical and bereft of theory and the usual book padding, I must admit that I find the charge peculiar and, given the inaccuracy of the fact about the links being dead, equally suspect.

Reviews of course, as far as I am concerned, play a crucial role. A book is always an unwritten contract between the writer and the reader whereby the former tries hard to satisfy a demand or fulfil a need experienced by the latter. Reader reviews are usually the only way a writer has of knowing just how successful he has been.

This is why when it comes to writing a review Amazon should perhaps have some guidelines which would allow those who really want to post a review about a book to focus on the book’s content, its communication value and finally the effectiveness of what it says (in the case of practical non-fiction). Delivery times are an Amazon issue not a writer one, book cost is set by the publisher. The writer is responsible for the content of the book and here, ‘Demand Better’ has fallen into that grey zone where I suspect his motives and demand better from him myself.