Authors are turning on each other, agencies are charging up to £5,000 to place favourable fake reviews and Amazon has recruited a team of amateur critics to restore the balance.
Nathan Barker, of Reputation 24/7, offers a service starting at £5,000. He said: ‘First we set up accounts. For a romance novel we’d pick seven female profiles and three males.
‘We’d say we like this book but add a tiny bit of criticism and compare it to another book.’ Mr Barker claims this is common practice among publishers.
Authors hiring agencies to publish fake customer reviews
Posted on Tuesday, November 30 2010 @ 7:33 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck