Why won’t Amazon publish reviews?

Whenever anyone writes to me praising “The Fastest Way to Write Your Book” I ask them to write a short review and post it on Amazon.co.uk. But quite a few of these reviews never appear. What’s going on? I even ran a competition asking people to write a review and post it on Amazon, but the competition was pretty unsuccessful (and had to be extended) because the reviews just didn’t appear. I knew who had sent reviews because I asked them to email me when they posted them.

I’ve also noticed that Amazon have extended the amount of time before reviews appear on their site from “within 48 hours” to “5 to 7 business days”. But they still aren’t appearing after this time. One took more than a month. Others just disappear.

If there was something wrong with the reviews, you’d think Amazon would let the reviewer know or send it back for alteration. But they don’t. Anyway, I’ve seen some of these reviews and there’s nothing wrong with them. 

A pretty poor show.