Astroturfing

Has anyone heard the term “Astroturf?”  No, I don’t mean that fake green stuff on football fields – I’m talking about using others you know in a way to give an artificial picture of support.  Political activists do this all the time to bring in paid protestors and give the illusion that more people support their cause than actually do.

Writers can do this as well.  How many of the Amazon reviews you see are from parents, friends, or just people the author knows, and who told them what to say?  Worse yet, how many writers go in and Astroturf themselves, providing fake reviews for their own work?  Here’s some advice on this – DON’T DO IT!

First off, fake reviews are pretty easy to sniff out.  They’re universally five stars, and they rarely, if ever, talk about the book beyond general platitudes.  Now I see nothing wrong with asking folks you know to read your book and provide an honest review, but shilling for others or yourself to boost your stock is both unethical and potentially disastrous.  Once it gets out that a writer is reviewing his or her own work, that writer’s credibility has been destroyed, and not just for that particular novel – forever.

Think about it – how would you trust any decent review for that writer’s work ever again?  To me, it also strikes me as the height of insecurity that you’d have to review your own work, because it tells me that a) you couldn’t get enough people to read your stuff to give an independent review, and b) you didn’t think your work was good enough to get an honestly good review.

Look, I get it – I’ve gotten good reviews and I’ve gotten bad reviews.  The bad ones can sting.  But so what?  Unless they’re uniformly bad, in which case you need to figure out why and improve, why do you care what some rando on the internet says about your work?  You’re not going to take long showers with them into the wee hours of the morning, so shake it off.

I bring all of this up because a writer buddy of mine recently asked me about this.  It had never occurred to me before to do this, and it immediately struck me as a bad idea.  The more I thought about it, the worse the idea got.  Just…just no.