“Satu Rämö’s Novel Received 1-Star Reviews on Amazon UK Because the Wrong Story Was Published on the Cover of the Hildur Book”, 2024-10-23 (; backlinks):
[Google Translate translation] The e-book version of Satu Rämö’s Hildur novel was sold in Britain for a while with the wrong story content. The mistake was revealed to Rämö when she was researching reader reviews on Amazon.
…“I always look at what the magazines have written, and of course I search social media using hashtags to see what the gang thinks of my book and if there have been reviews. Since there had just been a big deal in The Guardian during the week of its publication, I kept an eye out to see if there would be reviews”, says Rämö.
Soon, Rämö paid attention to Amazon’s reader reviews and wondered why the book only got one-star reviews on their service. It felt strange.
“There has to be someone blind here, I thought. Usually those stars range 3–5 stars, if people have read and liked it”, says Rämö.
“Something was said in the evaluations that the book that was bought has not been received. In other words, a one-star review had been left because the wrong product had arrived.”
Rämö immediately sent a message to her agent, who was in contact with the British publishing house.
“There, it was noticed that the wrong file had been accidentally added to the e-book. So it was a human error. So it had the covers of my book, but when you bought the book for the Kindle [reading device], you had received another product”, Rämö explains.
It turned out that instead of Hildur’s murder mystery, Amazon users got Carol Ann Lee’s book Something Wicked: The Lives, Crimes and Deaths of the Pendle Witches about the 17th century witch trials on their reading devices. The error has now been fixed, but nothing happens to already published estimates.
“Amazon never deletes customer feedback or those comments if they are factual and truthful, and in a way they were”, says Rämö.
He says that he has also received a number of e-mails about the matter directly from British readers who had bought the wrong e-book. They decided to approach the author directly because they couldn’t get in touch with Amazon.
…Over time, star ratings change, and Amazon already has reviews other than one star visible. Rämö still regrets the situation. “Amazon has such good Google visibility. When you googling those ratings, and if you don’t read the comments, you don’t understand where the low ratings of the book at the beginning came from.”