Once again, I’m using Writers Who
Kill to help me think my way through a wild situation in publishing. I doubt if
anyone reading this attended the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival
at Harrogate since it’s in the UK. (I would dearly love a chance to attend it one
of these days!) This whole mess of worms (or snakes) came out at that
conference and has been widening on the internet. That’s the reason I know
about it. I follow several great British thriller writers on Twitter. And
they’ve only risen in my estimation because they’ve taken on this mess and
tried to get one of their peers to stop doing these bad behaviors and others to
stop ignoring and allowing him. Not surprisingly, Jeremy Duns, who exposed
Quentin Rowe’s plagiarism and other instances where authors have stolen the
work of other writers and passed it off as their own, has led the charge on
this, along with another fine British writer, Steve Mosby, who was a member of
the controversial panel.
Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s
top-selling writers. Sitting on a panel about e-publishing during Theakston, he
publicly stated that he has many sock puppet (i.e., fake and disguised) email
and Twitter accounts that he uses to give great reviews to his books on Amazon
and Goodreads and rotten reviews to those he deems competition or whose authors
he simply dislikes. He bragged about using the accounts to attack himself and
other accounts to defend himself on Amazon, Goodreads, and Kindle discussion
boards in order to create fake controversies that will get readers to buy his
books out of curiosity. When another author panelist said he couldn’t put out
work as fast as Leather does because of the need for quality writing and
editing, Leather remarked that he doesn’t worry about that—he uses his readers
as editors. If enough of them notify him about a problem, he apparently fixes
it sometime in the future. Here’s the link to an initial account of the panel
by another panelist.
A number of authors have taken issue
with these behaviors, led by Duns and writers from the UK. The use of sock
puppet accounts alone (on an apparently large scale) damages the effectiveness
of Amazon and Goodreads reviews. If one major-trade-published and
self-published bestselling author does this, it leads one to wonder how many
others are also doing it, perhaps on a smaller scale—since Leather’s scale of
this activity is vast. How can any review be trusted? How can any discussion on
any book discussion board be taken seriously? And apparently, Leather also uses
these fake accounts to cyber-bully (much less successful) authors he dislikes
for some reason.
Then there’s the matter of putting
out work you know is not ready for publication with the expectation that the
readers who buy it (thinking this has been professionally written and edited)
are responsible for editing it. This is something that’s actually fairly
common with some self-published writers, though without the shameless
openness about it. (Please, self-pubbed readers, take note of the qualifiers in
that sentence!) What does this do to the whole market for books, especially
e-books? It seems to me that it causes the most harm to those self-published
writers who have been professional and paid (with money or time) to have their
books edited in order to give their readers the best possible experiences. It’s
not going to cause readers to avoid trade-published books where that’s not a
major issue, but it may well cause them to avoid self-pubbed books after having
been burned too often. And that’s not fair to the many self-published writers
who invest in putting out a professional-quality book.
I guess what bothers me is that
there’s a fundamental dishonesty about all of these behaviors—tricking readers
with false reviews and fake controversies, as well as tricking them into
thinking they’re paying good money for a professionally written and edited
book. I also think it contributes to the reason so many sales and review
outlets still won’t accept self-pubbed books. If you do, you open yourself to a
flood of books that include a fair number of these kinds with little or no way
to tell one from the other without taking a great deal of time and trouble. The
easiest way is to simply say “no self-published books.”
What do you think, readers? Is this,
as Stephen Leather says, a tempest in a teapot, or are these serious issues
with consequences for the industry, or at least the self-published part of the
industry?
(NOTE: I use “self-published” rather
than “independently published” because I come out of literary publishing—my
husband still works in that field—where an independent publisher has long been
a small press that does not publish the work of the publisher.)
