It’s Thursday evening and you’re discussing catching a movie on the weekend. Grab the paper, check out the entertainment ads - and those all-important little review grabs: “A drama you can’t miss”, “Funniest comedy of the year”, “Our finest actress”.
Every film seems to be a winner. Then you see where the reviews were written. Names like Silver Slides and Lumination. Can’t quite remember those review sites...
Well, we’ve all had enough disappointments by now to know that reviews have to be taken with caution, and never to rely on just one.
Take hotel accommodation. Accusations have flown around, about invented reviews in the “hotel advice” web sites, and where discounts and incentives have been offered to customers who give glowing reports.
Almost from the start, Amazon’s book reviewing system has been accused of “friends of friends of authors” stacking the feedback responses. Restaurants, theatre, wines - wherever there is room for reviews, a bit of fiddling goes on.
Researcher Bing Liu of the University of Illinois, Chicago, has studied the reality of those opinions and believes that at least a third of them are fake. But the same research also showed that it is almost impossible to pick the difference.
Since the boom of the ereader and ebook, the whole phenomenon of self-publishing has exploded.
Say that great novel in the back of your head is now written. You don’t have to camp on the doorstep of Penguin for six months to just get it read, any more. Now just turn it into ebook format, on your computer, and self-publish the book in days or even hours.
An estimate puts the number of books self-published last year, on line or physically, at 300,000. Now how on earth do you get noticed by those people who like to read?
Enter Tod Rutherford, yet another Internet entrepreneur. Working in a company for self-published authors, he saw how hard it was for them to get noticed, let alone reviewed. So in 2010 he decided to do it for them.
He set up a web site, GettingBookReviews.com, that offered to review your book for $99 - a glowing report, of course. But one was not enough, so he then offered clients 20 reviews for $499. And for those who needed their egos supercharged, $999 would to buy you 50 paeans of praise, though not necessarily the Booker Prize.
The service became a rapid hit. Before long he was making $7000 a week. The work of course was too much for one person but he quickly found a team willing to fast-produce at $15 a review. The one stipulation, of course, was that each had to be a glowing five-star rave.
As one reviewer later reflected, to make ends meet she had to churn the reviews out at a fast pace that allowed her very little time to actually read the book. She just took the time to glance at enough pages to get an inkling of what its contents might be, and then start praising the plot, concept or advice it offered.
She now thinks she might at some stage go back and actually read one or two that looked interesting.
Eventually GettingBookReviews was noticed by Amazon, Google and other big-timers who managed to shut Rutherford down. Now, though, he has self-published his own self-help book - The Publishing Guru on Writing.
It has only just been released so I can’t report on any reviews, but I’m pretty confident that before long they will come - and they will glow.
ray@ebeatty.com
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