Author RJ Ellory Outed For Sock Puppetry--But Not The Fun, Whimsical Kind
via Huffington Post:
British crime writer RJ Ellory has been outed for sock puppetry--writing reviews under a fake name for both his own books and the books of his fellow authors.
The issue of fake reviews has been thrust to the fore since the New York Times wrote a huge Sunday story about the practice of authors paying for reviews and revealed that self-publishing wunderkind John Locke trafficked in that arena.
Now British author Jeremy Duns has outed Ellory, for not only for writing praise-filled reviews of his own books, but for slagging the books of his competitors. (Duns, by the way, is like the Sherlock Holmes of the publishing industry--he caught plagiarist Q.R. Markham, and has been embroiled in another sock puppet kerfuffle with author Stephen Leather.)
Ellory, who wrote a review under the name Nicodemus Jones describing one of his books as a "modern masterpiece", had this to say:
"The recent reviews – both positive and negative – that have been posted on my Amazon accounts are my responsibility and my responsibility alone. I wholeheartedly regret the lapse of judgment that allowed personal opinions to be disseminated in this way and I would like to [apologize] to my readers and the writing community."
Personally, I don't believe for a second that Ellory is sorry--he's sorry he was caught. I also wish there was some sort of way to punish him (besides hoping for diminished sales). The writing game is hard enough without authors actively trying to hurt each other.
Do you accept Ellory's apology? As for the sock-puppetry, does this make you trust online reviews less? Has anyone read Ellory?
News by Rob W. Hart
Rob W. Hart is the class director at LitReactor, as well as the associate publisher for MysteriousPress.com. He's the author of The Last Safe Place: A Zombie Novella, and his short stories have appeared in Shotgun Honey, Thuglit, Crime Factory, and Needle: A Magazine of Noir. He lives in New York City, and you can find his website at www.robwhart.com.
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I won't say I don't trust online reviews, because there are tons of lit and review blogs that I read on a daily basis whose opinions I trust. But as far as Amazon reviews, I never really paid all that much attention to them to begin with.
I also am very skeptical about his sincerity. The very fact that he's done this AFTER tapping into such succes, makes his actions unexplainable. Literature, as a commercial product is not something you can run out of. How many people have over 100 writers in their book shelves? If your work stands out, you will get sales. There is no valid reason to do this. Not even insecurity. Not for him.
I always assumed almost every author from a major publising house had someone doing that, if the author knew or not. Micheal Alvear gives advice in his books on how to set up reviews on your book for indies in what he considered a honest way (have a least one person who isn't a fan of the book say why the don't like it). I guess I never trusted them much to begin with, so no.
This is nothing new. Marketing teams for movies do this constantly - just look on IMDB at any film about to come out. It will already have ten reviews, one negative, one so-so, and eight saying it's the best film ever made. The fact is, it's a film starring Luke Goss and Vinnie Jones, made on a minimal budget, terrible script, filmed in the shortest time possible. Similarly record labels will have a few reviews posted when new albums are released on iTunes, to show people are listening to it. Never trust reviews that appear before anything is actually released.
In book publishing, there is less money behind releases, less gross profit, less marketing (unless you're James Patterson), so the author doing reviews themselves makes sense. They are not necessarily trying to increase the reputation, just get the ball rolling with reviews to show that people are reading the book. Once your book is released you'll get one or two genuine reviews within a few weeks, from the die hard fans and bookworms. Why have two when you can have twelve? That's what they're thinking. It's not morally right, of course, but it's a form of marketing. Imagine you went on Amazon to look at the new Stephen King book two weeks after it was released and there was only two reviews? It doesn't matter what they say, the fact is you will subconsciously think no one is reading the book, or they got bored and couldn't finish it. Not good.
I'm not condoning it in any way, just offering some insight as to why people do it.
Chester!
I really don't care about the positive reviews he gave himself. I mean, I think it's stupid, but it doesn't upset me in any real way. The fact that he then went out and wrote scathing reviews of others' books is what gets me. I don't understand what he thought it would accomplish, not to mention it's really fucked up.
And I am not really down with his apology, either. It's easy to be sorry when you're humiliated publicly. I somehow doubt he'd be so sorry if no one had caught him.
Was he giving bad reviews to people who sold books similar to his that he thought he was competing with? Or just being a total jerk?
@Sparrow - Ditto on that part being extra not cool, but maybe he really does feel bad.
Dwayne--he was going after books similar to his, I would imagine to make it less likely people would buy those books. Which, yea. Jerk.
Right, but I at least follow the logic. I was sort of worried that he was just going around picking random books to do that for while saying, "Oh, sell more copies then me? Die nameless!"
I'm curious about the negative reviews he wrote. Were they books he actually read and disliked (whether naturally or because he was predisposed to dislike them because of the competition) or were the reviews baseless?
It's easy for an author to hate a book written by a competitor simply because they're looking to pick it apart, but I'm not sure how he could write a negative review under his name at all without being accused of this. It's a little troubling to consider that -- either he writes it under his name and is accused of knocking down competitors for profit, or he writes under a pseudonym to avoid it and is then found out. That is, if he was honest.
I trust online reviews about as much as I trust any other reviews. Which is to say, not very much.
To whoever put Chester in the header image: I love you.