New author spam - Just an annoying or a problem that needs to be delt with?

Maybe its just me but it seems like the message boards are suddenly rammed with new authors pushing their stuff, and posting fake reviews. The message boards are for discussing a topic, like what books are genuinely worth reading within a very specific genre. This is great, we all get good tips, find nice books and often, we end up buying them.

Then comes along Joe blogs with pushing his FIRST book that has a few suspicious five star reviews and hasn't been edited. Sometimes its Joe Blogs who just read a fantastic debut by a new author.

But the book hasn't been edited and lets be honest its not very good. Most first books aren't worth bookshelf space, the third or fourth maybe. But worse still, its not even in the right genre, and Joe has neither read the first post nor the last.

I would like to ask the community how you feel about this? And should Amazon be doing a bit more to clean up the spam? Perhaps by punishing the spammers? Or maybe its just a part of the community and we need to be more patient with our crowd of enthusiastic new authors.

Honestly, they should be metaphorically shot.
The problem is in distinguishing between misguided reviews, and those posted by the author/ thier friends and family.
Often they lack specificity, are laden with superlatives and don't mention many (or any) negatives.
I tend to ignore both extremes of the reviews, and just read those in the middle.
All we can really do is vote them not useful, and press the report abuse button.

Amazon have taken some steps to curb the Spam nuisance by creating the MOA forum (which is a bit like one of those walls where kids are allowed to spray graffiti) and banning self-promotion in "normal" discussions. It has worked to some extent but some spammers and self-pluggers still persist; however, Amazon has started to delete the more obvious posts where authors are trying to sneak in a free advert. Apropos phoney reviews, this seems to be endemic within self-published books and the only thing one can do is treat reviews for these books with great suspicion. It's pretty obvious if someone posts just a single review on Amazon which is a 5* rave about some obscure SP book that this is either the author or close family/friend.
The sad thing is that this sort of behaviour reinforces the view that self-publishing is the preserve of the mendacious and/or self-deluding egotists; the honest and genuinely talented writers in this field get tarred with the same brush.

One big advantage is the 'click to look inside'. I've just done that on the book that probably sparked John's ire, and it does strike me that it is not well written, and the comments about 'High School' do seem fair.
There may well be an excellent story in there, but someone needs help to develop the craft of writing
Certainly it isn't a book I would read

@S
WRT getting an honest answer from a set of reviews, I think there is an art to it. If a book is genuinely amazing it will have a lot of five star reviews and not much else. Definitely no 'scatter'. A book can be amazing but cater for a specific genre like hard sci-fi (Dune and the nights dawn trilogy), in which case it will pick up a bit of scatter because its not too everyone's taste or hard reading for the inexperienced reader. Generally good books don't pick up a lot of 1 star reviews, and those are the reviews I tend to pay most attention to. Also, it seems that three stars is definitely a bad review. Three stars constitutes a major flaw in the book in either plot, character or editing, and deserve a closer look. There are a lot of reasons someone will rate a book with 1 star; being generally overrated, have a terrible ending, not cater to specific tastes(Like being too violent), or for other reasons like a late postage or corrupted audio CD(I have seen that). Generally great books will accumulate a lot of similar and sincere reviews, many very short and to the point. When I see those I generally take note.

Its frustrating that it is so hard to read the reviews. I recently got a book called Pleasure Unbound by Larissa Ione. This was a mistake on my part, but there were a lot of solid 5 star reviews. Now I have it, I know that its written by a relatively inexperienced writer without an editor(and utter trash). But so many people gave it five stars... Its sometimes hard to pick out the good from the bad. I guess that's why the forums are important, except for the spam...

I love to read therefore I love finding new authors. Nor do I expect a self published book to have the same professional finish as a published book. And yes I do have a brother who writes but I was supporting indie writers before he published and I will continue to do so. I think its refershing to read something that is not writen by a footballer or someone famous for being thin. Here is a shout out for all those indies I've found on here just a few are
Mary Fitzgerald
Alison Buck
Carl Ashmore
Jon Rosenberg
Lexi Revellian

I think the point is that life is too short to read rubbish fiction(whether published by an illiterate footballer or an amateur genius). And we do want to encourage new writers to better their work, that is a supreme aim(I used to run a writers workshop), but I don't think we can do that by reading their books and accepting them before they are finished, and before they are properly edited. I will support a new writer IF s/he is ready to be read. Those names you have given us are useless. We know nothing about if they are good or not. Have YOU read them all? If not, why push them on to us?

I have read all those offered by the authors I have mentioned. Oh if only Amazon had a system were we could read a sample...hang on they have! Obviously this is all about personal taste, there are lots of published books I've read that are utter tripe and others which have lots of errors, The Da Vinci code fulfills both of these. I dislike these almost facist attacks on indie writers which have become the norm on the forums. I want to read outside the very ridged box publishers seem to think I should read in.

The main thrust of complaints is against Indie authors who abuse the system by self-plugging and spamming in these discussions, along with the small but significant minority who try and pull a fast one with bogus reviews. A key point here is not only are they irritating to general readers; they are also bringing the reputation of self-publishing in general into disrepute. It is also a true that a fair amount of self-published work is really poor - I've used the "Look Inside" facility on Amazon and I'm amazed at how awful some of it is. True, there's some pretty ropey stuff to be found in conventional publishing but seldom as bad as this. I'm not condemning self-publishing across the board; there is some good material out there and at least one of the writers in Creepy Lil' Sister's list (Lexi Revellian) seems to have a genuinely good reputation. However, for the reader, with so much poor material out there, it's difficult sorting the wheat from the chaff.

I think the MOA forum needs to be advertised a bit better. Some forums do have threads that stay at the top because they were started by amazon themselves. The thread on some of these that mentions the launch of meet our authors just says 'Important announcement'. So some people could just come to them in all innocence and think it's okay to post comments about their science fiction novel on that forum because they don't know any better. Something like 'self promoting writers please read' might help.

Amazon has indeed introduced the MOA forum, although to be fair they haven't signposted it particularly well.

The thing is, these forums aren't moderated. Amazon is only deleting the self-promotion when enough people DV the self-promo posts, or reporting them as abuse. Generally they do so quite quickly, but they won't do it unless they are alerted to it.

Although I am UK based, I spend more time on the US forums. There, people are *generally* quite polite the first time, and kindly request that the promoter removes his/her post. Most do so, and are apologetic. Some of them aren't, and they come back whining and arguing about censorship and all sorts of codswallop like that. Then ... they are mercilessly flamed, and reported for abuse.

So it does need the other forum frequenters to tell the self-promoters where to go (MOA, rather than the more rude metaphor). A few of us do it, and I have to say that I don't remember having anyone coming back to me with a whining argument ... perhaps because we Brits are better behaved? :-)

Some great points made here. Self publishing is in disrepute and it is a shame. I think it could potentially bring a lot of new original work to the fore, as well as helping authors get professionally published and become successful(and earn a salary). Creepy lil' Sister, I am not being fascist at all. Indi authors can do as they please but we don't want it pushed in our faces on these forums, we don't want our conversations interrupted and we don't want spam. The reason I am not into reading new authors is simple. When I listen to a piece of music, I and most people, generally enjoy the shifts in harmony, the melodies, and the cool shifts in tone, temp etc. When the great harmony is interrupted by a five minute discord its unpleasant.

That's what bad new writing can be like. A nice idea, nice concepts, nice characters and then wham, its written terribly or the dialogue is bad. Mistakes all over the place. Now if it was a song I would just skip it. But if its a book, I have already invested time, effort and money. My point is, YOU can support new indie non-corporate-non conformist-non edited self published work, but I would rather spend my reading time wisely.

BTW as it happens I did check out Lexi Revellian(Time child and other stories) and I found it to be fairly terrible, with the same mistakes as one would expect from a new writer. Check out the first page and try reading aloud. Again, I'm not holding these mistakes against them, as all writers were there at some point, its just that these authors are not ready to be published(If they can't get their basic grammar/spelling right etc), and I don't want to read them or have them spam the forums.

@marcus,
Point well made. Do you find there is a difference of opinion between Americans and bits regarding reading material? I notice there is sometimes a big difference between the rating of certain books but I haven't noticed a trend.

John,
I disagree about the first book not being worth attention, as there are many exceptions. Sometimes the first and very good book is the best... or even the only one. (I'll give you a list at the end, but those are books that do not need promotion IMHO.) Unfortunately I do not mean indie books and, worse, I agree about everything else.

I think that any spam outside MOA forum should be reported as abuse pronto and preferably deleted by Amazon ASAP. Sounds cruel, but there are hundreds, thousands of wannabie writers and the great majority of them should be encouraged to keep their creation in their drawers or computers, but NOT make public. I'm definitely not going to waste my life reading them. A random sample or two usually puts me off them for months. Them by some whim I try a couple again, and swear (again): nevermore. Let them thrive in MOA forum. Let the MOA forum be better advertised. But, please, leave at least some space for other things too!

Re Creepy Lil'Sister's list: all of them seem to be authors keeping in constant touch on various threads, so perhaps they do read each others' books. And Lexi Revellian, as Sou'Wester said, seems to be selling well. But I haven't read any of her books, so I can't say.

Now, the debut list. Perhaps not masterpieces, but non of them rubbish. Not all of them exactly new, and most of them are OT on fantasy forum, but still.
The Thirteenth Tale
The Tiger's Wife
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Random Acts Of Heroic Love
The Earthquake Bird

@John Wow that was really pompous "read more wisely"indeed. Hope the weather is nice on your pedestal.

Anita, yes I do agree. Sometimes the first is the best, and I think I know why. My first book(which is rightfully hiding in a drawer), well, its not great but it has some really great stuff in it, and I think its because its had 7 years of tweaks and work put into it. I reckon a lot of writers do that, their first book gets a gigantic amount of attention because they are younger, more enthusiastic and still getting to grips with writing. Years worth of fresh, untainted and original ideas go into it. Definitely some of the best work ever made was the authors first book. Maybe not published but written. I think writing well and consistently is really difficult, and it takes years to master. And many new authors don't want to wait, which I can relate too.

@Creepy,
The weather up here is great, thanks. 'read more wisely' does sound pompous now that you mention it. Replace 'wisely' with 'selectively'. You know exactly what I meant anyway. I read a lot, and I like reading books that are well written, well constructed and worth reading. Life is too short as it is, and in my lifetime I will never read all the awesome books out there, even without taking into account reading or half reading stuff that's not all that good.

I can't say that I have, John, but I would be lying if I said that I'd really looked at that sort of thing! :-)

I spend a lot of my time on the US Fantasy Forum, and one does see the "usual" names being bandied about, plus a small number that I haven't come across before (but I don't think they are author names that are better known in the US, just less familiar to me). There's a *huge* divide between those that like G.R.R. Martin, and those who don't - and it gets quite ugly! I keep well out of that one, I can tell you!

One thing I will say - the forums in the US are generally more active than those over here. Not always, and not all of them; but when I log on in the evening there's always *much* more catching up to do!

John, may I ask you something? I think you should post your OP also at science fiction and thriller forums AT LEAST

Marcus, I already learned the hard way about GRRM. I got badly flamed for pointing out a few things that I wasn't happy about in the first 2 books. Not a fan personally.
Anita, its early for me, and my brains not really working. What does OP mean? and why? Ty.

OP means original post in this case... I hope :)

As for why: those forums are hopelessly infected by spammers

I suspect that spam infestation is inevitable, too many people too desperate to sell their work.

I suppose that irony demands that at this point I finish with a link to my own, but I will be strong and resist.

I think it is also ironic that Amazon is perhaps one of the worst ways to go for a new author with good stuff. So, first off we have a lot of new authors who should be forced to sit on their work for a while longer, make them improve it a bit. As a result of there being an easy way to self publish, I think that it damages the full potential of the work. Also if you ever want to be properly published, you cannot do that if your book has already been published by amazon. I don't know about how amazon splits the revenue or what it does with the rights to your work but I doubt they give you much, and I suspect that they may get their claws into the rights to your work. I always hoped that someday I would be able to properly publish a book.

Anita, Thanks. I think I could re-post this thread. Somehow I am hesitant to do so because I have the answers I was looking for.

Jim, whats your book about?

Oh the temptation, can I resist, I must be strong.........

OK then it is a fantasy adventure, published in Kindle under my own name.
One of the reviewers commented "Swords for a Dead Lady follows Benor Dorfinngil through an intricate plot of murder and intrigue in a highly developed fantasy world with a rich caste of characters." (that reviewer wasn't my mother)
But whilst I'm writing, back to some things raised, yes it is my first novel, but I've done other stuff, for example http://www.sfsfw.org/a/13/peter.php (the address is right but doesn't seem to form a link, just search Peter Pan, the Wargame if you really want to see it) which isn't spam because it was 'not for profit' and I've been writing 'commercially' for over twenty years. I've also done stuff for Pelgrane Press in the RPG field.
So I've had numberless editors and have had to learn my trade the hard way.
Hopefully it means my first book is a bit more literate than the average first book. So I suppose I've saying that the craft of writing has to be learned through writing, and perhaps self publishing a novel is not the best way forward.

I will always remember the hard truth of learning that I actually barely had a grasp of the English language. I always thought I knew my stuff, and then I realized that I wasn't using commas or semicolons correctly. My sentence structure was so messed up that it was unreadable, my dialogue was terrible, and then after I had finished the damn book, and edited it a number of times, I realized that my POV jumped erratically between characters. And in the course of correcting that I realized that I jumped between past and present, and jumped in and out of peoples heads describing what the characters did know what minute and then mentioning things they didn't know the next. What a mess. I had to rewrite the entire thing, and that took me over a year. And I also had to edit all my noob prose and idea's so that they weren't quite so cringe-worthy. I'm hoping for more luck with my next book. Sadly, I have lost the inspiration. I have several huge stories/half sized books, sitting around waiting for me to finish them. But its hard because I have so many books to read. I love writing more than I love reading, but there are so many fantastic books. And reading is a lot easier. I guess I should sort out my priorities :-)

It is a craft, this writing business, and you learn a craft by serving an apprenticeship ;-)

If I had one suggestiong to give someone starting off, I'd tell them to read what they have written aloud.