You Scratch My Book

Recently, a furore has broken out in the press: a secret fraud perpetrated on an unsuspecting public, undiscovered by the masses for years, possibly even decades, has finally been exposed and attracted universal condemnation. No, I'm not talking about the equine offal discovered in a seemingly never-ending amount of supermarket produce (personally I'm waiting for the horse-hair toothbrush story to come out), but the amount of bovine waste product in an unspecified number of book reviews. Sock-puppeting, as the phenomenon is curiously known, is apparently rife: authors pretend to be other people in order to review their own books; they put their friends up to posting positive reviews; sometimes they are even encouraged by publishers or agents to post positive reviews of others with the same imprint or representation. It's getting to the point you can't trust anything on Amazon beyond the title and ISBN.

All of this is enough to give any conscientious author something of a moral hernia. Because, if you're an unknown writer struggling to make your book visible to the wider populace, wouldn't asking friends and colleagues to review your book be the most natural thing in the world? After all, whilst people often claim not to be swayed by reviews, a book which nobody appears to have anything to say about tends to attract purchasers in much the same way as a Findus lasagne attracts horse lovers with a desire for genuine Italian food - that is, not at all.

To be fair, it's not unreasonable to believe that readers can tell the difference between the genuine and the fake. This isn't about differentiating between one brown chewy fatty disc and another, after all. It would take a tremendous amount of effort for an author to generate vast numbers of positive reviews without falling into the trap of repeating structure and phrasing, or looking like someone with a copy of Roget's Thesaurus they're desperate to make use of. Not that some people wouldn't make the effort, but if they're not a good enough writer to produce a book that stands on its own merits, they're hardly likely to be masters of language enough to produce a wide variety of well-crafted reviews. They could ask their friends, which would be harder to spot, but unless the author had persuaded them to read the book first, these would also likely be littered with seeded phrases or just vague to the point they could be about almost anything.

Not that this is much reassurance to the honest author. The honest author can be a paranoid character, constantly looking for any reason why they should fail. For these authors, the concern is not so much the moral hazard of whether their actions constitute sock-puppeting as whether their reviews appear to be provided by said puppets to the lay reader. Once the idea is out there that people fake reviews, why should not the reader assume their reviews are so faked? And this leads to some odd thoughts, such as that a negative review is not something to be feared but proof positive that at least some of the reviews are genuine. But how many? Why should a reader assume that because one negative review is genuine - if, indeed, it is (sock puppeting also involving negative reviews of rivals) - the positive ones aren't still fake? If it was that simple, the cunning fraudster need only ensure a few negative reviews to get away scot-free.

The truth is that there's not much you can do to prevent cynics believing you're up to something - that's what cynics are like. In the same way that nobody with a fixed view of Tesco is going to believe they either didn't know or weren't in some way responsible for their dodgy beef burgers (and that Ocado or Waitrose would never do such a thing - even if they stock the self-same brand) some people will always assume that authors, particularly independent or small-press authors, are corrupt. There's nothing you can do to persuade them otherwise. That's not to say you should just decide to be hung for a sheep as well as a lamb and do as the cynics expect. What you should do is try to behave in a morally defensible manner and hope that most people believe you to be honest. Does that mean you don't ask friends for reviews? Not at all. If your friends have genuinely read and enjoyed your book, why shouldn't they be allowed to express an opinion? You can ask them to read the book, you can even ask them to review it. As long as you don't tell them what to say, or give them the impression you want them to be anything less than honest there's nothing wrong with having someone you know contribute a few words about your opus.

And the same approach holds true for reciprocal reviews. If you're asked to provide a review for someone in exchange for them doing the same for your book, it's not wrong to agree. What would be wrong would be to write a dishonest positive review in the hope of getting one back. If you liked the book it's all well and good, but if you didn't, by all means defend the friendship by not providing a review, but don't write what you don't believe. In fact, if you feel that although you didn't like the book your issues could be a matter of personal taste, write a constructive criticism: most people don't assume everyone shares their taste and look beyond the star rating when considering a purchase. If what you don't like about a book endears it to another reader you might even be doing the author a favour.

In the end, the people most likely to scream foul if they think an author isn't playing fair are other authors. Readers might be annoyed if the reviews of a book don't reflect their own views, but they have to feel particularly cheated to stick their heads above the parapet and shout about it. As with the burgers and lasagnes, most people will simply avoid the tainted brand. And because, in contrast with the average food product, most authors do go on to produce new and improved work; because few authors can retire after one book (and real authors don't want to anyway) it's important that readers aren't left with a suspicious taste in the mouth. A reader who comes away with a feeling that a book was OK, but not fantastic, may give the author a second chance if they hear good things about a later work. A reader who feels cheated will likely not. An author who wants to succeed would therefore be better employed working on their craft than trying to perfect the art of the fake review.