Deleted Book Reviews and Waning KENP Income: Your Fault?

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Disappearing Reviews and KENP Income? Try this simple fix.

Have You Experienced Vanishing Book Reviews and Waning KENP Income at Amazon?

Authors everywhere have reported loss of valid book reviews and diminishing or disappearing KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) income at Amazon. You might be surprised to learn that one of the causes could be you.

Yes, YOU!

Are you sharing book links (URLs) with multiple lines of unintelligible characters?

For instance, at the time of writing this post, these were the links generated by browsers when I searched for kathy steinemann at Amazon.com, and subsequently clicked on The Writer’s Lexicon, Kindle edition:

Google Chrome:
https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Lexicon-Descriptions-Overused-Taboos-ebook/dp/B06XRNB5SC/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1532809542&sr=8-1&keywords=kathy+steinemann

Firefox:
https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Lexicon-Descriptions-Overused-Taboos-ebook/dp/B06XRNB5SC/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1532809290&sr=8-1&keywords=kathy+steinemann

Microsoft Edge:
https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Lexicon-Descriptions-Overused-Taboos-ebook/dp/B06XRNB5SC/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1532809423&sr=8-1&keywords=kathy+Steinemann

Study the links before reading further.

… … …

You should have noticed that they’re identical, except for the numbers following qid (nothing to do with quid or quid quo pro).

This Is What the Gobbledygook Means

The first part is Amazon’s main URL, followed by the name of the book, its format, etc.

ref= indicates where the user came from.

ie= shows the preferred character encoding.

qid= gives the exact time the URL was generated.

sr= is a little more complicated. If you click on the first book of a search results page, sr will equal 1-1. If you click on the third book, sr will equal 1-3. If you click on the eighth book, it will equal 1-8, and so on. The sr indicator will change when you publish a new book, do a book promotion, fall or rise in the ratings, etc.

keywords= shows the initial keywords used.

Note that qid differs in each URL. It’s a timestamp, the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970.

So, if you provide your potential reviewers or readers with a complex URL like one of the above, imagine how Amazon’s artificial intelligence might interpret it:

Current time is 1533338683 but link says time is 1532809290. Book is in position 1-2 but link says it is in position 1-1.

FRAUD ALERT!

CANCEL KENP EARNINGS.

DELETE REVIEWS THAT CAME FROM THIS LINK.

Find thousands of writing tips and word lists in
The Writer’s Lexicon series
and additional resources on my Facebook page.
–

Here’s the Proper Way to Format Your Links

By following these instructions, not only will you prevent the situation described above, but you’ll also create a clean link that doesn’t break onto multiple lines.

How to find your asin.
–

First you’ll need to locate the ASIN of your book. (The graphic on the left shows the location of the ASIN for The Writer’s Lexicon.)

Here’s how your links should look. In each case, replace ASIN with your ASIN. For example, my link at Amazon would be https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XRNB5SC.

Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN

Amazon.co.uk
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/ASIN

Amazon.de
https://www.amazon.de/dp/ASIN

Amazon.fr
https://www.amazon.fr/dp/ASIN

Amazon.it
https://www.amazon.it/dp/ASIN

Amazon.co.jp
https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/ASIN

Amazon.com.br
https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/ASIN

Amazon.ca
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/ASIN

Amazon.in
https://www.amazon.in/dp/ASIN

Amazon.com.au
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/ASIN

Amazon.com.mx
https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/ASIN

Amazon.nl
https://www.amazon.nl/dp/ASIN

How to find your isbn-10.

For print editions and audio CDs, substitute ASIN with ISBN-10, no spaces or dashes.

I didn’t invent this stuff. You’ll find more information from Amazon at:

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200652190

Note: according to the above page, “You may not include a link to your own website from within your book’s product description on Amazon.”

Use a Similar Approach When Linking to Amazon Reviews

If I scroll down on the Amazon.com page for The Writer’s Lexicon Kindle edition to the Top customer reviews section, and click on the heading in bold type for the first review, its URL shows in my browser as:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RDT1MVSQU3YE4/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B06XRNB5SC

Note the same extraneous information I referred to previously. Let’s shorten the link:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RDT1MVSQU3YE4

Replace the underlined portion with the unique identifier for your review.

Now if you share the link, Amazon’s AI won’t go into meltdown mode.

Related Post:

Writers: Are You Tossing Away Potential Book Income?

Find thousands of writing tips and word lists in
The Writer’s Lexicon series
and additional resources on my Facebook page.
–

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18 thoughts on “Deleted Book Reviews and Waning KENP Income: Your Fault?”

  4. Great advice Kathy. I figured this out a few years ago and have written a few posts about it myself. I still see so many authors copying this long tailed links. But now one question comes to mind: I usually copy and paste a book’s cover from Amazon when I’m sharing a review on my blog. I type the ‘buy link’ myself, chopping off all the gobbledygook. But I’m wondering about those people who embed the image from an Amazon page where readers can click the buy button on the image, do you think that leaves a trail as well?

  5. Thank you, Kathy! I’m not a WordPress user, but I appreciated this post enough to take the extra Google step to comment. I haven’t lost any reviews, hardly enough for Amazon’s AI to take notice of anyway, but we live in hope! Very useful information.

  6. Great in-depth article! I shared it via my self-publishing Facebook Page. It’s something that all authors need to be aware of. Reviews are hard to get and losing them hurts. Keep up the great work!

    • Hi, Virginia. I’ll cover booklinker.net next week. The short answer is yes, it does cause some problems, but not with reviews and KENP income.

  8. Really useful information for us newbies. Our reading group is about to self-publish an anthology – even if we only get read by our families and U3A section this time around(That’s University of the Third Age in the UK). I’ll make sure our techie person gets a copy of this. Thanks

    • Thanks, Cathy.

      Newbie authors aren’t the only ones sharing problem links.

      AIs are set up to reduce cheating. However, the nets they spread catch honest people as well as cheaters.

  9. Interesting and useful information. I’ve always used the link produced from the ‘share’ button on the book’s description page. This is a shortened version too. I wonder if this gets flagged by Amazon’s machinery? I also use books2read universal links to refer readers in my emails and social media posts (to save producing multiple urls for different countries. Again, might this cause a problem? So far I’ve not noticed any reviews removed – although there are some 1 star reviews I wish could be removed!

    • Hi, Tom. Would you mind sharing your books2read link here? I have a reason for asking: next week’s post. 🙂 Your question will be answered there.

      Hey, you aren’t a real writer unless you have at least one one-star review.

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