Reviews, gaming the system, and fake popularity

As I write this, my book Pixie Dust has 29 reviews on Amazon, while my book Spaceship Broken has 26 reviews. Most people who think that means these books are roughly equal in popularity, right?

Except no.

Pixie Dust has made me almost $30,000 in revenue, earning most of it at shows and through Kickstarter. Almost zero dollars of it was made through Amazon. 

Meanwhile, Spaceship Broken has made me barely $2,000. That's 15x less than Pixie Dust. However, I've given away over 3,000 copies of Spaceship Broken in the past couple of years.

Nearly all my reviews for Spaceship Broken came from free review copies. While almost all my reviews for Pixie Dust came from people who paid for the book. 

This kind of skewing happened all the time during my career since I rarely focused on Amazon sales until 2019. My books Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter and Katrina Hates the Dead have each made me over $60,000 and yet only have 23 and 25 reviews respectively.

Ichabod sold out of 7 print runs, and Katrina is r…