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Fake Book Reviews!

25th February 2020

A few years ago, Todd Rutherford would bestow a positive book review on Amazon or Barnes & Noble through his business GettingBookReviews.com. The author or publisher would pay $99 for a single review, and up to $999 for a bundle of 50 reviews. From his home in Bixby, Oklahoma, Todd was raking in as much as $28,000 a month.

GettingBookReviews.com is now defunct, but the challenge remains: how does the consumer know if a book review is genuine and from a fellow reader, or is a pure marketing ploy from the author or the publishing industry? And do we really care anymore?

A data mining expert at the University of Illinois carried out research in 2008 that suggested about 1/3rd of all online consumer reviews are fake. No surprise, given the ease of leaving a digital review, and given all the vested interests in marketing that consumer object or service.

In the book world, let’s think about all the different people who could benefit from selling more copies of a title: the author, obviously; the publishing company; the retailer; the hired marketing company; a specialist service like GettingBookReviews.com; even the reader, who might be offered an incentive by the merchant for rating a book positively.

Additionally, the volume of books in the marketplace has sky-rocketed, thanks again partly to technology empowering low-cost production and self-published titles. In an increasingly noisy – and lower quality – publishing environment, any way you can get avid readers to buy your book, instead of someone else’s, will be worth pursuing. Reviews have largely become just another marketing tool, rather than any objective assessment of a writer’s talent.

A blog post from Writerful Books suggests that as well as writing five-star reviews to help boost sales, fake book reviewers can also offer to fabricate negative posts for individuals and businesses in an attempt to sabotage rival authors and books.

A dealer in fake reviews used their network to write a series of negative reviews for an e-book after being hired to sabotage a competitor. Negative book reviews cost twice as much because the impact can be a lot more damaging.

Indeed, a well respected publisher and good friend of TripFiction tells of the time someone left 1* reviews on goodreads.com of every single book they had ever published. They faced an uphill battle to get the clearly malicious reviews taken down from the hugely popular website, by which time no doubt lasting damage had been inflicted.

Writerful Books’ policy is to charge nothing for writing book reviews. Their mission is to promote high quality writing from Australia and the British Isles. To that extent they only review books of a certain calibre which means they will overlook most self-published books whose authors eschew the use of an editor and design their own book covers in an attempt to make money from an inferior book.

But that laudable policy is increasingly a quiet voice in the howling wilderness. I stumbled across bookreview.io, for example, shouting proudly:

A ‘review generator’ for goodness sake, distorting reader reviews and inducing consumers to buy something that may well be vastly inferior to what they are expecting.

Technology is an unstoppable tide. It’s helped us to consume our favourite books in different formats, but it’s also enabled mediocre authors to publish mediocre books and market them to literature lovers as a potential Booker Prize winner.

You’ve been warned! And perhaps the only approach we can recommend to TripFiction readers is to trust no-one. Apart from us, obviously.

Andrew for the TripFiction tea

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