Thank you, Ms. Klausner for a wonderful, intriguing preview

Someone "Joel, Holden" writes (comments) under a Klausner review of Other Kingdoms:


Now, two things. First, "Joel, Holden", perhaps unwittingly, breaks the code here: this Klausner excretion is (as all of them are) a preview, not a review. Second, when I see someone praising Harriet ("Thank you, Ms. Klausner for a wonderful, intriguing preview. My copy is on the way."), I kinda feel funny. Is it possible to be such an imbecile as to be honestly pleased by a Klausner blurb? And so (perhaps it's paranoia, I don't know) I just have to suspect a "scratch-my-back" action by a pleased author/flunkey/publisher employee. Iow, someone shilling for the shill (many of you will recall similarly unctuous posts by Mark Blackburn and JP Pix in the Harp realm). Iow, it's Quality Comments™ (remember Quality Comments™¹ ?).

So, driven by my paranoia, I begin to trace out who the hell this "Joel, Holden" might be. First I click on his name and go to his profile page, where I discover that he is (surprise, surprise!) an author (whose nom de plume is apparently "Barry Eysman"; among other things on this page there's an Amazon UK page holding something like a catalog of "Barry Eysman"'s oeuvre). Going back to Joel/Barry's US page: he's got some reviews; let's visit there. Well, nothing eye-catching, the prose a bit purple, otherwise all right... not all five-star, there are some negatives too... looks fine to me. Except notice that like every second review of his contain a strange link — a link that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the book reviewed or the review itself. And (bet you know where it's going) if we visit those links, we'll find out that all of them lead to the books by? yes, by Barry Eysner.

So this is one of those guys who don't do things just for the heck of it: they've got a product to puff, and everything they do has to serve that purpose. It's like the reviewers who always include in all their reviews that they are "the author of" this and that, and so on, which has nothing to do with the book/review — which invalidates their reviews, 'cause you immediately think, all right, this guy posts reviews not to review anything but to promote his own stuff; this is not a real review: he's a member of the scribbling crowd who review (always five stars) one another's crap as a matter of course, adding nothing — other than a faint smell of shit — to the universe; to be ignored. And so getting back to this Harriet review: do you think Joel/Barry's is a bona fide remark, or is it Quality Comments™?

---

Note 1: Remember Quality Comments™? The site that sold their shilling services, where for a payment their employees would visit a designated website and post "realistic-looking" comments — "Our Blog Comments are of high quality! [...] Our promise to you is that the comments will look very real[...] The blogger won't recognize that its [sic] a paid post" — kinda like Astroturf? I don't know if that BuyBlogComments.com vendor is still in business, but we've blogged a lot about them — or rather about the phenomenon itself — like for example here

PS. No, the place is no longer online, unfortunately. But there's plenty of it in caches, like this page, for example (here's a google search on their name; if the pages are absent, use the cache).

Thomas-Sundstrom Book: the saga ends (?)

Following up on the previous post: Harriet has now posted another review there; now it's probably what it should have been, and it's now rated five stars rather than four. Both reviews got a positive vote (probably from the author: why are the authors even allowed on the site?). Here's a snapshot (just in case the saga hasn't eneded here) — compare and contrast!

Come on, Linda, you got four stars, what else do you want?

Our Lady of Fauxreview has reviewed Golden Vampire by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom, but, um, it seems there's a problem! Author does not recognise the book she wrote in this valuable Klausner review! Ouch. But then, Linda, please be reasonable: Harriet doesn't read no stinking books (and you knew that, 'cause everyone knows that, 'cause how can anyone read (and review) six books a day, every day for over a decade? Yet this is Harriet's average over the life of her account)! She only posts blurbs, without reading the books: how would she know which blurb goes where? And then, who cares what the text is if the rating is good, after all. It's a positive review, four stars (although, for Harriet, it's a rarity: usually it's five stars... maybe Harriet found the reviewing fee insufficient? We'll never know). Anyway, Dear Reader, check it out (while it lasts; I took a snapshot though, see below, click for normal size):

---

---

Taken down?!?! How dare you. How dare you. Nothing gets taken down that Harriet graciously indited. Re-write your book to match the review! OK, so: here we have an author and/or her publisher hoisted on their own petard — I doubt Harriet bought this book: the author, Linda Thomas-Sundstrom (or her publisher) has probably requested a review and supplied a freebie for Harriet to "review" (and maybe a fee, who knows... it's hard to believe someone would throw up multiple reviews, no matter how bad, every day if it were not for a pay). Any takeaway lessons here? Yes: do not hire shills to puff your stuff.

PS. If the review does get blown away, remember that it will persist a long while in the reviews list sorted by most-recent comment. In addition to the snapshot above, I mean.

PPS. 1 a.m. next morning: Kluckusner blurb is gone. Damn! Not only gone, but in a speedily conducted (non-"Amazon-Verified") damage-control operation replaced by a fully five-starred piece of perky, smooth-flowing professional copy, quite Klausnerian in content, but impeccable grammatically and completely coherent. I say, Harriet is far more fun; bring back Harriet's blurb. 'course our Maîtresse will not disappoint and will (and already did!) post more of her delightfully discombobulatory burbling little affairs — but not for this book! And that is a loss.

Oh btw, the new reviewer, "J. M. Dickson" (real name), has only three reviews (including this one) in his record, all of them for books by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom. The other two reviews (dated 2010 and 2009) have been "Amazon-Verified" (there was probably no hurry then — although they're also distinctly less well-written: just a couple of lines, fairly vacuous, definitely not like this latest one).

Actually, a bit of digging uncovered the fact that J.M. Dickson also is a writer of similar kind of books, so this begins to look more and more like a professional favour by one writer to another (iow, essentially the same as a Klausner review would be: not an honest review by an unaffiliated reader, but something concocted by the industry in order to move the wares).

---

Klausner blurb also survives (for now) as a google-cached page from her "go round" blog (snapshot below, for when the cache goes dead, which it will, with time; the post itself has been deleted).

We Got Mail

We've received a note from someone claiming to be one of the Amazon (top?) reviewers, who wishes to let us (and the world? :-) know that not everyone on Amazon is a phony PoS like our dear Harriet, or — very distant, of course! — W.Boudville, Maestro Harp, John Matlock "Gunny", Midwest Book Reviews, Mark-O, Dr.Maraio, "Respected Leatherman" Roubel, etc., etc. Well, we can believe that! (Not that we'd be terribly surprised to find out otherwise, btw., but yeah, it is possible that not everyone in the "Top" category is a fake.) Anyway, here's the letter (name withheld because the correspondent did not explicitly ask to post it, and in cases like that we always err on the side of privacy):

Hi!

I occasionally read the stuff that gets posted on your site & only recently did I really feel like I needed to post anything. It was in response to Malleus' post about top amazon reviewers. I couldn't post it on the site but here's generally what I had to say:

I can't speak for anyone but myself but I did want to let you know that myself & more than a few other "top reviewers" do actually read the books & use the items that we review. I just read somewhat quickly & thanks to my night job having some extended periods of downtime I get to indulge my habits of reading & reviewing. It's just something I like to do in my spare time & I've been lucky enough to get up around the top 300-ish. I don't think I'll get any higher than that unless I suddenly win the lottery & get oodles of time to read & review or unless some computer error levitates me to the top.

Just wanted to let you know that not all top reviewers are machines intent on rising to the top in the hopes of getting recognition or free stuff. I've seen more than a few that seem to just crank stuff out but a lot of us are just people who really like to review in our free time. The expensive goodies might be nice but in the end that's not what we really go in for.

I have to admit, getting accused of possibly being a hack or a shill sort of miffs me a little. I'll admit that I'm pretty easy to entertain (the stuff I like that I don't post reviews for is pretty embarrassing) but I don't pimp myself out in the hopes of reward. That's the opposite of what I want to be recognized for.

Thanks!

[name withheld]

Well... yeah, OK, no problem, we believe you.

Bill Cunningham... or Robert J. Rubel? More gems from Amazon

One Robert J. Rubel wrote a book that's been published by Nazca Plains Corp., and is sold on Amazon under the title of Squirms, Screams and Squirts: Going from Great Sex to Extraordinary Sex (looks like one of those books Harriet denominates as "heated"). The book has received a good number of reviews, most of them five-star (naturally; though it's got some one-starrers too). One of the positive reviews has been written by a certain Bill Cunningham (click on the image to see the full-size version):



What makes this review interesting is the comment under it, by C. B. Gurney who says that, in another review of his, Bill Cunningham claimed to be the author of the "Squirms" book (click on the image to see the full-size version):



And indeed, among other things, Bill Cunningham reviewed Cleopatra's Secret, Cool Mint, where he stated just that (the review can be found through Bill Cunningham's reviews collection; it's on the very first page there).



But if that's not enough, we can visit his profile page and discover that, yes indeed, it appears that "Bill Cunningham" is a non-real name assigned to an account set up by, um... yeah, Robert J. Rubel (click on the image to see the full-size version):

---

So here we have a smartass author setting up sock-puppet accounts (how many? we've just found one: is there more?) so as to post five-star reviews for his own books right under the watchful eye of Amazon — who does what? Nothing. Yet, clearly, they know the real name of the account owner — so why not compare it with the name of the author of the book under review and disallow posting (and maybe freeze the account altogether) if it's the same name? For a technological powerhouse that Amazon is this should not be too difficult, no? Yet this is not done. Why? (That was rhetorically.)

Btw, "Bill Cunningham" reviewed many books by Robert J. Rubel, not just this one (five stars, of course), just peruse his reviews. For example: Protocols: A Variety of Views: Power Exchange Books' Resource Series by Robert Rubel PhD (click to enlarge):



or Protocol Handbook for the Leather Slave: Theory and Practice by Robert J. Rubel



or more (and more, and then some):

---

So, once again, why does Amazon do nothing to prevent this sort of thing? It is not a difficult thing to do.

---

"Educational Sociologist, Author, Respected Leatherman
Robert J. (Bob) Rubel, PhD" (whose respectability does not, apparently, prevent him from posting bullshit five-star reviews for his own books under an assumed name).

---

Unrelatedly: have you noticed that Harriet is 738 now? She was ~760 a couple of days ago, and 749 yesterday. Looks like "Team Harriet" found a way to push her back up somehow.

Dr Gina Maraio: A New Gem from the Amazon Reviews Machine

A new reviewer has just made her entrance into the holy space of Amazon reviewing by posting twenty-five (25) absolutely identical, five-star (natch), reviews for twenty-five different books, all on the same day, March 20, 2011. Goes like this:

Oceanside, CA Doc says:This is a great book to even introduce my regular HMO pts to natural healthy treatments., March 20, 2011
As a female medical doctor I have battled against many colleagues to get this info to my patients and have it help them for over 15 years. Now, even my HMO patients are finally agreeing to try to manage their health with 'alternative and natural' approaches... with the help of reading books like this. The rewards are plenty from practicing medicine this way and have my patients giving me the "high five" on a daily basis. I love practicing medicine this way for all of my patients. This medicine is no longer only for 'the rich and famous' that I've treated for over 15 years! Kudos to all who continue to expand my patients minds and let them now come to me asking for these types of treatments instead of me having to convince them this stuff really works! DRMARAIO.COM

And so it goes, one after another, for three pages, twenty-five times in a row (a representative snapshot follows; click on the image for the full-size picture).



I say this is a very strong beginning! I see very good Amazon Top-Reviewer material here: effort-saving laziness (why write twenty-five crappy blurbs when you can take one crappy blurb and post it twenty-five times?) combined with self-promotional chutzpah combined with an utter lack of ethics. Yeah! Thumbs up — that is the kind of doctor I want my enemies to go to! Friends, there can be no mistake: please join me in welcoming Dr Gina Maraio, Family Practice Physician Oceanside, CA into the ranks of our Friends Top Reviewers here. I'm sure she'll be very comfortable next to such luminaries as Harriet Klausner (a.k.a. Our Lady of Fauxreview, the Bernie Madoff of Amazon, and The Queen of Reviewing Fraud), as well as the venerable W.Boudville, John Matlock "Gunny", and of course, last-not-least, often imitated never equalled, never-forgotten unsurpassed master of scholarly imposture and self-vote totals — drum roll, please — our dear Maestro, Grady Harp himself.

Amazon Deletes Reviews That Mention Pay-For-Play Review Schemes

Interesting nuance (oldie but goodie): on the same Consumerist, Alex Chasick writes:

After buying an anti-snoring mouthpiece from a third-party seller on Amazon, reader Bob received an email from the company offering him a free mouthpiece in exchange for a five-star review. He noted this attempted bribe in his Amazon review, and Amazon deleted it. Twice. [...]

This is totally new to me. Check it out, quite curious.