About a month ago, I put up a post titled “And now: reader reviews are crooked (yawn),” about how Amazon reviews can’t be trusted, since so many of them are either bogus or bad.

Today, Charles Hughes, who owns a Wind Publications, a small press out of Kentucky, left a mildly chastising comment to that post. He thinks the issue is worth more than a yawn, and for evidence posted a link documenting the Amazon review abuses perpetuated by one Rhett Ellis. Hughes has identified at least eight or nine different aliases that he thinks are really Ellis. Apparently, the guy not only leaves fake reviews of his own novels, but also posts pseudonynomous reviews for other books that compare them to Ellis’ books. For instance, in this review of The Dark Tower, there’s a review that ends

Good job, Stephen King. You ARE the man. Oh, and you know what– this book reminds me of one called The Greatest White Trash Love Story Ever Told. I’m not making that up. There really is a book called The Greatest White Trash Love Story Ever Told.

Hughes further claims that Ellis has admitted to him that he uses fake reviews to game the Amazon review system.

Oh, and Ellis will offered to tutor Hughes in how to improve the sales of his own book.

Okay. This goes a bit beyond the mild stuff I posted about — having your mother write glowing reviews for you, etc. (Something I never bothered doing incidentally.)

Still, at first I kind of reflexively kept to my “so what?” attitude, since my basic hypothesis still holds, IMO. Bogus Amazon reviews only work until people start to realize that some of the Amazon reviews are bogus. At that point, they stop working, because people will become sophisticated enough to spot and discount them.

But in the interest of intellectual honesty, I decided to think it all through again, and here’s the outcome.

First of all, Ellis’ novel is, today, ranked in the mid-2000’s, and if this speculation is anything like accurate, that means he could be moving about 5 books a day through Amazon.

The non-fiction dog training book I co-wrote has hit the 2000’s once since it was published in December 2004. I was thrilled. So yeah, it’s a tad irritating that somebody else might have juiced the rankings, to achieve what I achieved by, essentially, honest work.

But then I started to think about what ol’ Rhett really gains from this, vs. what it costs him.

I’m assuming he’s self-published: his publisher, Sparkling Bay Books, doesn’t seem to have a very high profile, other than being the publisher that handles Ellis. I’m not sure what Ellis’ margins would be (SBB may be his own company) but if we figure 40 percent, that means he’s pocketing about $140/week — $7280 a year — from his Amazon venture. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s certainly not millions. Nor a living wage.

And it’s important to bear in mind that gaming Amazon doesn’t do squat for your sales through other sellers.

So on the profit side of the balance sheet, that’s about it. Seven grand. Something in that neighborhood.

What about the loss side?

First of all, I hope Ellis doesn’t have too high hopes of ever getting a publishing deal with a conventional publisher. If you follow Miss Snark’s blog for any length of time, you’ll catch on to the fact that agents and editors do talk to one another. Word gets around. Forking over $500K to a plagiarizing teenager is one thing. Publishing a known Amazon sock puppet? That’s going too far.

ha ha ha

Couldn’t resist that. But seriously, the kind of thing Ellis is doing — what legitimate publisher wants to sign an author who has a reputation for this kind of dishonesty?

I sure wouldn’t take that kind of a risk with my reputation. And for $7280 a year?

And there’s more. This gets to a point I tried to articulate in my original post. Them-that-knows say that if you want to make it as a novelist, it’s the writing that counts. And the reason it counts, if you want to believe a guy who’s been an agent since 1980 — i.e., a guy who makes his living by figuring out which unpublished novels have a chance to make some money — is that well-written novels generate word-of-mouth.

Word of mouth, says Donald Maass in Writing the Breakout Novel, is what sells books. It’s more important than your editor, your marketing, your promotion. It’s what sells books.

But wait, you say. Isn’t what Ellis doing creating word of mouth?

No, it’s not. He’s breaking readers’ trust.

That doesn’t create word of mouth. That destroys it. It doesn’t get people talking about Ellis’ book. It gets people talking about Ellis’ scam.

So Ellis is not only jinxing his chances to get a conventional book deal, he’s also jinxing his chances — if he had any to begin with — of generating the sort of genuine word of mouth that one day might have put up some real numbers.

And that’s what I think about that.

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