Malicious one star reviews

Anyone ever experienced the above? How did you deal with it? I have and it was rather annoying, not least because I had zero prior reviews.

Hi Thomas
I can imagine it is upsetting, but I saw on Amazon you have several positive reviews. As for the negative ones, the same as any other type of criticism you feel is unfair.....ignore it.
Best regards
Tina

Why do you assume the review is malicious? Maybe the person just didn't like your book.

>1 ThomasNorford: If you have an actual campaign against you, putting a large amount of 1 star reviews on Amazon or other sales sites, you can report them and have them removed.

IF this is just one or two users who didn't care for your writing, just ignore them.

>3 lilithcat: I won't go into the background, but I am 100% sure that they had not read the book.

>4 gilroy: They had not read the book, I am 100% certain, but it was only a few, so I just hit the Report button and left it at that.

>2 JLCrellin: Good advice, thanks.

I had a recent one star review in which the reader admitted not finishing the book. His choice, of course, but reviewing a novel I haven't finished is not something I'd do. Nothing to suggest it was malicious, though, and as it's the only one star review I've received, it didn't bruise my ego too much! :)

>8 Screenscope: Yeah, fair enough. It's a bit galling though when the only review you have is a one-star from someone who definitely hasn't read it. Chalk it up to experience I guess...

>8 Screenscope: "but reviewing a novel I haven't finished is not something I'd do."

I had the realization recently that this is a valid reason to never rate something with low stars -- a situation that had always seemed contrived to me before. If you only hand out three to five stars, why is that a five star system?
But if a one star or two star book is a book I didn't finish, and if I couldn't finish it I don't want to make a comment on it, then suddenly only rating things positively started to make sense to me.

But I'm still not so sure how helpful that is to other people.

ETA:

Putting low rating on books you haven't even read doesn't seem hugely helpful either.

Amazon reviews annoy me, as someone who wants a sense of what other customers thought of the product. Half of them are doing that, but it seems like half are only rating whether they received the product on time and in good condition. Maybe someone ordered your book and it got dropped in a puddle enroute.

>11 Cecrow:

Amazon reviews have seemed okay to me in the past, although I expect them to be increasingly gamed with generative AI. Their system for leveraging user responses to highlight the "most useful" positive and negative reviews is especially keen.

Amazon ratings seem to me to be as bad as other star rating systems, with the added insult of high stakes.