A Few Trends on Amazon Reviews

The other day, I read this post by Rolando Garcia looking at trends among Amazon book reviews. He identifies several distinctive distribution patterns among reviews and noted that there may not be any books that have a majority of three-star reviews.

I don’t really have anything to add to his study. I just thought it was neat and interesting and apparently very thorough–he mentions that he looked at 4000 different books to put this together! A trainspotter after my own heart.

From here, it would be particularly cool to take a look at each different distribution pattern and try to identify what kind of book provokes that particular pattern. For instance, his example with Hugh Howey’s Wool would probably be “the fan favorite” whereas Robert Jordan’s Crossroads of Twilight would be like “the former fan favorite who has finally pushed all those fans to the breaking point.” If you had a significant enough number of reviews on one of your own books to see a clear pattern, you could compare it to the catalogue of distribution patterns and get a pretty good idea of what kind of book you wound up writing.

Which.. might just be a roundabout way of confirming something you already knew. Still. It would be interesting! I swear!