Isa Lavinia

This is interesting. On the purchasing of reviews, on making fake friends with hand-picked reviewers on Goodreads in order to get good reviews, on the slagging off of one-star reviews as inadequate etc. It was written by Doris-Maria Heilmann at 111Publishing. That info took a while to track down.

Start making “friends” with reviewers, long before your book is finished: Search on your social media sites for reviewers, reviews, book bloggers, etc. when using the search function on top of Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook and Google+ pages. At Goodreads, reviewers are listed, so you can conveniently choose them as friends and follow them for a while...

I wish Goodreads appreciated us as much as she does though, 

those readers do not only review books, but post their reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and the like. On top of that, they often write a blog post about the books they read, which stays there for years to come. They are actually promoting those book reviews to readers and indirectly even to industry decision makers: librarians, booksellers, agents, publishers – like a publicist does it (for money). If compensated it would mean at least a couple of hundred dollars worth, what they provide you for free!

But they don't like honest reviews, only good ones.

I think about an extremely unfair review, a good friend of mine has received from a “Librarian” at Goodreads! She wrote about a book that has amassed more than 90 percent 5-star reviews. The “reviewer wrote: “I tried to like the book, really. But I just can’t.” That’s it, this was the whole review! No description what the book is about, no mentioning of the writing style (excellent!), not about the plot, the characters, nothing. And gave it a 1-star. So much for the quality of reviews…

What she doesn't say is the 5-star reviews were from her friends, family, fellow self-published authors and possibly not one single genuine one among the lot. Just like Jennifer Smith's reviews on her book, Grrr where all 239 stellar ratings were created by people who live in Scranton, PA, joined between 30 Sept and today (yes, she's still at it). They squeal when they get 1 star reviews but expect us to believe all the manipulated 5-star ones. That's popularly known as wanting to have your cake and eat it too. 

The only way to please these authors who are looking for reviews worth "at least a couple of hundred dollars" is to give them a fake 5 star review. They don't care it's fake.

Some authors think that reviewers should take my mother's advice "If you can't say anything nice , don't say anything at all." 

Honesty out of the window, scam us for our $$$ with manipulation of reviews. I am sure those sort of authors are a tiny minority though. The ones I know on GR and in real life (a lot) are with a single real life exception, really straight and credible people.