Earlier this week I joined amazon.co.uk's vine program. They invite people who've written useful reviews in the past to join the program.
It works like this: Each month I get to chose a few free books, software, and other stuff that are about to be released into the wild. In return for the freebies I'm asked to write amazon reviews for 3/4s of them. I can, of course, write positive or neative reviews. The books' publishers would be daft to put weak books through the vine program, of course, because they want the books to "go live" with a bunch of good reviews. so the freebies are pretty good quality.
It's a good idea except ... I don't like writing reviews and I tend to only write reviews for books I love or hate. But now I'm being incentivised to write reviews for books and stuff which I'm not all that bothered about. That's not easy! More than that, though: I often start a book but then abandon it quickly if I don't like it. I don't like the idea of writing a review of a book which I abandoned; it seems unfair. But, if I don't write the reviews, I don't get more free books. What a dilemma.
I suspect I'll opt out of the program soon.
So here's my thought: if you read a vine review (they're clearly marked) then keep in mind that the people who write the reviews are (a) people who like writing reviews (b) people who are now motivated to write reviews so they can get more free books to read/review next month.
[Oh, one more thing: I've put in 2 reviews so far. They were very short reviews and 5 people have reviewed the reviews, all of them saying they weren't useful. I presume that the votes came from other people on the vine program (who else would be looking at the books?) which intrigues me. The voting system builds in an incentive to write longer reviews. I suspect that if you look at the vine reviews that they're longer than non-vine-reviews ... and I suspect that they'll have more filler/fluff in them. Just a suspicion.]
Don't get me wrong - I think the Vine program is a good thing. The more reviews out there the better, in my opinion, and reviewers are free to give positive and negative reviews. Just keep in mind that the vine reviewers behave differently when reviewing the vine books than they do when they review other books. The incentives are different.
