Gaming Amazon: An Army of One
I saw this once before. A book with 5 star reviews, reviews obviously written by the author himself ---I wrote it off as a one time incident--- probably something Amazon would catch and clean-up later. Then I stumbled across another. The first example was at least a little sneaky. He changed up the prose a little and tried to modify his style of writing. All his reviewers though, had only ever reviewed that one book. This next guy just takes it totally over the top.
What makes it hilarious is that his grammar is terrible and he has a very distinctive style of writing. Both qualities amply evident in his "reviewers." What's even more entertaining (although a bit sad) is that this same style and grammatical oddities show up in negative reviews of his competitors. At least one of which has caught onto the fact and discusses it in the forum section of his book listing.
And it gets weirder. Evidently this guy has the energy of a crack monkey; he's setup his own personal forum, with literally thousands of posts where he practices asking and answering questions to himself with different identities. A few naive outsiders appear to have been roped in assuming it was a real venue.
As an experiment, I posted a negative review on his book. Within about 8 hours it was removed. His book is self-published through lulu and it appears he's also gone to some expense buying his own copies and turning them to generate higher rankings. (Being self-published, he's also written his own copy in the "editorial" section of his amazon listing.)
Not only does no one know if you're a dog on the internet, no one knows how many dogs you are.
(If I tried that, all of my reviewers would disagree with one another, the ratings would be incidental, and some would probably start flame wars between themselves.)
(BTW, for those of you stragglers who haven't tried the puzzle below, the path to the answer may be different than expected.)
What makes it hilarious is that his grammar is terrible and he has a very distinctive style of writing. Both qualities amply evident in his "reviewers." What's even more entertaining (although a bit sad) is that this same style and grammatical oddities show up in negative reviews of his competitors. At least one of which has caught onto the fact and discusses it in the forum section of his book listing.
And it gets weirder. Evidently this guy has the energy of a crack monkey; he's setup his own personal forum, with literally thousands of posts where he practices asking and answering questions to himself with different identities. A few naive outsiders appear to have been roped in assuming it was a real venue.
As an experiment, I posted a negative review on his book. Within about 8 hours it was removed. His book is self-published through lulu and it appears he's also gone to some expense buying his own copies and turning them to generate higher rankings. (Being self-published, he's also written his own copy in the "editorial" section of his amazon listing.)
Not only does no one know if you're a dog on the internet, no one knows how many dogs you are.
(If I tried that, all of my reviewers would disagree with one another, the ratings would be incidental, and some would probably start flame wars between themselves.)
(BTW, for those of you stragglers who haven't tried the puzzle below, the path to the answer may be different than expected.)
I've always heard we are our own worse critic? Sounds like him and that prosecutor Bill Peterson have alot in common...setting up their own self defending website...Anyhow...I've found myself to be soooo different than the mainstream...a 5 star review prob. means I'm just nottagonna like it...but if i wrote a book, I'd sure be tempted to put my own blue ribbon on it..yep.
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