Fake Reviews
Over yonder at The Bookseller there is an article which discusses bad reviews being given on Goodreads even before a book is available to read.
What’s the motivation? From the article:
Goodreads reviews have long been associated with review bombing, for example in 2021 Time revealed how some authors were allegedly victims of extortion, facing demands to pay scammers to avoid bad reviews on the website. In 2023 the Guardian also reported authors were actively “staying away” from the site. Later that year, Goodreads announced changes later that year to prevent review bombing, shortly after Daphne Press backtracked on Cait Corrain’s debut deal after the aspiring SFF author admitted to posting negative reviews about other books on book recommendation website Goodreads under multiple accounts.
Would-be authors are being asked to pay a bribe so that a preemptive negative review is not given. This is quasi-extortion, as the only action the author has done by this point is to write a book. The equivalent would be to pay a ransom so a person is NOT kidnapped, which is also a backwards-facing procedure to the unstated criminal rule book. Maybe criminal kids these days are getting lazier?
In case the reader of the above article missed the important desired nuance the writers wish the audience to deduce, there is a predigested-digested ‘this-is-what-you-should-think-about-this’ quote provided for them:
“Also, book ratings do matter. Otherwise, why are we all here? One friend who writes crime for a digital imprint was advised by an editor to retire a long-running series because the average rating for the most recent installment slipped below 4.2 stars. So every keyboard-licking troll who fires off a volley of one-star ratings for their own strange and probably sad reasons, has the power to affect a writer’s career.”
Begging the question does not drop alms in the bowl of the scribblers of volumes. What the article is making abundantly clear is that the reviews do not matter as they cannot be trusted.
Trust And Money
American money, last I knew, still has the motto “In God We Trust” on it, sometimes. (it originally appeared on two cent pieces –for putting in my two cents) The reason for invoking a higher power on the filth that passes for a medium of exchange is because it turns out that many people are dishonest, and if you cannot trust anyone, you are not going to trade with them. You need something a little higher up the chain than the Earthly kingdom to figure out whether you should trust someone who is presenting themselves in a certain way. This skill is discernment, which in the business world is often labeled shrewdness.
The vexing version that highlights the issue between trust and money is illustrated by P.T. Barnum’s quote that “there is a sucker born every minute.”
Circus Wisdom
On the other hand, P.T. Barnum also said that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” Since he was in the business of running circuses, one deduces he probably knew something about when the world was more bonkers than normal. This is to say that a writer will write because they are a writer. Publishers might care about reviews, because sales could be impacted negatively by word of mouth. Conversely, one could market the book on the merits of how badly it sucks as a work. There are many photos of coffee places doing exactly this where one can stop in and get the worst cup of whatever a person has ever had. This is what Barnum meant.
Reading Between The Lines
What this article is specifically about is making a living as a writer where the industry and commerce of being a writer and one’s reputation matter. How anyone can be alive in 2025 and have anything that does not resemble the American flag flying in tatters above a sieged fort for a reputation I cannot fathom other than such a person must have been a non-offending political genius that should be immediately placed in an embassy so their skills can be used for important problems like National Security. The rest of us plebeians, though, have had at least one round of attempted reputation assassination if not worse. The free-speech-o-meter has been running almost on empty and is just now showing signs that the needle might bounce back to a position a little greater than it has been occupying for the past ten or so years.
Fake News And Dastardly Jews
Fake reviews are a specialized case of Fake News, which court accusations of Evil Jewish World Empires. Right now, the pulse is that Palestine is an angelic being that would never do anything to provoke anyone, and Israel, a place which was born after World War II on the heels of attempted genocide, is super mean and wants to beat the world with the Star of David as a billy club. Apparently, the last scorching of a type of specific religious identity predominately only buys you around 70 years or so before everyone decides the guy who tried to kill you last time was actually right about everything even though the illustrations of the evil wrought by him are legion. If we cannot get the narrative straight on something as simple as this story, which has been pounded into almost every media imaginable, I doubt we are going to do better because your book about vampires falling in love with dolphins is being unfairly held ransom by Russian Shadow Brokers. Hell, people cannot agree that the huge fire sacrifice on Jewish people happened, and if it did, they try to get all mathematical about it as though it would be somehow better if two people died in a raging inferno instead of six-million. (it was probably way, way more for the record) Such logic brings to mind the reasoning of Joseph Stalin who allegedly said that “one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic.”
Picking One’s Battles
Are Fake News stories a problem? Sure. Fake reviews are too. However, we are much, much farther down the rabbit hole of problems. We want to sit around and bemoan our fates concerning our potential to sell books. How about we focus on the ability for some people to work at any given job at all? That’s a thing now. If Social Credit lunatics have their way, it will become more of a thing. We might also want to think about how we are teetering frequently on the knife edge of world war with the power to completely obliterate life as we know it. But then, what do I know? I have only been blowing this horn for something like the past 13 years, and you know what I got for the effort, at least in part? Accused of being a part of a vast Jewish conspiracy to uh–well, I’m not sure what it was, exactly. Not be Satanists? Pretty much that.