Sock Puppets and alleged scams

So when I saw the headline, “Marietta science fiction author charged with multi-million-dollar scam,” I thought, “Which one of my friends got arrested for being a part of which Nigerian scam.”

As it turns out it wasn’t any of my friends, it was a guy named Mitchell Gross, who writes under the name, “Mitchell Graham.” Gross allegedly defrauded close to $3 million from at least one woman.

So this got me thinking… it wasn’t one of my friends, but I wanted to see what he wrote, and in doing so probably confirmed something I suspected about Amazon reviews for a long time; many of them are fake, especially about authors with low sales.
I’m not saying that Mitchell Gross is a con man who wrote his own reviews on Amazon, I’m not saying that at all; what I am saying is that Mitchell Graham seems to be the beneficiary of readers who never wrote an Amazon review before, or after, but created accounts to specifically rave about Mitchell Graham’ fantasy trilogy, and his two legal thrillers.

Of the 73 reviews the first book in the series received, 42 of them are five-star reviews, of the 51 five or four star reviews, 34 are from reviewers who have only published one review on Amazon.com, four are from anonymous posters that Amazon certified did actually by the book, and two of the reviewers have only posted reviews on other Mitchell Graham books. Of the five star reviews all of which have at least 15 people saying the review was helpful, while the bad reviews only have two or three people saying whether it was helpful or not.

Not only do these reviewers rave, a word that is repeated several times in reviews, they take issues with reviews.

“One thing I felt the author did an excellent job with was the dialogue between the characters. The speech didn't sound stilted or forced. It was more like people talking to one another.”

There’s also a number of reviewers who only picked up this book because “so many people” were talking about it. One reviewer mentions their professor assigned it as reading, the professor shows up in a review for a later book, and more than one mentioned that the bookstore clerks recommended it, or that their book club read it, or “I heard so much about this book and so many people were reading it, I finally caved in.”

I’m not saying that is a lie, but I’m an aspiring SF&F writer and I have a lot of friends, and one brother, who are deep into the genre, and none of them have ever mentioned Mitchell Graham. If there was considerable buzz about this trilogy I more than likely would have heard about it.

So, for comparison sake, I decided to look at two newer authors in the genre I’ve actually heard other people talk about, China Mieville and Mike Shevdon. Both are smart new fantasy authors with solid selling, but not massively selling, books.
Shevdon’s first book had 42 total reviews, I sampled the ten latest reviews, of which only two are left by reviewers who only read his book. Mieville, the most established and successful of the three authors, had 352 reviews. Of his ten most recent only two were left by reviewers who only wrote one review, and both them were slamming the book.

Honestly, I’m more prone to believe Shevdon and Mieville’s Amazon reviews. Both have big time agents, significant publishing deals and Mieville is a college professor, and if he were posting fraudulent reviews of his own work it would endanger his day job. It seems improbable to me that authors of self-published e-books would have higher reviews, and a higher percentage of one-review reviewers, than two of the strongest new names in the genre.

I kept searching. I looked through Amazon for some self-published e-books and checked out the reviews on some of those. I found “Warriors in the Mist: A Dark Medieval Fantasy” by Susan Kalior, which has received 19 reviews to date in a curious distribution. Eight of the reviewers gave the story zero to three stars while 11 reviewers gave the story five stars.

Of the five star reviews a number of them were suspect. I’m not saying Ms Kalior wrote them, but it potentially illustrates another problem with Amazon reviews: friends and family leaving reviews. Of Ms. Kalior’s 11 five-star reviews one was written by “Mark Kalior,” who more than likely is related to her, and three other five star reviews came from reviewers who written numerous reviews of Ms. Kalior’s other self-published books and nothing else, two of whom share the same last name. Of the other positive seven reviews, three are from reviewers who only created accounts to rave about Ms. Kalior’s book, and at least two who wrote one-star reviews of a competitor of hers.

What’s funny is that according to Amazon people who bought Ms. Kalior’s book also bought the incredibly lengthy titled “Xoe: or Vampires, and Werewolves, and Demons, Oh My! The First Novel in the Xoe Meyers Series,” self published by Sara Roethle. What I find interesting about that is that the two people with the same last name who left glowing reviews about Ms Kalior’s book just so happen to have the last name Roethle. It’s an uncommon name, and it’s unfair to say that they’re related to Sara Roethle based on last name alone, so I won’t actually say that. Even if Sara C. Roethle is the Karolynn Roethle who left glowing reviews about all six of Ms Kalior’s self published work there’s nothing illegal, or even massively unethical about it. It’s friends doing other friends a favor, there’s nothing wrong about it technically speaking, but it is misleading, and I doubt it’s an honest review. If you’re going to review a friend’s book, you should say that in the review.

Sock puppets is an internet term for fake accounts created by one person in order to advance whatever it is they’re selling/pushing. It’s far more common than what people think. For example, the self published novel “Eleganta : A novel of Fairykind” had 28 reviews, which are split between rave reviews and readers saying the book is almost unreadable due to massive grammar problems. Of the 18 five star reviews six came from one review people, most of whom were talking about how they couldn’t put it down and were anxiously awaiting a the next book. Many of the five-star reviews had similar grammar problems.

People who have posted reviews that seem real seem split between people who picked them up because of the “reviews,” and those who realize these reviews are mostly crap. As one of the readers of “Eleganta” wrote, “This reads like a first draft from a very young writer without fully developed self-critical facilities…. On the other hand, the publicist for this is doing an incredible job.”

The problem is that the slush pile is coming for you. The advocates for self-published e-books are looking to crowd sourcing to cut the wheat from the chaff, but that only works so long as you don’t flood the field with sock puppets. People are going to game online systems to try and get their crappy book read. (I haven’t read any of the books mentioned here so I don’t know if they’re crappy or not. I’m not saying their crappy, or that their reviews are fake. It could be that they’re just the beneficiary of a lot of people who are moved to write one review and then never review again; it’s implausible, but possible I suppose.) No, it doesn’t mean we’ll see crappy books getting more attention than what they deserve, it means good books will get lost in the noise of manufactured hype.

Think about it, Mike Shevdon is a real author, with a big time agent and big publishing house, yet his book has less reviews on Amazon than a book written by an obscure author who is now charged with running a $3 million fraud ring. If you’re relying on Amazon reviews for book recommendations the odds are actually greater you’ll come across “The Fifth Ring,” than “Sixty-One Nails.”

As e-publishing becomes more popular the problems are only going to get worse. Authors are trying to game the system by writing fake reviews themselves or getting family and friends -- a number of their friends are self-publishers themselves so their sock puppets have mutually beneficial relationships -- to do it for them. There are marking services paid to leave realistic sounding reviews from accounts with long, believable histories of reviews to inflate ratings of books and create a false buzz about non-buzz worthy projects. As more bad books, and most of them are bad, are dropped onto Kindles and e-readers the ever increasing drone of false buzz will get so loud it will be that much harder to find the worthwhile reads in a sea of slush.