Review numbers are not an accurate reflection of book sales

Well, the email spam fell silent for about three days after I blocked Nigeria from my website. Then this morning I was contacted about my "12 books," and the single digit number of reviews on Amazon on my oldest book which by itself was downloaded 1500 times in 14 years, and has only 9 customer reviews. This is 0.6% of the total number of people who have my first book in their libraries.

14 additional people rated it on Goodreads, so if you combine those numbers it's 1.33% of people. I reveal this to encourage other authors that you aren't alone if your customer reviews and sales numbers don't match up. You can't force people to leave reviews, and in a number of cases, you may be risking your account by encouraging them to do so.

Amazon's TOS states, "We also don’t allow people to create, edit, or post content about their own products or services. The same goes for products and services offered by friends, relatives, employers, business associates, and competitors. As a customer, you’re NOT allowed to create, edit, or remove a review in exchange for compensation, including payments, refunds, discounts, products, gift cards, warranties, or services. As a customer, you’re NOT allowed to post reviews on products that you have financial interest in."

Don't fall for it if you get one of these unsolicited emails, promising you sales and reviews if you just pay for them. It's not worth having your publishing account shut down for trying to game the system. Reviews will come with time, or they won't. It doesn't matter. Also if you get a bad review, just leave it alone. You're not allowed to harass people to remove their bad review just because it hurts your ego. Not everyone is your target audience. Leaving a perfect five stars or any stars at all isn't a mandatory part of the reading process. I even put my lowest review on my website because I found it humorous.

I have 24 books available if you count the anthologies that I edited and over 100 ratings & reviews on them combined between Amazon and Goodreads. I do not play review swap games, and I will not pay to artificially spike my review count, so these emails about reviewing my books on multiple websites for a fee are a waste of my time.