Poll: Is it ever justified for an author to pay for reviews?

There’s been a lot of talk about paid reviews lately, first with the New York Times article that raised the issue and then with various authors being outed as having dabbled with the practice. It seems like almost every day now, another author is being accused of having either paid for a review or used ‘sockpuppet’ accounts.

It seems like a lot of people are getting very angry about the issue. While it’s understandable that people are upset when the system is ‘gamed’ in this way, I was wondering if there are times when it’s okay to pay for a review. Is it the idea of paying for reviews that angers people, or is it the deception that occurs when these reviews are presented as if they’re from ‘ordinary’ consumers?

Now that there seems to be growing pressure for review-buying authors to be outed and for sites such as Amazon to try to stop this kind of thing from happening, I thought it was time for Indie BookSpot to dust off the old polls we used to run earlier in the year. Let us know what you think and we’ll report back with the results in a few days.