This week I'm hoping for a little six-degrees-of-separation magic in locating the right Ronald Noble in the UK. Ronald was kind enough to write his first Amazon review after reading Betrayal, and it was a nice one: "Best book I have ever read top marks." Unfortunately, he made the not-uncommon mistake of assuming that 1 was "top marks" when it came to Amazon's star system (where 1 is actually the worst, and 5 the best.)

I'm sure Ronald would happily correct this, something that's easy to do, but he's unaware of the error, and I have no means of contacting him. So I'm hoping that through the power of friend-of-a-friend communication we can find him.

This incident exposes a few flaws in Amazon's rating system. The first is a complete lack of moderation. At the very least, there should be a mechanism in place for addressing rating issues. These errors are common. The second is Amazon's icon system. Amazon's visuals of stars don't represent the actual star rating, but rather a rounded version thereof. They only show Half or Full Stars. This creates cliffs in their rating system. Dropping from 4.8 Stars to 4.7 equates visually to dropping from 5.0 to 4.5. Likewise for dropping from 4.3 to 4.2, where you go from four-and-a-half stars to a flat four. Amazon subsidiary GoodReads, for example, gives an accurate representation of stars, so the code to correct this is literally in their possession.

I estimate that my sales of Betrayal in the UK will drop 4X as a result of this single error, which takes Betrayal from a rare full-5-star visual to a relatively common 4.5. So if you happen to know Ronald Noble, please let him know his kind assistance would be greatly appreciated.