Review Group discussion

With an ever-growing membership and over 6,000 reviews generated by this group it is becoming more and more difficult to moderate for review clashes. The main rule in this group is not to have reciprocal reviews and the group administrator and moderators depend on authors to help with identifying review clashes. There are a couple of ways members can help with this when signing up to new groups.

1) New members: When starting out in the group it will be easiest to keep a list of names of reviewed / reviewed by. As you join subsequent groups check this list against names in the round you are joining and let the moderator know of any clashes by posting in the thread. Ideally you should also know which book was reviewed so if the author has another published this can be allocated in place of the nominated book.

2) Existing members: For some of us this will be more difficult, those who have been participating in the group for several years or who have multiple books published might not be able to recall every book they have reviewed or submitted. There is one way you can help, and this is as a group forms and authors join go to your My Books link and sort the list by Author Name. Look for any authors who have signed up, if you see you have reviewed any book by them let the moderator know. This doesn’t cover ‘reviewed by’ but does halve the chance of a reciprocal review and if everyone does this will hopefully eliminate reciprocal reviews.

As we move forward, the Group Admin and Moderators reserve the right to remove authors from a review round who fail to declare review clashes when signing up. We don’t expect every wrinkle to be ironed out, but if all authors participating in a Review Round try to comply with the above then the Group as a whole will function more smoothly and the mods will do less teeth grinding.

Just to add briefly an update on how to check for review clashes you might have:

(1) Go to your reviews, click the 'Author' heading to get them in alphabetical author order, and then checking through to see if any of the people on the list have reviewed you.

(2) You can check if someone has reviewed you in the same way through their profile, just put their reviews in author alphabetical order and then look to see if you are on the list.

If you do this you can save whoever is setting up the round a lot of issues.