Authors Reviewing Their own Work
Are Some Writers Creating Aliases to Rave About Their Books?
Jul 20, 2009
It’s not hard to imagine an author going to the trouble of creating a few alternate identities online and reviewing their own books, but what about several hundred? There seems to be a growing fervor over a fantasy author who has about 100 books listed on Amazon, and all of them have glowing reviews, but no one has heard of him. Why is that? Because he is a self-published author whom a lot of people have begun to suspect reviews his own books hundreds of times. It is also suspected that he scours the Internet to defend any negative reviews as well as trashing other fantasy authors.
Google "Fake Amazon Reviews" for Entertaining Reading
David Louis Edelman wrote an article on the ethical use of self-promotion. He also states what to avoid and gives an actual example of an author who uses shameless self-promotion.
There are even people who hire writers with Amazon accounts to write and submit fake 5 star book reviews. Visit Blog Relations for more information.
Such Dedication to Deceit is Mind Boggling
One can only imagine the detail and time (not to mention the cost) it would take to level such a huge campaign. Keeping track of all the identities and back stories would be time consuming to say the least. It's probably a good idea to pay attention to a book's sales rank that has a bunch of glowing 5 star reviews. Going by the odds that most people who read books do not review them, do the reviews seem to outweigh the rank? Of course, if most of the reviews are bogus, it would make the most sense to assume the sales are no where near as high.
Amazon Needs to Crack Down on Their Review Process
What does all this say for the review system at Amazon? Well, first and foremost Amazon needs to be a bit more stringent about who can review. They no longer allow just anyone to post a review, stopping the incessant garbage posted randomly on authors' books. They now require that someone make a purchase through them before they can post a review. This means that anyone who posted a book review after that update had to make a purchase. It doesn’t mean they bought the book reviewed, merely made any purchase.
So is it feasible that an author could create over a hundred identities on Amazon and make a purchase on all of them? That would boggle the mind, but it’s not impossible. They could also pay a hundred other people with accounts to post fake reviews, which might be cheaper than making those individual purchases. Going by the average of 2 cents a word, a 30 word review could cost an author as little as 60 cents. Of course it could cost more to convince an Amazon customer to post the fake review ($10 - $15 in the above linked article).
What else could Amazon do? Other than requiring everyone to send in a copy of their driver’s license, they are limited on the background checks they can do. They want customers after all, so they do not want to risk irritating them. Though they might want to consider implementing the policy that a customer must buy the book or product they are reviewing. That would certainly cut back on the fake reviews.
Many people do not base their sales on the reviews, knowing how they can be fake and/or subjective. After all, a review is merely one person’s opinion. True, the majority of those opinions usually amount to a fair representation of the work, but not if most of those opinions are from the same person or his/her friends.
Self Publishing Gets Another Kick
Self-publishing gets a lot of flack by the publishing industry. Not having a professional editor going through it to fix any errors is a major drawback. No one wants to read a book and have grammatical roadblocks every other sentence. It is understandable that a self-published author has to be vigilant in their marketing, but where is that line drawn?
Of course, it is wrong to do what most fear this fantasy author is doing, but he is getting a lot of publicity and interest because of it. People are buying his books out of curiosity now. Does that make his books worth reading? No, but it might get him a following. A lot of people root for the underdog. Only time will tell if he is the next JK Rowling or merely a flash in the pan.
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