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RIP: Prolific Amazon Customer Reviewer Harriet Klausner (1952-2015) (teleread.com)
Robotech_Master writes: Prolific Amazon customer reviewer Harriet Klausner passed away last week at the age of 67. Klausner was a controversial figure: She never gave anything a negative review, her review blurbs cast doubt on how closely she actually read what she reviewed, and received dozens of free books per week (which ended up resold on Half.com via her son's account). Nonetheless, for a time she was one of the most recognizable names to any frequent Amazon.com customer; it was rare to come across any popular title that didn't have a Klausner review.
Not many reviewers have ever inspired snarky sites tracking their contributions.
She stated in an interview that she did it for lesser known authors who lacked a publicity machine behind them; so that machine she became. Quite a noble thing to do in your spare time, which she, apparently, had quite a bit of.
She's an obscure hero/villain, of course this story belongs on Slashdot. The question is whether you do.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the day, she was a hugely controversial figure among book nerds. As the Slashdot poster added to my submission, Not very many people can inspire snarky sites tracking their contributions, analyzing their statistics, and outright accusing them of fraud simply from the act of posting consumer reviews to an e-commerce site.
The fact that such a thing is even possible could be taken as a metric of just how broadly the Internet has affected our lives.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
She averaged, what?, three book reviews a day, for years. Mostly new books too, it isn't like she was sitting in front of her computer writing reviews for books she had read decades before.
Unless you're suggesting she actually read all of those books the fraud accusation is just, and unless you knew her personally to have read all of those books the suspicion of fraud is reasonable
You don't necessary have to give positive reviews. I've been among the top 1000 reviewers for a decade or so. Just due to my ranking, companies started offering me stuff, but they didn't seem to care (or even notice) that my few thousand reviews ranged liberally from one to five stars, and that if something was crap I wasn't afraid to call it crap. Indeed, even after I accepted free products in exchange for an honest review, I have found the bulk of these to be Chinese crap, at best merely satisfactory for their purpose, and usually horrible, and I've said so in my review. And yet, those same companies continue to offer me the next product they are trying to develop hype for.
I am aware that a lot of reviewers who accept free stuff give invariably positive reviews to keep the goods flowing, but I really don't think that is necessary if your reviewer ranking is squarely in the top 1000. You'll continue to receive free stuff even if you are brutally honest.
That's because it's really not necessarily the quality but the NUMBER of reviews that are important at Amazon. The more reviews something gets, positive OR negative, the more it tends to get featured near the top of its category. So by giving something a one-star review, you do it nearly as much good as by giving it five.
So says Chuck Wendig, noting that all the one-star protest reviews of his new Star Wars book helped it become a bestseller.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org