Do It for the Vine: Literary Reviews and Online Amplification

Margo Howard may not be a household name, but that's because she comes from advice-column royalty. Advice columns are the realm of pseudonyms. Daughter of the original "Ann Landers" and niece to "Abigail Van Buren," Howard carried the torch of her maternal line as the pen behind Slate's "Dear Prudence" column from 1998 to 2006. When Howard decided to publish a memoir under her real name, she may have felt the pull of sincerity would carry the day.

Eat, Drink, and Remarry: Confessions of a Serial Wife was scheduled for a September 2014 release. Yet, as Howard would later recount, reviews of the book appeared on Amazon weeks before the publication date. "I thought this would be a humorous book but for me, it was horrifying," wrote a user who went by Quirky Girl. "Margo slept with a married man WHEN SHE WAS 51!! Way old enough to know better. HELLO PEOPLE - she was writing an advice column!!!!!!!" Another user complained: "Reading this felt like watching an aging singer past their prime still trying to perform in concert. I suppose if you want to learn more about Ms. Howard's pampered life then you may enjoy this. I did not."1 How did these unvarnished pans come to dominate the book's dedicated sales webpage so quickly?

Howard learned they were a product of Amazon's Vine program, which, in the company's description, "invites the most trusted reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make informed purchase decisions."2 "Trust" is the keyword here: users with a record of writing "helpful" product reviews on the site are selectively invited to participate in the program. It's opaque as to how invites are determined, or even who gets to make them. We don't even know how many people are in the program, which has been in operation since 2007. What we do know is that, in exchange for free stuff, "Vine Voices," as these reviewers are called, agree to write honest reviews that will likely be the first to populate selected products' feedback on the world's biggest e-commerce website.

Howard conceded Vine might be a good idea for commodity products — "cold cream and pots and pans" — but she found the program's reliance on amateur reviewers at odds with the culture of books. Prepublication reviews, Howard argued, ought to be the province of "magazines or newspapers." She elaborated: "'Book Reviewer' is considered a profession, and reviews are done by other writers. Good sense would seem to militate against any group of people unschooled in creative and critical reviewing coming up with a worthwhile review. The Vine people, who deal mostly with products for the home and the body, seem inappropriate bellwethers regarding products for the mind, if you will." We find ourselves in a weird media ecosystem indeed when the author of Eat, Drink, and Remarry, published by Harlequin, would cast her would-be core female readership as philistines, and their criticism as "slamming by the barely literate."3 Howard might have preferred that you first bought the book before deciding it isn't for you.

Therein lies the rub: Vine Voices have gained access to what had previously been reserved for the reviewing class. Is the advance review copy (ARC) still "advanced" if it's been made available to everyday readers — a book's projected purchasing public? ARCs used to circulate only among critics, taste makers, and industry insiders: in short, the prepublication actors tasked with creating "buzz" around a book. Through Vine, however, that class has been forced to share its power to create buzz with Amazon's own customers. And it's arguably in book culture that this redistribution of authority is felt most acutely. Reviewing a ladder or diapers can get awfully technical, and the focus is usually on the product itself. Books, however, are rarely reviewed for their materiality, or whether or not they "work" as artifacts (i.e., "I can't turn the pages" is not a common complaint). Instead, we judge them by the quality of their writing — their artfulness or entertainment value — which often slides into judgments about the author herself. Vine redistributes the authority to judge among customers, thereby challenging the reviewing class' hold on the symbolic middle ground between production and consumption. One could say that with the program Amazon has created the ultimate "grapevine," or word-of-mouth network that bypasses professional judgment for a neighborly recommendation.

Of course, we shouldn't take Vine at face value. The program is one of myriad ways Amazon has streamlined its customer-oriented operations while trampling over the labor that goes into production and distribution. Whatever "personalizes" the shopping experience on the site is bound to meet its bottom line of moving product. Vine takes this a step further. Amazon charges companies for participating in the program, and they are responsible for making their items available to customers. In this way, Vine perfects the website's ability to profit off users' freely provided content. By inserting a degree of quality control into its own reviewing mechanism, Amazon aligns producers' interests with those of its customer base. The result: reviews that stand out from the rest while retaining the aura of amateur authenticity.4 In the morass of feedback that populates the platform, Vine Voices — those most adroit at reviewing products for Amazon — become a version of producers' target audience.

For readers used to the institutional assurances of the reviewing class, Vine may seem to augur the death of literature in the age of digital retail. In ceding so much authority to amateurs, Amazon puts the proverbial (shopping) cart before the horse, letting customers decide the value of something that's not supposed to abide the classic economic determination of value. Yet, while the market logic of Vine is undeniable, the threat of homogenization, much less a "dumbing down" of literary taste, has not come to pass. Instead, what's developed over the program's existence is a more symbiotic relationship between publishers, amateur reviewers, and the retail giant. Indeed, far from simply letting Amazon's customers dictate literary taste, publishers have used Vine to identify readers for new literary talent.

For book culture, this has meant that publishers capitalize on Amazon's reviewing mechanism to amplify the work of lesser-known or first-time authors. And it's not just small or independent presses that are taking advantage of the scale of Amazon's reach. The world's biggest publishers are making decisions about which authors could benefit from sending ARCs to everyday readers. While genre fiction constitutes the majority of books available for Vine review, a wide array of literary fiction is regularly featured in the program. For these titles, Vine operates in the same way the twentieth century's standout print middlebrow institution, the Book-of-the-Month Club, used to: evaluators with a knack for understanding books' appeal to the "general reader" help render strange experiences familiar, and frame new or different perspectives as relatable.5 Amazon did the Book-of-the-Month Club one better by putting actual general readers in the position of evaluating books. Yet even this twenty-first century twist to hierarchies of judgment hasn't diminished the lure of the middlebrow. Vine Voices usually approach their task as speaking to a broad community of readers who can appreciate literature's ability to step into someone else's shoes, to make the unusual ordinary.

That tenet certainly applies to Yaa Gyasi's 2013 novel Homegoing. The Ghanaian American writer's first book tracks the descendants of two West African sisters separated at birth in the eighteenth century. Moving chapter by chapter over eight generations of the sisters' familial lines, Homegoing is an epic reckoning with slavery and its afterlives. Gyasi based Homegoing on a 2009 trip she had taken to Ghana, a personal homegoing to the country of her birth. A critic would point out it's also a story we've heard before: Alex Haley's 1976 bestseller Roots advances the same plot and moral takeaway, though in that novel we only follow the protagonist Kunta Kinte's line. From a longer view, both Homegoing and Roots participate in a tradition of novelistic sagas that reflect and refract history through the lens of family bonds. This pull of familiarity in literary fiction turns out to be what appeals most to the Vine community and, by extension, its conception of the general reader. Whether a book is derivative or contrived matters far less than whether it does what it's supposed to do: namely, abide by the genre qualities it sets out for itself. In this sense, amateur reviewers embrace a conception of the literary that is more genre-oriented than what is usually legitimated by the reviewing class. Novelty matters, but only in relation to what is readily identifiable. Thus, when Knopf enlisted Vine to help introduce this new voice to the world, it was able to garner feedback that acknowledges Gyasi's novelty and her familiarity.

Months before the book's release, Vine Voices sang the book's praises. "Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming [sic] is a beautiful reminder all great fiction is a tantalizing paradox. A great novel is a story that never happened but its 'truth' is undeniable." For Laurence R. Bachmann, this strength is tied to Gyasi's episodic narrative, such that each chapter feels like "a short story." This structure allows her to "bridge[] two continents and cultures," the expanded vision of which makes the novel feel "more authentic than autobiography and memoir." Other reviews deem Homegoing a "historical fiction," a "moving saga," a "fairy tale...gone awry," and, again, an episodic narrative that recounts "the story not of one person, or even one family, but instead, tracing a much larger theme, and arc, of the cost of cruelty, and the redeeming power of sacrificial love."6 All of these reviews, without exception, state that this is Gyasi's first novel; some marvel that she is only 26. No one points out that she earned her MFA from Iowa, a fact that would likely be noted in a professional book review. Where Iowa looms large in the reviewing class' acknowledgment of literary value, for Vine, symbolic authority derives from Gyasi's voice, free of credentialed interference.7

It would be too much to say that Homegoing became a bestselling, award-winning novel because of Vine.8 But this cluster of reviews did set the book on the path to e-commerce success, with one 5-star review in particular receiving the most helpful votes. There's a knock-on effect to such helpfulness: as more users confirm the review was helpful, the judgment it contains comes to build a consensus around the book — even if the user has yet to read the book, or maybe never will. Helpfulness is Amazon's way of building value through its reviews. Again, though we can't measure how much of an impact Vine had on Gyasi's reception, it's notable that most major African/American women's novels to come out in the few years since have made use of the program. Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers (2016), Ayobami Adebayo's Stay with Me (2017), Esi Edugyan's Washington Black (2018): a veritable flowering of African/American women's writing is being tilled by Amazon and Vine.

Part of the reason for this success is that Vine Voices are remarkably adept readers of genre. Genre fiction, yes, but also literary genres — themes and typologies that are recognizable to a well-read general reader. Publishers have seized on Vine's capacity to introduce new voices to the literary marketplace through a team of amateur genre experts. The style of their criticism is as broad-minded and as seemingly ordinary as that of the greatest amateur genre theorist of the twentieth century: Northrop Frye. I use "amateur" loosely here. Frye was of course an eminent critic and professor; but he trained to become an ordained minister, not a professional critic, and he never earned a doctorate. His greatest work, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), is known for describing fictional genres according to evidence immanent to literature itself. A throwback to classical literary criticism, Frye's study, it might be said, systematizes how readers situate individual works in recognizable categories. Anatomy of Criticism's interpretive strategy is thus similar to Vine's: take what appears new and show how it expresses longstanding, even ancient, meaning-making processes. Although attuned to history, this strategy is, at root, narratological, evincing a keen appreciation for the intricacies of plotting, dialogue, and characterization. As Frye shows these elements to cohere into familiar storylines, he practices a mode of genre criticism.

New, diverse voices have been introduced to the American reading public through Vine Voices' deep investment in genre. But the program hasn't been without its blind spots. Within the realm of literary fiction, something Vine has consistently failed to amplify is the work of authors in translation. Where anglophone novelists can expect scores of helpful votes on Vine reviews, novelists published in translation see only negligible returns. Part of that is attributable, no doubt, to the fact that there's less coverage of these writers in supporting and adjacent media, including periodical reviews. If one doesn't know to seek out these writers, they can be easily overlooked or bypassed on the Amazon website. More than this, however, there is the constitutive problem that translated works frustrate amateur reviewers' ability to read genre. When a non-anglophone work's genre coordinates are not US- or West-centered, it tends to wither on Vine (see Matt Eatough for the likes of those Amazon misses).

Take Taiwanese eco-critic and novelist Wu Ming-Yi. His debut novel The Man with the Compound Eyes was published in Taiwan in 2011. The parable about ecological disaster, written in a magical-realist style and featuring indigenous Taiwanese characters, was acclaimed both in Taiwan and in the UK. Pantheon published the novel in 2014 and enlisted Vine to help amplify Wu in a new market. The campaign got off to a rocky start: only 2 of the first 7 reviews of the novel were by Vine Voices. This implies that Vine Voices were struggling to write reviews on time, in advance of regular users. Even after receiving their ARCs, Amazon's hand-picked reviewers were setting the book aside.

The explanation came in a wave of complaints. The first Vine review observes: "There is one thing you must have in order to get through this book, much less attempt to enjoy it - patience (and lots of it)." Others follow suit: "Being eco-friendly is fine with me, but sermons get a bit tiresome, and those in this book are rather tiring"; "Mystical and magical stories are intertwined in this book which took a lot of patience on my part to finish." What tested readers' patience, it seems, was Wu's lack of genre fit. Reviewer Addison Dewitt was left so confounded by Wu's non-categorizability that, in frustration, she turns the novel against itself: "This is one of those books that has a few redeeming qualities that kept me afloat in a sea of trash. Perhaps that's the metaphor Ming-Yi is working toward, but this novel needs a major re-write and clean-up. I've read elsewhere that Ming-Yi is an environmentalist. Perhaps he can start his clean-up efforts with this manuscript."9 This 3-star review received the most helpful votes of the bunch — only 10. So to the extent that Vine amplified anything, it was Wu's tepid reception in the US.

That's surely not how Pantheon wanted the program to work for Wu, but that's exactly how Vine did work for Amazon — using amateur reviews to assess the market viability of an unknown quantity. In this function, Vine has proven remarkably good at promoting new anglophone voices writing in familiar genres. Yet it has proven the opposite when it comes to novels in translation, amplifying extant biases under the guise of lack of genre fit or intelligibility. Which begs the question of whether Americans' global imaginary is shrinking even as its genres become more diverse. Here I am thinking of Vine less as an actant than as a symptom, a manifestation of the recursive consumerism of Amazon itself. We may begin to wonder whether, in the age of e-commerce, Amazon's powerful retail presence is developing literary fiction not so much within a world republic of letters as through Amazon's 17 international markets (as of this writing).10 If so, what gets amplified in the US will mirror the anglophone-algorithmic biases of Amazon.com, leaving the already tiny fraction of books that appear in translation (as low as 3% of the US market, according to one metric) in a perilous state.11

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Kinohi Nishikawa is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (Chicago, 2018).

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Keywords: Amazon Vine, amateurs, genre fiction, middlebrow, translation

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