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Hi, All! I’m curious if anyone has experience a bunch of ratings (in my case they were all 3-5 stars) showing up all at once?

I woke up this morning and found I had 11 new ratings that weren’t there the day before on my kindle book, and that’s rare for my book unless I did a huge giveaway, which I didn’t. I did have almost 2000 pages read this month so far, but they were read for my Spanish edition of the book. The ratings popped up overnight for the English version.

I’m just curious if Amazon gets behind in approving ratings before they are posted or something? I’m actually not sure how that works, or if 11 people suddenly really did rate my book last night lol.

Leah wrote: "Hi, All! I’m curious if anyone has experience a bunch of ratings (in my case they were all 3-5 stars) showing up all at once?..."

Hi Leah, it hasn't happened to me, but several people in a FB group I'm in said they had the same thing show up suddenly...some even more than that what you saw. They couldn't figure it out. Whatever the reason, that's uplifting!

Leah wrote: "Hi, All! I’m curious if anyone has experience a bunch of ratings (in my case they were all 3-5 stars) showing up all at once?

I woke up this morning and found I had 11 new ratings that weren’t the..."

Hi Leah, It has happened to me on my books. I do think that they get behind in their approval process. I have had readers tell me that they left a review and it doesn't show up for a week, and I have had other readers tell me that they left a review and it shows up within an hour! I think it depends on who is working the 'approval' system on any particular day.

Okay, thanks for the responses. That might be what’s going on. None of mine were reviews, just star ratings.

A lot of companies here in the UK, including Amazon, are reducing their staff.

As we know, inflation drives wages up and therefore costs so they reduce one of their costs - staff! There are other reasons too, I expect, but it means we are all noticing this sort of stuff.

However, a ŷ������ member let me know that he'd left a review and it has appeared on the same day.

This morning, I just found it went up another 7 ratings. Something weird is going on��

I hope it’s what Anna is saying, that they are just super behind in approving ratings because they are understaffed. It’s possible, because I should have had about this many ratings by now, with all the KDP pages I’ve seen read over the last few months. It’s just weird seeing it go up 18 ratings over 2 nights. What I hope it’s not is someone trying to be nice having a bunch of buddies rate my book, but I guess that would only make sense if they were all 5 star ratings. These are 3-5 star ratings. It’s just strange. I’ve never gotten that many all at once. Maybe 10 after a big giveaway.

I had the same thing happen this weekend. One of my books added 5 ratings on Sunday, then 5 more on Monday. It has been on sale recently so I just figured that I got lucky with the readers being willing to rate it. There were no actual reviews, plus often if I get a new rating/review on Amazon, I get it also on ŷ������. There was no change on ŷ������.

Only happened with one of my books though. Several others were also on sale in the past month or two.

Eileen, okay, so it’s not just me. Mine must be from several months worth though, which is concerning I guess.

Maybe I’ll even find 10 more tomorrow. Maybe 20 lol!

I got a boost in ratings (not reviews) this past week. Amazon did introduce a verified purchase "rating only" option some time back, I wonder if this has been a bit buggy, or there's an extra step they added on their end so the ratings aren't immediate. Bit weird, but very welcome!

Jessica, this must be it, because like yours, mine are only ratings, not reviews.

Could be that your work was the subject for a book club.

Could be Jay, but I’m nothing special lol. Plus, it’s apparently happening to other authors as well.

I just hope they are lagging behind and that a bunch of review will appear on my book's page.
Ten days ago I had a freebie downloaded hundreds of times. I have seen one review only, and that's someone who reads my books.

Now, on Wednesday, nothing new to report on Amazon, but ŷ������ took a rating away for one of my books!!

Two steps forward, one step back.

I didn’t have new ones this morning either.

Yes, Eileen, it's often baffling how the ratings and rankings work. One sale can affect my Amazon Books reports significantly, while a bulk purchase from one of the retailers that sell my books will show a lesser impact.

Leah, could it just be ratings showing from other territories?

That’s also possible, Catherine.

I just noticed that there are still some reviews missing from other countries. I found a 5-star review from 2018 in Canada that is missing on the US Amazon page, while there are plenty of others from other countries not missing. Strange.

This morning I checked again and a different book added 5 new ratings. No reviews, but I'll take what I can get!!

Catherine wrote: "Leah, could it just be ratings showing from other territories?"

It could be for the US site, but the UK site doesn't capture reviews/ratings from anywhere else. The US site had more reviews for my other books than the UK site, which used to capture US reviews, and which was stopped some years ago. The AUS site, only captures the UK reviews.

Not all Amazons are made equal.

It's been over a month since the last comments so maybe I'm the only one this is happening to, but the last couple of weeks have seen one of my books add about 100 (!!) new ratings, and the other has gotten 40 more on Amazon. Not much change on GR.

Not that I'm ungrateful for them, but it does seem odd.

I wish I had that problem.

I actually got over 50 within a few days last week. I have no idea where they are taking them from or where they’ve been sitting “waiting to be approved.�� I was extremely surprised. Now my first book has 198 and my second 31, which makes me wonder if my second in the series should have more than 31��

Phillip wrote: "I wish I had that problem."

Hah, right. I almost went to buy fireworks when I saw I had 20 KENP recorded for March, which is the first since... you read the book. Back in late 2020.

What concerns me isn’t that I have a bunch of new ratings, of course. It’s that I may have many more from various books that are just waiting to be approved or something. All the ratings that came through all at once for my first book must have been from long ago. I haven’t had KENP pages read in that book for a while. Along with other books.

Some of the ratings added may have come from KENP, but not all. Two of my books are in Kindle Unlimited and two aren't. One of them that isn't has added about 50 reviews in the last week or so. The newer one in KU has added about 9 reviews.

Interesting. Mine are all KU.

This has been happening to some of my books lately too. Some of the books it's happened to were published years ago, have never been in KU and haven't had many sales or promotions in recent times. And the numbers of new ratings are such that it can't just be different territories combining. I also wondered if some are coming from ŷ������ but, again, this theory doesn't hold for all of the books.

So it does, indeed seem that, unless it's just a system error, these ratings may have been loitering for a long time or are ratings that have recently been approved but, for some reason, were previously not. I also wondered whether they relate to books that have been on free promo (but outside of KU) at some point, but this wouldn't be true of all my affected books either.

Catherine, I agree. It doesn’t make much sense otherwise. At first I was worried they weren’t real lol!