I think the British/Scottish crime fiction market is long overdue for a major shift in direction. So many good authors given so little advertising and promotion, and here we have another tiresome same-old, same-old from someone who could do so much better. Similarly, in his one-star hatchet job of Stuart MacBride's Dark Blood 'Jelly Bean' writes: PR flacks talk about books like this-readers don't. Whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul.' This reads like one-sheet publicity material. 'Nicodemus Jones' called Ellory's A Quiet Belief in Angels a 'modern masterpiece.' Ellory's sockpuppet urges readers, 'Just buy it, read it, and make up your own mind. No real reviewer, however clueless, would offer such a narrow range of opinions. These fake reviewers are incredibly two-dimensional, obviously concocted only to skew Amazon's aggregated ratings. Making people up is what these writers get paid to do, yet they still aren't very good at bringing their fake reviewers to life. This isn't the first time sockpuppetry has been exposed, and evidence suggests that more writers might be guilty.īut let's put aside the ethics of sockpuppetry for a second and look at the latest offenses from a literary standpoint. The storm began when Jeremy Duns tweeted his suspicions that the Amazon accounts 'Nicodemus Jones' and 'Jelly Bean' were both controlled by R J Ellory (reviews by these accounts have since been deleted). Major news outlets picked up the story, Ellory apologized for his sockpuppetry, and authors have banded together to denounce the practice. It's a clearly unethical practice, but to make things worse, the authors who've been caught doing it aren't very good at making their phony reviewers seem real. Lately, authors have been caught sockpuppeting, the cute term for the ugly practice of faking favorable reviews, on Amazon to inflate ratings of their own work.

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