Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Readers Are The Victims Of Bad Author Behavior

We’re all familiar with the recent spate of bad behavior by authors, right? Writers paying for false five-star reviews. Authors creating fake sock-puppet accounts (or “dick-puppets” as Blackmoore calls ’em) which they then use to pump up their own work, denigrate the work of others, and act as fake mouthpieces online. Then you have the response, where authors see that bad behavior and respond with their own, leaving one-star reviews as some kind of “Internet country justice.” We’re all clued in, I’m sure, by now.

My initial reaction to all of this was that it’s a bit inside baseball. It’s authors being dicky and tap-dancing on dubious ethical ground and waggling their penmonkey genitals about in an unpleasant display.

Except then I was online at Amazon (which already is notoriously assy in terms of filter and discoverability) and I was reading reviews and was suddenly struck by the horrifying notion —

I don’t know if these are real.

Suddenly I’m reading reviews with the same level of doubt and suspicion I reserve for reality television (we all realize that ‘House Hunters’ is a big lie, right?). It’s the same vibe I get when I go looking for reviews of restaurants. Locally we had a restaurant where the owner was caught leaving good reviews for himself, bad ones for his competition, and was also getting on forums as a sock-puppet and shouting down folks who said his food had dropped in quality (as it used to be great and isn’t anymore). Shitty behavior, right?

I read reviews for a toaster, my cynical mind flares up like a hot rash: “I’m sure the positive reviews are all left by employees of Big Toaster, and all the negative ones are left by proponents of some Anti-Toaster Coalition.” Casts all reviews in these areas as suspect. Which makes them beyond useless.

Now I’m feeling that way about books.

Maybe I should’ve been all along. Maybe I was naive.

It doesn’t change the fact that this isn’t good for anybody.

I once thought that the bad author behavior displayed here was bad for authors. And it is. Bad for authors, publishers, Amazon, B&N, etc. But, now I’m thinking they’re not the real victims here.

The real victims are the readers.

Readers, who want honest feedback. And who want to give honest feedback amongst equal honesty.

Readers, who love books, and who don’t want to get caught in bullshit author headgames.

Readers, who want to trust their authors outside the story (as you should never trust the author inside the story) and who are now confronted with the idea that the fiction that should’ve been contained to the books themselves has bled out of the pages and infected the relative purity of the author-reader contract.

So, let’s be clear here — if you’re buying up a bunch of bullshit reviews, if you’re out there putting on a series of Halloween masks and pretending you’re Joe Dicknose from Topeka and Betty Lou Buttplug from Albany just so you can boost your own reviews while hurting the reviews of others, you’re not only a scat-gobbling poop-fingered liar-face, you’re also actively punishing readers. You know, readers? The people who want to read all our books? The people who help us pay our mortgages? Readers, the ones who matter more than the authors because they’re the ones who allow us to be who we are?

Dicking around with the livelihood of other authors is dirty pool and you should be crotch-punched.

Dicking around with readers is like you dumping medical waste in the watering hole. We all drink from that water. You’re poisoning the relationship. You’re harming readers.

And that sucks, big-time.

So, stop doing it. Come clean or don’t.

But embrace shame and just stop.

You human canker sores, you.