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Sea­sons in Love by Dave Malone

Poems rich in romance, life, and nature, Sea­sons in Love jour­neys through four sea­sons and through love that breaks and sus­tains us.

Ozark sum­mer heat to win­ter bliz­zards, long-lasting love grips these poems. With words and lan­guage from south­ern Mis­souri hills, Mal­one takes us into the roman­tic back­woods of moon, creek, and moun­tain, but ulti­mately leads us to life — “it’s blue light, barely seen.”

Find out more on Amazon.

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Fraud­u­lent Reviews: Beside the Point / Howse, Duns, Ret­zen­brink, Charman-Anderson, “Robin Reader”

 

Calm down. Authors who give their own books glow­ing reviews are noth­ing new.

I’d hoped not to lead this week’s Ether with this fraud­u­lent reviews busi­ness. But look at those two sen­tences above.

They’re the work of Christo­pher Howse at The Tele­graph. His story is called Ignore the sock pup­pets, they won’t bite you.

His take on the widen­ing scan­dal reveals a pecu­liar divi­sion show­ing up in the indus­try! the indus­try! — not one we might have expected to see in a busi­ness already ragged with the dis­rup­tion of the dig­i­tal dynamic.

Here’s another snoot­ful of his write:

This is “fraud­u­lent and dam­ag­ing to pub­lish­ing”, say a small bat­tal­ion of well-known authors – Joanne Har­ris, Ian Rankin, Susan Hill, and dozens more – in a let­ter to the Tele­graph. Come off it. That is naivety taken to a self-deluding extreme.

Howse and those who agree with him seem to be bent on dodg­ing and dimin­ish­ing what oth­ers see as an out­right cri­sis. The Howse camp uses lines such as “nobody trusts online reviews any­way” and “this has been going on for years” and “why are you so sur­prised?” And they seem sur­prised, them­selves, to find oth­ers tak­ing the prob­lem seri­ously and talk­ing of how it has defrauded read­ers, authors, and — as the largest retailer — Amazon.

These infrac­tions can occur any­where online, of course, but it is Ama­zon that has cham­pi­oned the con­sumer review as a sub­stan­tial ele­ment of online commerce.

Indeed, as The Bookseller’s The Naked Book show went live Wednes­day after­noon East­ern time (evening in Lon­don where it orig­i­nates), it was frus­trat­ing to hear hosts Philip Jones and Sam Miss­ing­ham have to punch their way through some of the paper-tiger argu­ments that con­tinue to spring up around these issues.

The Naked Book was a much-improved event this week. A man­age­able two guests — not four — were on-hand to talk about the issue.

One of them is Cathy Ret­zen­brink of Quick Reads.

In an inter­est­ing moment near the end of the pro­gram, she pro­posed “a kind of amnesty” for authors who are par­tic­i­pat­ing in fraud­u­lent review prac­tices. It’s hard to know how much sup­port she might find for such an idea.

The other is author Jeremy Duns, who has become some­thing of a spokesman for an effort to get a han­dle on the fraudulent-review scandal.

Duns, author of May’s The Dark Chron­i­cles: A Spy Tril­ogy, is the writer who has called out British author RJ Ellory for “sock pup­petry” — the use of fake IDs to pose as a cus­tomer and write reviews. And Duns has helped put together the No Sock Pup­pets Here Please site that’s attract­ing the sup­port of many writ­ers who want to con­demn these practices.

In her write at Forbes, Ama­zon Reviews: RJ Ellory Apol­o­gises for Fak­ery, Suw Charman-Anderson points out that in the UK, con­sumer pro­tec­tion laws put into place in 2008 do make the prac­tice of leav­ing fake pos­i­tive reviews ille­gal. It’s termed “astro­turf­ing.” She writes:

Authors who astro­turf, as the prac­tice of leav­ing fake pos­i­tive reviews is called, need to be aware that their actions are ille­gal in the UK and could result in an unlim­ited fine and up to two years in jail.

 

“Janet,” the blog­ger also known as Robin Reader at Dear Author, includes in The per­ils of paid-for reviews some com­men­tary on the Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion and its lat­est update (2009) to guide­lines on endorse­ments and tes­ti­mo­ni­als. And she makes a great point about why things in this area can look murky:

Before the Inter­net, adver­tise­ments and prod­uct endorse­ments were more eas­ily dis­tin­guish­able from inde­pen­dent, crit­i­cal reviews of prod­ucts. How­ever, online com­mer­cial venues like Ama­zon have com­pli­cated that dis­tinc­tion, because it can be dif­fi­cult to tell whether the per­son writ­ing the review is a dis­in­ter­ested user or a paid promoter.

But as she points out in her piece, the act of crit­i­cal review is freighted with con­sid­er­a­tions of free speech — and this fur­ther com­pli­cates these issues.

Crit­i­cal dis­tance is good, not only because it encour­ages hon­est feed­back on books, but also because it pro­tects the free­dom and integrity of book review­ing more gen­er­ally. While authors and pub­lish­ers might think of hon­est book reviews as mar­ket­ing, at best that mar­ket­ing is indi­rect, because there is a serendip­i­tous com­mer­cial advan­tage to the word of mouth reviews can generate.

 

Clar­i­fy­ing a few points: What is being discussed?

To quickly review what’s at issue (so far), there are three types of infrac­tion now being discussed.

1. The buy­ing of bogus pos­i­tive online reviews — this is the prac­tice con­fessed to by US author John Locke, which we’ve Ether­ized here and here. As Janet (“Robin Reader”)clarifies in her new post — the first in a series — a paid-for review is “a com­mer­cial exchange on behalf of the author.”
2. “Sock pup­petry” in which an author poses as an online shop­per to write pos­i­tive reviews of her or his own work. This is the infrac­tion Ellory says he has com­mit­ted (detailed in Charman-Anderson’s write). In this case, the author has a mate­r­ial inter­est in see­ing her or his work enhanced by self-generated reviews.
3. And sock pup­petry in which an author poses as an online shop­per to write neg­a­tive reviews of other authors, also admit­ted to by Ellery, whose faux account names are reported to have been “Jelly Bean” and “Nicode­mus Jones.” In this case, the author has a mate­r­ial inter­est in see­ing other authors’ work given neg­a­tive notices, thus, one assumes, lim­it­ing competition.

The ques­tions these three forms of fraud­u­lent review bring us to, per Janet at Dear Author, are these:

At what point do book reviews become com­mer­cial speech and there­fore sub­ject to gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion? At what point does the FTC decide that there is enough con­cern about the inde­pen­dent nature of reviews to step into the book blog­ging world and cast a shadow on the many hon­est, inde­pen­dent bloggers?

 

More clar­i­fi­ca­tion: What is not being discussed?

• Is the receipt of a free copy of a book by a reviewer wrong? No. This is com­mon prac­tice through­out the indus­try, and as long as there is no guar­an­tee that the review copy will prompt a review (nor that such a review might be neg­a­tive or pos­i­tive), there is no prob­lem with the review copy of the book being free. News­rooms are flooded, in fact, with review copies sent strictly on the hope of a review, not the promise. It’s smart for a reviewer, when­ever asked, “May I send you my book?” to clearly state that if an author does send a copy of the book, there’s no guar­an­tee of a review or of what kind. But the use of free review copies is not involved here.
• Are Kirkus Reviews part of the prob­lem? No. Again, both by tra­di­tion and by clar­ity of pol­icy — a Kirkus review is paid for, but the crys­tal clear under­stand­ing is that there’s no guar­an­tee the review will be positive.

 

What is at issue, then?

Any form of com­men­tary that might affect an online sale or rank­ing of a prod­uct when that com­men­tary is not the free-will, no-relation (unbi­ased), unpaid-for com­ment that it appears to be rep­re­sents a con­flict of inter­est. The fear among many in the com­mu­nity is that such bad prac­tice is so wide­spread that a major ele­ment of online com­merce — and of read­ers’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in pub­lish­ing, let’s face it — is dam­aged beyond salvage.

 

Do you write reviews of books on Amazon?

Great. If you have a rela­tion­ship of any kind with an author that might have some­thing to do with what you say in your review — or that might appear to bias you (the “appear­ance of con­flict of inter­est”) — you sim­ply dis­claim it right up top, very briefly.

For exam­ple:

“I am a col­league of sev­eral years of Author XYZ and we are fre­quently in touch on social media. I con­sider Author XYZ a friend.” You’re done. Now write your review. No need to go on about how your friend­ship isn’t going to have any impact on what you say — you’re human, and it’s fine to have rela­tion­ships. You’ve just need to state them, giv­ing your review reader a chance to decide how to eval­u­ate your review.

And because I’ve actu­ally had some­one ask me why this is wrong, here’s what you say to some­one who wants to dis­miss it:

1. It cheats read­ers, first of all: they need every chance to make good deci­sions about whether to buy and read authors’ work.
2. It also cheats authors: they need a chance to have the rank­ings and posi­tion­ing that can be affected by reviews work as cleanly as possible.

When you game any sys­tem, some­one is get­ting the short end. The folks say­ing, “There’s no vic­tim in this” are wrong. We’re all vic­tim­ized by it, whether buy­ing books or toasters.

The retailer

And that gets us to the last point we need to men­tion here on this: the retailer. Some are pes­simistic that Ama­zon and/or other online retail­ers will try to address this, step­ping up fake review detec­tion, mov­ing against vio­la­tors of their terms of ser­vice, etc. Oth­ers are optimistic.

For Duns’ part, he tells of being dis­ap­pointed in his ini­tial efforts to be in touch with Ama­zon about his expe­ri­ences. And in the Naked Book dis­cus­sion, he states the ques­tion cleanly: “What is the point of hav­ing pol­icy guide­lines if they’re not actu­ally enforced?“
Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.