This news is about a month old, but somehow I managed to miss seeing it when it came out. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post had a story about an “industry of ‘Amazon entrepreneurs’” built around “catfishing”—creating fake online personas to trick the unwitting. (The term “catfishing” comes from a 2010 documentary film chronicling an online relationship with such a fake person.) These “Amazon catfish” create a fictitious expert—often using character names from books or movies—and then hire some low-paid remote worker to write the actual book. Then, after the book is written, they buy fake reviews for it to promote it, and make out like bandits when it hits the bestseller lists. The Post notes:
“Making money with Kindle is by far the easiest and fastest way to get started making money on the Internet today,” enthuses one video that promises to guide viewers to riches. “You don’t even need to write the books yourself!”
The article goes into detail about some of the writers who use this technique, and some of the online courses that teach writers how to use it. The courses recommend inventing fake authorial personas to build credibility with audiences, reporting bad reviews for “abuse,” and using fake reviews to plug your book.
As the article notes, there’s nothing wrong with using pseudonyms for your books. (Amazon even allows authors to use up to three pseudonyms, something I hadn’t known before I read this.) The problem comes when you make up a fake professional background for that pseudonym, like pretending to be a linguist to write a language tutorial, or a doctor to write a book on health issues. This sort of thing has been an issue in advertising for some time; truth-in-advertising laws prevent using fake medical personnel in advertisements for medicine. (Advertisers have tried some fairly ridiculous stunts to get around that, including the oft-spoofed line “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”)
Some writers are concerned that this sort of thing could give self-publishing as a whole a black eye, but not everyone is so alarmed.
Experts are more optimistic: Jane Friedman, a professor of digital publishing at the University of Virginia, describes catfish as an ongoing but “not that significant” threat. (“It increases the noise for everyone, sure,” she wrote by e-mail, “but for any author building a long-term career, it’s not hard to distinguish yourself from low-quality opportunists.”) Amazon, meanwhile, promises that it is weeding out deceptive accounts and their products.
This probably explains the reasoning behind Amazon’s recent focus on rejecting “paid” reviews—Amazon knows that so many people out there are abusing them to try to build the reputations and sales of their shoddy fake self-help books, and they want to crack down on that sort of thing.
When you get right down to it, scammers and loophole abusers are always going to be with us. Before Amazon changed the payment scheme for Kindle Unlimited, the same sort of people wrote ridiculously short works to try to scoop up book-sized payments for people who just read a page or two. As each loophole is closed, they just move on to the next one. Meanwhile, it’s worth developing a little healthy skepticism when you see a suspiciously-large number of five-star reviews for a book that doesn’t have all that many other reviews.