Legitimate marketing … or fraud?

If an author asks me to write a review of their book on Amazon I have always obliged (giving them the obligatory five stars of course). One should always have a healthy scepticism when it comes to reviews: especially a journalist’s puff about a fellow journo’s book or an author’s review of a book published by the same house. It’s a natural bit of back-scratching.

But is it okay to take things a bit further, creating discussions around your book on Amazon and giving it a five-star review, through setting up sockpuppet accounts? You may have been aware of the frenzied blogging over this issue in the past weeks. One particular author has been blasted after he apparently admitted to using sockpuppet accounts in a discussion at Harrogate’s crime writers’ festival.

Some authors have been known to take it one step further, writing and posting one-star reviews in an attempt to scupper their competitors. You will remember when Professor Orlando Figes was found out after using the alias ‘historian’ to post critical reviews of rival academics’ books, while writing that his own left ‘the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted’. Simon Tanner in an article for the Guardian Professional quipped: ‘I'd frankly like to make him eat his sock puppet and then see how awed and humbled he felt.’

My own view is that sockpuppetting is a new part of the game that we’re going to have to live with, much in the same way that we’ve always had to put up with literary toffs back-scratching their mates with glowing reviews in the TLS. But what we do now need is the publishing equivalent of the Queensberry Rules to establish which parts of the game really are below the belt.

Wanda Whiteley, former Publishing Director at HarperCollins, is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Manuscriptdoctor.co.uk, a literary consultancy