Dick Deadeye Was Right

I had suspected this for some time, but it is now obvious—there is a concerted effort on the part of someone, possibly a competing author, to “review bomb” my books for the purpose of lowering their average customer rating. 

The practice is fairly widespread and is common enough to merit a write up in the New York Times not too long ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/business/a-casualty-on-the-battlefield-of-amazons-partisan-book-reviews.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Here’s what “review bombing” is, how it works, and why someone would do it.

You see, over time, even the best book starts to slide down the bestseller lists.  Where a book gets more durable exposure is on the “Best Rated” lists, where books are ranked by some mysterious formula primarily based on the average “star” rating given to books by customers.  If a book is rated high on these lists, it will get exposure for many, many months, maybe even years, thereby providing the author with a steady stream of sales in the long term. 

Authors whose books are on these lists but who want a higher ranking can obtain it fairly easily by getting five or six of their friends to go online and to give “one star” reviews to the books with higher rankings.  Because of the mathematics of averaging, it does not take many one star reviews to cause a meaningful decline in a book’s rating. 

Here’s an example.  Take my second book, For Honor We Stand.  It has an average customer rating of 4.7 stars (it has been as high as 4.9).  If some troll comes along and gives it a 1 star rating, I will need to receive 15 five star ratings before the average of that one star rating and the subsequent 5 star ratings is equal to or higher than the 4.7 I had before the 1 star rating was issued. 

What makes me believe that this is going on?  There is one rater who gave three star ratings (Amazon is starting to look more closely at the one stars so if you give three you are safe from having your review erased) to my first book and to several other military science fiction novels on the same day, using the exact same language:  “It was an okay science fiction story but not a whole lot of interesting ideas or plots. Maybe it's aimed at a different target market.”  Six reviews.  The same day.  The same rating.  The same words.  Exactly.  Hmmmmmmmmmmm. 

Then, there’s the individual who trashes the first book in a series, saying that you have to “look for the story line between the inane drivel” and who then goes on to read and review the second book so he can trash it, too!   Do you finish a book, tell the whole world that it contains “inane drivel” and then spend $5.99 and a day or two of your life reading the sequel unless you have something other than entertainment in mind?  If you do, you need to find something more interesting to do with your life.  This person clearly has an agenda.  As if that were bad enough, he suggests skipping the chapter that provides the foreshadowing for the ending and comes right out and tells the despicable lie that neither book contains any sub-plots.  So, not only is he basically committing a fraud on Amazon’s rating system, he’s a lying piece of garbage, to boot. 

There are other examples, but these are among the worst.  These people are doing damage to the reputation and the sales of these books for no other reason than their belief that, by tearing down my work, they can build up the work of someone else by comparison.  This is a despicable and dishonest tactic.  The people who do it are not only the lowest form of contemptible slime, they are also guilty of Wire Fraud, which is a federal felony prosecutable by the FBI under 18 U.S.C. Section 1343. 

Now, gang, I know that there are people who don’t like what I write and that it is possible to hate every sentence I have ever set to paper without any nefarious motives of any kind.  There are unfavorable reviews that I recognize are clearly those of people who just don’t like my work.  I’m totally cool with that. 

For example, here's one.  The writer has legitimate reviews of lots of different kinds of books, many about science and scientific writing, and just doesn't like my book.  I happen to disagree--for example, there is a gripe about the boarding cutlasses, something which I think I explain quite convincingly (should people be shooting bullets in a closed, pressurized metal tube in the vacuum of space, jammed with pressure vessels containing toxic gases and radioactive elements?).  But reasonable people can disagree about such things.  It is clear that the writer simply is not wild about the book.  That's fine.  It is a genuine opinion expressed for non-malicious reasons.  THAT is what these reviews are for, not so that you can game them to push one product over another.  http://www.amazon.com/review/R23F7AO4J2X85I/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm


There are great works of literature that I can’t stand (can you say “Paradise Lost by John Milton” anyone?), and works of schlock that I adore (and, no, I won’t give you a title). 

What these review bomging folks don’t seem to get is that this is a kind of theft, and I don't mean theft as in stealing from Capitol Records by pirating a song. I mean like theft from a neighbor by stealing his pension check from his mailbox.  I’m not a millionaire.  I’ve enough in the bank to pay for a month of bills, maybe two.  I have tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid medical bills from my heart bypass surgery, and have a 17 year old daughter with braces I’m still paying for and who will be going to college in about a year and a half.  Writing is how I support my family (with the help of my wife, who also writes and does well at it).  This kind of attack is an attack on my livelihood and on my family.

There’s not much that can be done about it.  I report the abusive reviews to Amazon as “abuse” but nothing has ever been done.  I have never even gotten any correspondence from Amazon regarding any of my reports, some of which are many months old.  The only thing that you, readers and fans, can do is to write positive reviews if you can do so in good conscience.  As I said earlier, it takes 15 reviews with 5 star ratings to put a book with a 4.7 average back where it was before getting a 1 star rating.  With a 2 star review, it takes 14 reviews giving 5 stars to do the same.  The mathematics is relentless, which is why people do this—it works. 

Notwithstanding these attacks, sales are still pretty good on both books.  There are so many good reviews with so many people who say so many good things so articulately and so persuasively that, if someone who is interested in this kind of book takes a look, that reader is very likely to buy the book.  But, this is not the point where the low reviews hurt; rather, it is in lowering the books’ visibility on the “Top Rated” lists and reducing the number of people who take a good look at the books in the first place. 

As Dick Deadeye says in HMS Pinafore, “it’s a rum world.”