Sockpuppetry and Other Sleight of Hand

Back in July, I wrote a blog post called Audience Building is Not For Sissies. The post centered around a popular British author named Stephen Leather—who is particularly famous for self-publishing much of his current works—and the comments that he made at a writer’s conference called Harrogate. To recap briefly, Mr. Leather claimed that an author with a large fan base could write short fiction (about one story a week), sell it for $0.99, and the resulting royalties from his sales (which he calculates at around 500 a month) is well over $100,000 per year. All well and good. But I contacted him and asked him where he got his “large fan base.” I suggested that it was from his traditional publisher (Harper), who built him the fan base with which he walked away and which is producing his 500 sales a month. His response was, shall we say, non-responsive: He chose not to give his publishers credit for helping him build his fan base, and instead pointed to self-publishing authors such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke who did not have a traditional publisher build them an audience.

However, it turns out that Stephen Leather (and, for that matter, John Locke) has been playing both sides against the middle. The Guardian (the UK newspaper) has reported that Mr. Leather has recently admitted to creating what are now called “sock puppets,” false accounts on retail sites like Amazon, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and using them to write many, many favorable reviews of his own work, thus skewing both the promotion algorithms at Amazon (which likes lots of reviews, particularly positive ones) and confounding the average reader’s ability to make an informed decision. John Locke, one of the authors Mr. Leather pointed to as an example of a self-made self-publishing author, has admitted to paying a service to write favorable reviews of his books with exactly the same results. Another successful self-published author, RJ Ellory, has admitted to creating sock puppets to leave negative reviews on the Amazon pages of authors he considered rivals. There are other blogs reporting all this.

I find all this disturbing and amusing at the same time. Stephen Leather confidently tried to convince me and his readers that selling short fiction at $0.99 is the magic bullet for self-publishing success and wealth. He left out the part about his publisher helping him build a fan base, and he also left out the part about him padding the reviews so that it seemed that everyone loved his work.

Is Stephen Leather a good writer? Sure, why not. I haven’t read him, but there’s no reason to think he can’t write. After all, he was picked up at one point or another by a Big Six publisher, so he’s at least commercial. But would Stephen Leather, or John Lock, or RJ Ellory be as successful today if they hadn’t gamed the system? Probably not.

You see, it’s really hard to get real readers to leave real reviews, even if they like your work. Like any publisher or author, I’ve asked people for reviews—honest reviews, always—and so have my authors (Brian Knight recently wrote a very good blog post on this exact subject). But it can take weeks or months for the reviewer to get around to it. You have to remind, cajole, and otherwise make yourself a pain in the butt to some of these people to get them to review your work. Why do we do this? For exactly the same reason Leather and Locke cheated! The system (by which I mean, Amazon) is built on the citizen reviewer singing the praises or talking trash about new products. Google spends a lot of time and energy weeding out the false voices to get the best, genuine reviews to base their algorithms on. Amazon, on the other hand, has no such incentive. They are there to make money, and integrity is not exactly their first priority.

I recognize that I spend a lot of words in these blogs giving Amazon grief, but here’s the reality: If Amazon wanted to have an honest, transparent system, can you imagine it would take them more than a few weeks to implement that system? They’re Amazon, for heaven’s sake. Jeff Bezos, whatever else you might think of him, is one of the business geniuses of our time. If only he would use his gifts for good instead of evil. But Jeff Bezos is not an altruistic savior of the retail world. Instead, he has a very plain agenda: Dominate the market. If having honest reviews helped him do that, we would already know the exact identity of each reviewer, and spam reviews, good or bad, would be a thing of the past.

Does that mean we shouldn’t hold cheaters like Stephen Leather accountable for taking advantage of an inherently flawed system? No, of course not. What Leather did was unethical (or at least immoral). He is taking money from people on the basis of skewed data that he himself skewed. If he were the officer of a corporation selling stock, I would say that he is guilty of insider trading—or at the very least, plain old fraud. But there is no SEC for Amazon reviews, and I don’t expect there will be one anytime soon.

What do we do in the meantime? I don’t have a good answer for that. Prayer comes to mind. Pray for the end of apathy, the end of dishonesty, the end of monopoly (sorry, I had to get that in there). What am I going to do? The most effective solution that I have is to not engage in sockpuppetry, and hope that there will soon be legitimate, available ways for authors to promote their books. But I’m not going to hold my breath.