This is worth a chuckle: An author is buying multiple copies of his book each day and reviewing it himself each time — and bragging about it, too. If he spend half of this energy working on a book, he might get somewhere. Apparently Amazon caught wind of this and deleted the phony reviews:
I’ve purchased my own book, Wealth Hazards, close to 200 times now. I wrote 42 customer reviews and voted on them 108 times. Not once was a review or vote rejected by Amazon. It took about 45 days to move the book up to #1, but after it got there I didn’t feel it was appropriate to promote it – so I have not profited from it. I continue to buy 2 or 3 copies a day, write reviews and vote on the reviews and wait for Amazon to notice.
via Author Claims To Manipulate Amazon Rankings By Buying Own Book Every Day.
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5 Comments
Just one question…Why? I would think a person (author) would have more important things to do with their time…and more productive. This gives the rest of us authors a bad rep. This writing business is hard enough, and this simply doesn’t help anyone.
I can’t believe this guy admitted to this and that he didn’t consider it appropriate until it reached #1.
Ugh!! Yep, typical of the culture so many people are currently being so seduced by.. the culture of fame, in which it’s more important to be SEEN to be number one at something than to do YOUR best job of expressing your greatest vision of the thing.
I’m enjoying your book BTW Steve. Thanks for sharing these insights.
Is He Kidding?
When I go to amazon to look at reviews of My Friend Nick the Greek, which I wrote, I see a notice saying that I cannot vote on my own book or review it (I can’t imagine why I would want to do so anyway).
I think “the trickster,” well-known to primitive tribes, is getting the better of this author. Time to grow up.
I totally get it. I’ve been marketing my YA book for about a month now and it’s hard as hell, so if there was a way to make things a little easier, you take the out. I get it.