You may have seen the stories last week. RJ Ellory, British mystery writer, was caught writing highly laudatory reviews of his own books under an assumed name. Among other things, he cautioned readers, “Ignore all dissentors and naysayers, this book is not trying to be anything other than a great story, brilliantly told. Just buy it, read it, and make up your own mind. Whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul.” This in itself, while sort of pathetic, might not have been enough to really piss off other writers. But Ellory went farther than that. Along with the dreamy reviews for his own stuff, he also wrote slams of his competitors under yet another name. Ironically, these negative reviews were the ones that other authors followed back to their source.

This particular practice is called “sock-puppeting” since it involves a writer pretending to be someone else so that he can deliver his message under another name. There’s a variation of sock-puppeting that involves having somebody else write a positive review of your book—some publicists now offer this service for a fee. Needless to say, Amazon strongly discourages this practice, although there’s not a great deal they can do about it.

One thing that Amazon has done, which in my opinion indicates their total confusion over the origin of the problem, is to delete reviews written by authors of one another’s books—i.e., if you review Author A’s book and she reviews yours, Amazon will delete both. Now these reviews may, in fact, be what used to be called “log-rolling” where authors exchange positive quotes. But, as several authors pointed out at the time, they may also be legitimate positive reviews written by friends. I read books by my fellow Naughty Novelists, for example, and I’ve rated them on Goodreads. That doesn’t mean I’m dishonest, it just means I read my friends’ books and they read mine. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to write reviews for each other?

What I find most annoying about all of this, however, is the corruption of what used to be a terrific idea: user reviews. Back in the early days of the Web (yes, kiddies, I’m old), user reviews had a kind of revolutionary tinge. For once you were hearing from people who’d listened to a particular CD or read a particular book or bought a particular appliance and were sharing their experience with you. It was a way to get around the corporation’s propaganda to see how things really worked.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for corporations to figure out how to get around these independent reviews themselves—just hire people to post reviews you write for them. Consumer Research has even published an article telling readers how to recognize phony reviews among the real ones (http://www.consumersearch.com/blog/how-to-spot-fake-user-reviews).

Yet as a writer, this whole thing just makes me tired. If the reviews aren’t from real people, when read them at all?  I’m afraid the final take-away from all of this may be the oft repeated advice to ignore all reader reviews and just keep writing. And, of course, to wish RJ Ellory and his ilk a really painful case of shingles.