Jessica Russell's Blog - Posts Tagged "fake"
How to Easily Spot Fake Reviews
There are legitimate review services out there that have professionals read and review your book and publish their reviews to your Amazon author page. Such services aren’t cheap but they are sometimes helpful for newly published authors. My main message today, however, is buyer beware. Even some of the most reputable review companies are slipping these days. In fact, I did a “secret shop” on one of them recently and ended up asking them NOT to post the reviews that I paid good money for. I know right in this second you are all thinking that’s because it was a bad review.
It was not.
It was a FIVE STAR review full of compliments for me and lovely descriptive phrases. However, I didn’t want it published because I knew the reviewer didn’t really read the book. You never want an inaccurate review even if the reader gives you five stars. Accuracy is more important than rating.
In one section of my book the heroine, Catherine, leaves England for France but mitigating circumstances make her return. The leading man, Julian, welcomes her with open arms. He rolls out the red carpet, treats her like a china doll, caters to her every whim and she falls all over him in gratitude. Yet the supposed reviewer described that section of the book as “Julian and Catherine spending most of their time fighting like cats and dogs until the book’s last chapter.”
Yes, this was a reputable review service with a good online rating. I’d love someone to tell me how anyone could possibly describe what I wrote above as two people fighting like a cat and a dog.
The “reviewer” was taking a gamble: in most historical mysteries that have romance subplots, the leading pair spend their time fighting like enemies until the last 20 pages when they suddenly realize they can’t live without each other. That’s one way to spot a fake review. If the reviewer is obviously taking an educated guess based on the “typical” storyline in your genre, it’s fake.
Why a professional service would let that happen I don’t know, but if you can believe this, I gave them three shots and all three were fake. One described the leading lady as a “spitfire prone to temper tantrums.” Well, once again, that’s probably accurate in 95% of the nonsense romances out there. Unfortunately for that reviewer, mine isn’t one of them. My leading lady was refined, quiet, and a thinker as opposed to someone prone to emotional outbursts. So all three reviews were five star, but fake. I told them NOT to publish them. I don’t need a few more 5 stars at the expense of having wholly inaccurate info. being posted about my book and neither do you!
In addition to professional services, there are also people who review books simply to get points in a book club or hit a certain level as a top reviewer on Amazon. Something they do on a regular basis–and they all think they invented it, but they didn’t–is what we call in my line of work “spinning.”
I write web content for a living and a very short and concise example of spinning is this: suppose you get an order from a travel client for a blog on the best vacation destinations in Brazil. To use “spinning,” all you would do is go to a competitor’s website, pick yourself out a nice article from that site and rewrite it. By rewriting it I mean simply changing the word order around, swapping out adjectives and adverbs, and essentially giving the client the exact same information that’s in another article rather than researching and writing the original piece he/she is paying for. You change it just enough so it passes copyscape. (Copyscape is the Web’s plagiarism checker tool.)
Behold, spinning. It’s called a black hat tactic in my line of work and no professional ever does it.
Well, people who write fake reviews often use this very same tactic and it’s obvious when they do. Tip: if you see a “review” and every single line of that review is something that can be gleaned from the summary–or copied from another review–it’s highly unlikely that that person read the book. The odds are just north of impossible for someone to read an entire novel and not have one original thought about the story other than the facts in the summary. So reviews are important, yes, but don’t let anyone publish fake reviews for your book if you can help it. They are an embarrassment, and to web content writers out there like myself, their fakeness is painfully obvious. Write on!
It was not.
It was a FIVE STAR review full of compliments for me and lovely descriptive phrases. However, I didn’t want it published because I knew the reviewer didn’t really read the book. You never want an inaccurate review even if the reader gives you five stars. Accuracy is more important than rating.
In one section of my book the heroine, Catherine, leaves England for France but mitigating circumstances make her return. The leading man, Julian, welcomes her with open arms. He rolls out the red carpet, treats her like a china doll, caters to her every whim and she falls all over him in gratitude. Yet the supposed reviewer described that section of the book as “Julian and Catherine spending most of their time fighting like cats and dogs until the book’s last chapter.”
Yes, this was a reputable review service with a good online rating. I’d love someone to tell me how anyone could possibly describe what I wrote above as two people fighting like a cat and a dog.
The “reviewer” was taking a gamble: in most historical mysteries that have romance subplots, the leading pair spend their time fighting like enemies until the last 20 pages when they suddenly realize they can’t live without each other. That’s one way to spot a fake review. If the reviewer is obviously taking an educated guess based on the “typical” storyline in your genre, it’s fake.
Why a professional service would let that happen I don’t know, but if you can believe this, I gave them three shots and all three were fake. One described the leading lady as a “spitfire prone to temper tantrums.” Well, once again, that’s probably accurate in 95% of the nonsense romances out there. Unfortunately for that reviewer, mine isn’t one of them. My leading lady was refined, quiet, and a thinker as opposed to someone prone to emotional outbursts. So all three reviews were five star, but fake. I told them NOT to publish them. I don’t need a few more 5 stars at the expense of having wholly inaccurate info. being posted about my book and neither do you!
In addition to professional services, there are also people who review books simply to get points in a book club or hit a certain level as a top reviewer on Amazon. Something they do on a regular basis–and they all think they invented it, but they didn’t–is what we call in my line of work “spinning.”
I write web content for a living and a very short and concise example of spinning is this: suppose you get an order from a travel client for a blog on the best vacation destinations in Brazil. To use “spinning,” all you would do is go to a competitor’s website, pick yourself out a nice article from that site and rewrite it. By rewriting it I mean simply changing the word order around, swapping out adjectives and adverbs, and essentially giving the client the exact same information that’s in another article rather than researching and writing the original piece he/she is paying for. You change it just enough so it passes copyscape. (Copyscape is the Web’s plagiarism checker tool.)
Behold, spinning. It’s called a black hat tactic in my line of work and no professional ever does it.
Well, people who write fake reviews often use this very same tactic and it’s obvious when they do. Tip: if you see a “review” and every single line of that review is something that can be gleaned from the summary–or copied from another review–it’s highly unlikely that that person read the book. The odds are just north of impossible for someone to read an entire novel and not have one original thought about the story other than the facts in the summary. So reviews are important, yes, but don’t let anyone publish fake reviews for your book if you can help it. They are an embarrassment, and to web content writers out there like myself, their fakeness is painfully obvious. Write on!
The Author Didn't Do It–Honest
Just a quick word about reviews: some people are under the impression that it is AUTHORS who delete reviews from Amazon. Let me be very clear about something. Authors cannot access reviews with regard to deleting them or approving them. Amazon’s software does that. All we, as the authors can do, is read them. Even if a review is nothing more than a spiteful person saying something nasty because they don’t like us, we still can’t do anything about it.
So, rest assured if you left a nice review for an author who is not well known yet and it disappeared, it was NOT the author deleting it. Similar to what many other companies have done, Amazon has fallen into the trap of allowing software and apps to decide what a “real” review is and what a “fake” review is. Naturally they get it wrong most of the time. That’s because a robot can’t do a human’s job, but because companies make more money using software than paying people, that kind of stupidity is here to stay.
The funny thing is, I have almost 50 reviews and all except five of them are from perfect strangers. I lost 19 to Amazon’s ridiculous software and review purges, but the five that were from people I knew are still there. I kind of wish the software HAD worked because it would have left me 14 to the good. Who knows what the big deal is anyway? Do they think it’s impossible for someone you know to read your book and like it? I guess so because it’s automatically assumed that those reviews are “fake.” Anyway, I digress. Bottom line is, if you have ever left a nice review for an author you like, rest assured that author did not delete it… faulty software did.
So, rest assured if you left a nice review for an author who is not well known yet and it disappeared, it was NOT the author deleting it. Similar to what many other companies have done, Amazon has fallen into the trap of allowing software and apps to decide what a “real” review is and what a “fake” review is. Naturally they get it wrong most of the time. That’s because a robot can’t do a human’s job, but because companies make more money using software than paying people, that kind of stupidity is here to stay.
The funny thing is, I have almost 50 reviews and all except five of them are from perfect strangers. I lost 19 to Amazon’s ridiculous software and review purges, but the five that were from people I knew are still there. I kind of wish the software HAD worked because it would have left me 14 to the good. Who knows what the big deal is anyway? Do they think it’s impossible for someone you know to read your book and like it? I guess so because it’s automatically assumed that those reviews are “fake.” Anyway, I digress. Bottom line is, if you have ever left a nice review for an author you like, rest assured that author did not delete it… faulty software did.
