Wall of Shame - Post Your Amusing Spam Stories Here.

Over the past few weeks I have seen some hilarious spam posts and mistakes and I want people to share them here.

Some examples...
One author created three fake or misleading reviews to his own book, one review was by the person the book was dedicated too, one by a fake account and one in his own name. The one by his own name had a comment under it by his publisher criticizing him for reviewing his own book. He was also named on their website. I believe the book was called city inc.

Another a new author decided to change his amazon name and have a conversation with himself about how good his book was. Apart from the fact that his thread title was laughably obvious, he hadn't realized that his name changed with him so everyone knew what he had done instantly.

I outed three fake reviews once by commenting on them. Then the author wrote a come back, claiming to be a real reviewer. Except that he used the wrong fake account. To cover for this he copied the comment and pasted it back in using the right account, then deleting the first comment. But I got the first comment in an email anyway thereby proving beyond a doubt that both reviews were fake.

There are countless other new authors doing the stupidest(and funniest) things to try and drum up some attention and con us out of our hard earned cash.

Please post you stories here with as much detail as possible. Copy and paste the hole lot if you can.

Finally, if your forum has been spammed, use the See Inside feature and write a review of the book. If that review is harsh and/or comical, post it here. If anyone feels like mentioning the specifics of the cases I mentioned, please do.

Finally, if you are a new author and are tempted to spam this forum, please go right ahead :-)

John, why have you left your funny examples anonymous?

Enjoy:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/forum/thriller/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg1?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx293U5YYTNOEH&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=TxQAPGUGXJ50RW

Also - for self reviews please notify Amazon at <reviews-help@amazon.co.uk>, if you want spam gone use Help => Contact Us => 'Something Else' => Website feedback.

I greatly enjoy adding tags to spammers books.

On the enjoyable spam/shill front - there is a thriller author who has had numerous reviews removed. He followed the pattern of having a second account, sayign how good the book was et cetera. He was stupid enough to leave the name on the account with his surname. When picked up on it he got the accounts confused, and kept replying with the wrong one / delete / reply correctly. Email tracking is such fun.

Judging by the "No" votes on the last two posts there's at least one spammer who has taken umbrage at this exposure of the seedier side of self-publishing! Perhaps they'd care to join in the discussion by defending the practices being highlighted here?!

I didn't mean to leave them anonymous, I just got back from a long weekend camping and I'm also sick. I didn't/dont have the energy to dig out the details. When I'm past this cold I might, or you could :-)

A little bit of something last night made me wonder, if "funny spammers" are really that funny. All right, that happened in MOA, so that particular author formally was not a spammer (any longer). Still, accusing someone of trolling and posting his ridiculously long and boring blabber of self-promotion he clearly went over the top. All right, maybe I overreacted, I admit, that happens. He replied simply stating that he won't be wasting his time on me. Up to this moment it was funny, I did agree not to waste our time, just suggested him to spare a second and correct a typo in his very first post. Guess what. He promptly no-voted my post, and deleted all of his.

Makes me wonder: perhaps the guy needs help? Definitely NOT funny, then.

Still, can't resist to mention the typo, as it WAS funny. Among other things in his book you'd find "Spychic powers". Now we shall never know, if it really was a typo, or maybe he meant some "spy-chic" powers? One way or another, if you self-promote, be more attentive, it's not really impossible to avoid making a joke of yourself. My very personal opinion

That guy does seem a little unstable. I started by just pointing out that bumping a thread about his book by just posting 'bump', and deleting his previous 'bump' post was tremendously boring, and didn't make me think he had enough imagination to write a good book. He ranted then deleted all posts and started a new thread.

I do feel sorry for some of them, like the guy in question. But really - ultimately they come to an unmoderated forum, don't read the sticky posts the forum owner posts, and apparently don't even read the threads they post in - which is just bad manners beyond anything else.

Whilst I sometimes think maybe we should just ignore them, imagine if this and the sci-fi forum became like the Thriller forum. And that thought makes me not care if I am hurting their feelings. I'm not always a caring nice person :(

this is one thing that irritates me, if they're supposed to be imaginative writers, why can they not write imaginative spam rather than just copy/pasting great screeds of stuff, often on a dozen threads at the same time

Also, they all spam with minimal effort. There are ways of drumming up interest that might be more effective, maybe joining a conversation, establishing your reading credentials by giving a few appropriate suggestions or supporting one already given, if you enjoyed it. Then maybe saying, I see you like this genre, and this book and this book. I wrote this book, its in this field and I have paid attention to the plot, the main character is like the one from the book you said you enjoyed, I think you might like it. Have a read inside and see what you think. If its terrible, Im all ears. If you love it Ill email you the next couple of chapters.

Then if you were really trying to drum up interest, and perhaps show off your skills you could start a thread for new authors, such as how to make dialogue interesting, realistic or funny. How to create tension, how to write a who-dunnit plot (eg back to front) or how to avoid most common noob mistakes... If you know your stuff and are genuine, you will create interest in the thread. From there people might be tempted to take a look inside your book, if you introduce it in the right way. If its any good they might want to read further, especially if they have given enough of the book away for people to get into it. One might be tempted to provide a few before and after examples. eg this paragraph is unedited and look at the sentence length, the excessive dialogue tags(he snarled x5) and the lack of punctuation. Now, the edited version... Does it not read better... etc etc... And if your book does not stand up to that scrutiny it wasn't ready to be published, and we wont discuss the matter further.

Maybe I am being naive... but this copy and paste spamming seems like the wrong way to go about it... The community is not gigantic, and the readers are mostly smart, educated people who wont be easily fooled or tricked into buying rubbish.

They're interesting ideas, certainly copy/paste spamming just irritates me, partially because it seems to assume I'm stupid enough not to have noticed.
Mind you, occassionally when I do dip into the book of a copy/paste spammer, I can see why they resort to the technique.
They're never going to get anywhere with scintillating displays of imagination and wit

I did waste a whole half a minute on the guy in question re-reading my posts, and what the heck, did I say anything really insulting?? Even if my tone was not exactly friendly, I half think I was doing him a favour by pointing out that typo :) I don't know for sure, but if he copy/pasted that post in various threads, the typo is everywhere there for people to enjoy.

Perhaps the idea to just ignore them is not so bad. Honestly, I start feeling a bit stupid, spamming the threads with "please, don't spam" posts.

It seems I've picked up a secret admirer somewhere along the way. Someone is promptly no-voting all my posts without IDing him/herself. A missed chance to get some attention, I'd say :)

when someone spams eight threads in less than an hour I think it is only fair to point it out, after all they might realise they'd missed some

Now, THAT's funny! Amazon spamming their own forum :) Seven (not eight, Jim) threads have the same post: deleted by Amazon. The only difference: 17 OR 18 minutes ago :))

There was someone spamming - and A seemed to get them pretty damn quickly. I wonder of they've put something in place to spot dupe comments, and get someone to go and check them. It should actually be fairly easy to script.

that makes sense althrough at least two of the ones I meant are still there.

Garscadden: I got that :)

Something else about the spammers. They do have some 'special' phrases, and the one that knocks me down is this: it's sooo difficult to get noticed/some attention (etc.). Logic of iron, as we say here. How on earth do you expect to get noticed amongst the spam and spam and yet more spam?.. I don't have a Kindle (I might end up buying one at dot com, I can buy it AND books there, or perhaps some Sony or something at local electronics store), but what puts me off is the "look inside" feature. I do use it often enough on PC. Now I have a huge mixture of "look insides" inside (yep, that's intentional) my head, with virtually nothing to stand out.

There was a guy some time ago offering his story with some interesting creatures in it, "creatures that don't exist until someone thinks about them" (not an exact quotation, just from memory) looked quite promising, but 7 dollars for a short story seemed a bit OTT. Sadly, I remember the price, but not the author's name.

All right, blabbering too much, off for now

the 'look inside' feature is probably one of the most useful features Amazon have.
I would have thought the way to stand out would be to post interesting posts that tempted people to look at your book, even if they only did that indirectly by clicking on your profile page, seeing if you'd read anything and then looking inside.
If the book is any good, it might then have a chance

but then what do I know?

Sorry for misunderstanding, Jim. I do agree that look inside feature is useful. Perhaps failed to make myself clear

I'm agreeing with you.
Probably my English. I tend to use irony when I shouldn't I'm afraid

Ahem... it should be MY English, I suppose... :))

The look inside feature is fantastic. I sadly underused it in the lst few months, but these days thats the first thing I do. Read the first few chapters. If its good and they give me enough to get into it (ie a few chapters, not 5 pages) then I'll buy it then and there. I have done this with a lot of the recent suggestions, only adding the good ones to my wish list. Wish that every book on amazon had it.

don't worry about it, you can speak English properly, or like a native, and you wouldn't believe how some of the natives speak it

From the authors point of view it gives added weight to the old rule of 'grab their interest in the first couple of pages'

O/T (sorry, John)

There's an interesting (quite) discussion going on on Kindle forum with an uninteresting thread title of "Explicit Book Titles". Something that I'm interested in: does violence in book/on TV motivate kids (and not only kids) to try it in real life? Or maybe, just maybe, having watched enough violence on screen you have enough of it and DO NOT let your violent trends out? (I.e. violence on screen as a prevention? Perhaps sounds like blasphemy to some, but still - ?) And then, why so many people do like things like that? What do you think? Personally I don't like horror films of any kind and I hardly watch any porn, still, I admit, I like characters suffering (like the ones John was asking about).

Garscadden: I found the review you mentioned, and it seems interesting, still haven't read it all, too busy posting here :(

As a few of you know, I run a couple of 'post your pitch' threads for authors to practise their elevator pitches and get some feedback.

They too get the attention of spammers who don't stop to look at any posts before hitting 'paste'...

But I do think that they are an annoyance that has to be accepted and ignored.