Received my first comment on my blog in email from Richard Cody, who writes the nice Notes from a Life blog. Richard pointed me to the Amazon discussion boards, which I hadn't even been aware of, and in particular the board about customer reviews and the arcane formula that Amazon uses to determine top reviewer ranking. Although no one knows for sure, it seems that it takes at least three helpful votes on an item for it to be recorded (and ten helpful votes on a item means that it makes even more points for you). The general consensus is that the best thing to do to increase your ranking is to ignore your ranking and concentrate on writing good, insightful reviews.

The trick to reviewing honestly, however, is to let people know about the negatives as well as the positives. One of the first items I ever entered a review for on Amazon was on Lois McMaster Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice, which had been recommended highly to me for a long time by both Hypatia, the automatic recommender from Alexandria Digital Literature, and the denizens of AlexLit's newsgroup. I found the book to be too derivative and formulaic, and said so in my review. Bujold has a legion of fans, however, and they don't take kindly to anyone dissing their idol, and so that review has as many unhelpful votes as it does helpful. This is just to say that I doubt I'll be moving up the ranks too quickly, simply because I'm no toady to rate five stars and write a glowing review for every book that I read.