INTERACTION

On his blog Steve Mosby documents what appears to be extraordinary behaviour by bestselling author Stephen Leather:-

http://www.theleftroom.co.uk/?p=1724

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http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

Blimey!

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www.andrew-hook.com

Where do these people find the time to do this?

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http://jimsteel.wordpress.com/

He's a bestselling writer Jim - probably has staff to take care of the little things

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http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

More on the Stephen Leather thing:-

http://www.theleftroom.co.uk/?p=1736&cp ... ent-141323

I think you can often tell if you're right or not by looking at who your allies are

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http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

And now R.J. Ellory has been outed:-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book ... views.html

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http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

The fight back against sock-puppetry:-

http://nosockpuppets.wordpress.com/

Barry Eisler agrees, with reservations:-

http://barryeisler.blogspot.co.uk/2012/ ... n-thy.html

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http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

There's no excuse for any author issuing pseudonymous reviews of their own work.
But how do you police it on the Internet?

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MY WEBSITE: www.nemonymous.com

I don't think you can Des.

At least the only way I can see is if publishing contracts had clauses that penalised those who were caught doing so, but there isn't really any incentive for publishers to do that, and even if they did it wouldn't affect the self-publishers and small fry.

Best we can do is naming and shaming, in the hope that some will be deterred.

What puzzles me is why million sellers like Ellory and Leather do this sort of thing?

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http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

Given that publishers are prepared to publish people who have murdered, dealt drugs, and colluded in the abuse of children, I doubt any will care about this - except in so far as it causes a PR problem. So naming and shaming, and making it a PR problem, a customer relationship issue, is at least one way to fight it.

And in the long run by protecting review venues that you can trust to be honest, like Interzone and Black Static, even if you don't always think they'll be right.

I reckon Amazon would benefit greatly from a friends system, like the one on Goodreads. Yes, there are just as many fake reviews on Goodreads, but the reviews of my friends and the people I follow come first, giving me the opportunity to curate my own trusted cadre of reviewers.

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Theaker's Quarterly Fiction