Yes, but ask first. The reader who wrote the review owns it, not Amazon or Goodreads, and the retailers’ own terms restrict commercial use of their site content. If you want to quote reader reviews on a cover, in an ad or on your website, permission from the reviewer removes most of the problem in a single message.
- Who owns a review a reader wrote?
- How much of a review can you quote without permission?
- Do the platforms’ terms let you quote reader reviews?
- Can you put a reader review in Amazon’s Editorial Reviews field?
- What do the advertising rules require?
- What can you safely do with reader reviews?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Who Owns a Review a Reader Wrote?
A reader who writes a review owns the words in it. Under both US and UK copyright law, a piece of writing belongs to the person who wrote it from the moment it exists. Posting it on a bookselling site does not hand it over to that site.
The platforms say so themselves, in the same documents authors often cite for the opposite view. Goodreads’ Terms of Use, last revised on 28 April 2021, make every reviewer promise that “you are the owner of all the copyright rights with respect to, or that you have the legal right to post, your User Content”, meaning anything they post to the site. The reviewer then gives Goodreads permission to use it, and that permission is expressly “nonexclusive”. Amazon’s Conditions of Use, last updated on 14 August 2026, work the same way: the person posting promises that they own or control the rights, and Amazon takes a non-exclusive permission rather than ownership.
Non-exclusive is the word that matters. It means Goodreads may use the review, and the reviewer may still use it too. It also means the reviewer may give that same permission to somebody else. Had the site taken ownership, there would be nobody left for you to ask. Because it did not, there is: the reader who wrote it.
Why Authors Think the Platform Owns It
That is worth spelling out, because the opposite belief is common among authors. One long-standing contributor to the r/selfpublish forum put it flatly in a 2025 thread about using reviews in ads: “reviews belong to Amazon/Goodreads and are specifically not for use for any reason.” A commenter in a 2016 KDP Community thread titled “Who Owns A Review?” made the same claim, that reviews “are the property of Amazon”, and another participant corrected them by quoting the Conditions of Use back. The belief is confident, widespread, and contradicted by the very documents it appeals to.
How Much of a Review Can You Quote Without Permission?
No word count, no percentage and no sentence limit makes a quotation from someone else’s writing automatically safe. Any figure handed to you as a rule turns out to be somebody’s house policy rather than law, so the honest answer to “how short is short enough” is that shortness is not what decides it.
The US Copyright Office states this without hedging: “There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work.” Fair use, the US rule that sometimes lets you quote part of someone else’s writing without asking, is decided case by case on the particular facts. The UK and Australia use a different rule called fair dealing. It is narrower, because it covers only a fixed list of purposes such as criticism, review and news reporting. It also offers no short-quotation exemption that makes a brief extract automatically safe. They are different rules, not two names for the same one.
Where the 10 Percent Rule Came From
The “under 10 percent is fine” belief is the most travelled of these myths, and its origin explains why it cannot help you. It comes from an “Agreement on Guidelines for Classroom Copying in Not-For-Profit Educational Institutions”, negotiated in 1976 between publisher and author representatives and a group of educators, and reproduced in the US Copyright Office’s Circular 21. Those guidelines allow “not more than 1,000 words or 10% of the work, whichever is less”. They went into the congressional committee report that accompanied the Copyright Act of 1976 rather than into the Act itself, they describe themselves as “the minimum and not the maximum standards of educational fair use”, and they were written about a teacher photocopying pages for a classroom. Marketing a book for sale is not classroom photocopying.
The 300-word and 250-word figures have the same shape. Individual publishers set those thresholds in their own permissions guidelines, and the numbers differ from one publisher to the next. Each one binds only the publisher that wrote it. Quoting those figures in court would not help you, and quoting them to a reviewer would not either.
Do the Platforms’ Terms Let You Quote Reader Reviews?
The bookselling sites restrict commercial use of the material on them. That restriction works as a contract rather than as copyright. It is the objection most authors never think about. Unlike the copyright question, a contract does not care how short your quotation is.
Goodreads’ wording is the more specific of the two we quote here. Its licence to you “does not include any resale or commercial use of any part of the Service, or its contents; any collection and use of any book listings, descriptions, reviews or other material included in the Service.” Reviews are named outright. Amazon’s Conditions of Use are broader but less pointed: the licence excludes “any resale or commercial use of any Amazon Service, or its contents; any collection and use of any product listings, descriptions, or prices.” The word “reviews” does not appear in that sentence, so a review would be covered, if at all, as part of the “contents”. Those two clauses are often quoted as though they said the same thing, and they do not.
Why a Contract Is Not a Copyright Question
Why this matters more than the copyright question is a point about mechanisms. Fair use is a defence to a claim of copyright infringement. It is not a defence to a contract you accepted when you used a website. An author who has reasoned carefully about how many words are safe has answered a question the terms of use never asked. The contract is still sitting there, unanswered.
How far those clauses actually reach is a fair question. The honest answer is that we could not find a retailer addressing it. The wording governs commercial use of the service and its contents. Whether a dozen words on a printed back cover fall inside that language, months later and away from the website, is not something we could locate on any page published by Goodreads, Amazon, Kobo, Apple or Barnes & Noble. What we can say is that Goodreads and Amazon both require their express written consent for commercial use. We found nothing on either site that grants an author permission in advance.
The place you post the quote adds a second contract on top of the first. Meta’s Terms of Service, effective 1 January 2025, tell every user not to share anything “that you do not own or have the necessary rights to share”, which is the requirement a Facebook or Instagram ad built around someone else’s words has to meet. So an author running a paid social ad with a reader’s review in it answers to three separate things at once. The bookselling site’s terms, the advertising platform’s terms, and the advertising rules in the next section. None of them is the copyright question they were probably worrying about.
Can You Put a Reader Review in Amazon’s Editorial Reviews Field?
No. Amazon’s Editorial Reviews section is the block of quoted praise on a book’s Amazon page that the author fills in, and it excludes customer reviews outright. A reader’s review posted on Amazon or Goodreads is exactly what Amazon means by a customer review.
That section sits on your book’s detail page, the page shoppers land on, and you edit it through Author Central. Amazon’s help page for the field describes editorial reviews as “transcribed directly from reputable sources” and says plainly that they “are different from customer reviews”. Its list of content the section will not accept runs to nine items: web addresses and phone numbers, time-sensitive details, edition-specific information, advertisements, prices and availability, profanity, obscene or offensive content, then, eighth, “Customer reviews or solicitations for customer reviews”, with spoilers last. A reader’s five-star review is the thing that field is built to keep out. Our guide to setting up your Author Central page covers what does belong there.
Where the 25-Word Rule Comes From
This is also where the most durable myth in the whole subject comes from. Authors repeat a 25-word limit as though Amazon had published it, and they attribute it to this exact field. A contributor to a 2018 KBoards forum thread wrote that “Amazon itself asks us to limit an excerpt to 25 words for purposes of Editorial Reviews (through Author Central) and no doubt we should adhere to that”, then repeated it on KDP Community in 2021 as “Be brief (AC says 25 words max)”.
The help page sets no word limit at all. For the editorial reviews it does allow, it sets character limits: five of them at up to 4,000 characters each on a print edition, one such review on a Kindle edition, three on an Audible edition, and 20,000 characters in total across that edition’s editorial reviews, counting spaces and any HTML. We could not trace a 25-word instruction to any current Amazon page.
Amazon’s advertising side takes the same line. Its guide to book ad moderation lists “Inclusion of customer reviews” among the things to avoid if you want your ad approved, alongside prices, unsubstantiated claims and obscured profanity. Reviews you commission from named outlets are a different category with different rules, which we cover in what paid editorial reviews are and where they go.
What Do the Advertising Rules Require?
Once you put a reader’s words into an advertisement, regulators stop treating them as a review and start treating them as a testimonial. A separate body of consumer-protection law then governs how you present them, and it applies whether or not you had permission to use the words at all.
The distinction is the US Federal Trade Commission’s own. A consumer review, it says, is an evaluation “submitted to and published on a website or platform” built to display them. A testimonial “is an advertising message that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, or experiences of a consumer.” Asked directly whether the exemption for merely hosting reviews covers reviews a business features in its own marketing, the FTC answers: “No. When featured in that context, consumer reviews become testimonials and the exemption for review hosting does not apply to them.”
That rule has teeth. Its Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, took effect on 21 October 2024. Under that US rule, a violation the business knew about can carry a civil penalty of up to $53,088, the figure in force since 17 January 2025 and unchanged for 2026.
What the FTC Rule Actually Targets
What the FTC rule polices is authenticity rather than quotation. It targets fake reviews, undisclosed incentives, and testimonials that misrepresent what the reviewer actually experienced. That last one is the trap, because it pulls against the copyright advice. Cutting a review down helps with the copyright question, because you have taken less of it. It hurts with the advertising rules, because a short extract is easier to make misleading. Reducing “brilliant in places, but the ending collapses” to “brilliant” is the version most likely to interest the FTC in the US or the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK, and no word count protects it.
What UK Law Requires
UK law arrives at much the same place by two routes. Schedule 20 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, a part of that Act in force since 6 April 2025, makes it a banned practice to publish “consumer reviews, or consumer review information, in a misleading way”, and its examples of misleading publication include publishing only the positive ones.
Separately, the advertising code enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority requires permission: under UK rule 3.50, “Marketing communications must not feature a testimonial without permission”, meaning permission from the person quoted. UK rule 3.47 requires you to hold documentary evidence that the testimonial is genuine, plus contact details for the person who wrote it. The UK code does allow an exception for accurate quotes taken from a published source, but you still need evidence that the statement is genuine and accurate. For an anonymous Amazon reviewer, holding contact details is not something you can do.
The ASA has ruled on misleading attribution for years. It found an album advertisement misleading because it quoted a review of a single track without saying so, and it found a film advertisement misleading for attributing a quote to a newspaper in a way that implied a full published review which did not exist. Both are the fault an author commits when a mixed review becomes a rave.
What Can You Safely Do With Reader Reviews?
Four routes let you use a reader’s praise without guessing at a word count. The first removes almost every objection raised in this article, and the rest sidestep them.
They do not all answer the same objections. That is worth seeing in one place before you choose:
What Each Route Solves
| Route | Copyright | The site’s terms | UK advertising code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ask the reviewer | Answered | Still applies | Answered |
| Permission in your ARC terms | Answered | Still applies | Answered |
| Link instead of copying | Not engaged | Not engaged | Not engaged |
| Rating and count only | Not engaged | Not engaged | Present them in full |
- Ask the reviewer. Permission answers the copyright question, satisfies the UK advertising code’s permission requirement, and settles the etiquette, all in one message. It does not rewrite the bookselling site’s terms, which are a contract between you and that site. It does mean the person who owns the words has said yes. You can often reach reviewers on Goodreads, Instagram, BookTube and StoryGraph. On Amazon many reviewers post under a display name with no contact route, so asking is frequently not possible there.
- Build permission into your ARC terms. An ARC is an advance review copy, the free early copy you send to readers in exchange for an honest review. Agree the permission in writing when you send the copy. You are still in contact at that point, and the question is uncontroversial. Our guide to choosing ARC readers covers what else that agreement should say.
- Link instead of copying. Pointing a potential buyer at the review page reproduces none of the words, so the copyright question does not arise. The cost is that no quote appears on your own page. The benefit is that anyone who follows the link reads the review in full, in its original context.
- Use the numbers, honestly. An average rating and a review count are facts rather than expression, so copyright does not reach them. UK rules do reach them, because a star rating counts as consumer review information under Schedule 20, and publishing only the flattering part of it is one of the practices that Schedule describes. Give the average and the total, not a selection you have picked.
The One Thing Not to Do
One thing to avoid outright: never edit a mixed review into a positive one. Of everything in this article, that is the practice most likely to draw a regulator’s attention rather than a reviewer’s, and it is also the one the person who wrote the review is most likely to notice.
Reader reviews are the strongest evidence an indie author has that the book works, and none of this is a reason to leave them unused. It is a reason to ask. Send one message to the reader who wrote the words, keep the reply, and quote them in full sentences that say what they meant. That habit costs almost nothing and answers most of the questions raised here. None of this is legal advice, and a reuse question with real money attached is worth putting to a lawyer in your own country.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I put a reader’s review quote on my book’s back cover?
With the reviewer’s permission, yes. Without it, you are relying on a fair use argument in the US, or a fair dealing argument in the UK or Australia, for the copyright question. You are separately relying on the bookselling site’s terms of use, which restrict commercial use of their site content and operate as a contract rather than as copyright. Ask the reader who wrote the review instead; a back cover lasts for the life of the edition.
Can I screenshot a review instead of typing it out?
A screenshot makes things worse rather than better on every count. It reproduces the same words, so the copyright position is unchanged, and it adds the site’s own page design plus the reviewer’s name and profile picture. In the UK it also engages the advertising code’s requirement to hold permission and contact details for the person featured, set out in the ASA’s guidance on testimonials and endorsements.
Is it safe to quote star ratings and review counts?
Ratings and counts are facts rather than creative writing, so copyright does not protect them. Present them completely. Under Schedule 20 of the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, publishing review information in a misleading way is a banned practice, and its examples include showing only the positive reviews. Give the average and the total number rather than a selection you have chosen.
Has an author ever been sued for quoting a reader’s review?
We could not find a reported case. Searches of US case law and of the US Copyright Claims Board, the small-claims route for copyright disputes, turned up no claim by a reviewer against an author or a business for quoting a review. That describes what we could find rather than proving nothing exists, because the Board’s public search would not return results to us. The risk looks low. It is not zero, and the more likely consequence is a public complaint from the reviewer than a court case.
How do I ask a reviewer for permission to quote them?
Keep it short and specific. Thank them for the review, quote back the exact words you want to use, say where the quote will appear, and ask whether they are happy for you to use it and how they would like to be credited. Keep the reply. On Goodreads you can comment on the review itself, and on Instagram or BookTube a direct message usually works; on Amazon there is often no route to the reviewer at all.
