Show Hide image Books 17 March 2014 Your book sucks: are authors being bullied with one-star Amazon reviews? Anne Rice thinks there are communities of “parasites” intent on dragging down writers by slating their books online. Is she right – and why are we such slaves to the star rating, anyway? Print HTML I frequently fall down internet rabbit holes – I google medical symptoms late at night, I look up animals who have won awards (I have not won awards), I try to find out the exact length of intestinal worms pulled from dogs’ bellies on old episodes of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not that I vaguely remember watching in the ‘90s (results so far inconclusive). I also habitually read the one-star Amazon reviews of books I love. Why? I have no idea. Try it. It’s like sitting mutely at a dinner party with aliens. Here's Lolita: “The book arrived on time in and was in great condition but the actual literature itself was just terrible . . . its turgud, pretentious crap, which is badly written and really just utterly dull, I doubt a combination of the literary talents of Katie "Jordan" Price and Alan Shearer could come up with something more indescribably poor.” Go find a book you love. Click the one-star reviews – there will always be some. Cancel your plans for this evening. But one-star Amazon reviews are more than a space for performance art or green-ink rantings. Some authors believe that they amount to “bullying”. Anne Rice, writer of Interview with The Vampire has signed a petition snappily entitled Protect Amazon.com Users and Indie Publishing Authors from Bullying and Harassment by Removing Anonymity and Requiring Identity Verification for Reviewing and Forum Participation – a collective effort to eradicate trolling and abuse in one particular corner of the internet. The petition wasn’t her idea, nor was it one of the dozens of daily causes sent to our inboxes courtesy of 38 “pick your battles” Degrees as a way of enabling Rice’s long and personal war against The Unfavourable Reviewer. (ICYMI: Last year she took umbrage with a small potatoes blogger (who not only didn’t like her book but cut it up for some arts crafts project), posted a link to the offending review on her Facebook and invited comments. Essentially she just set her fanbase on someone who didn’t like her book, and opened the blogger up to a world of shit-slinging from the more slavish of the group (others called Rice out on it). In terms of picking a postergirl against being a dick on the internet, you could do better than Rice.) Anne Rice is not the only writer to have gone after a bad reviewer. In 2011, a self-published author in Milton Keynes launched libel proceedings against the guy who wrote a series of bad Amazon reviews of his book, The Attempted Murder of God: Hidden Science You Really Need to Know. Also summoned to the courtroom were Richard Dawkins and his foundation (for discussion threads relating to the review on the foundation’s website) and Amazon (for allowing this to happen in the first place). Earlier this year there was a story about another self-published author in America threatening to sue a reviewer because their single bad review allegedly lost the writer $23,000. Whether it’s back-of-the-envelope maths or real maths we’ve only got his word, but at this point it’s irrelevant. Stay with me. While I’m up late googling intestinal worms I shouldn’t be, there’s a thing I always try not to do and invariably end up doing anyway on Twitter: argue. As a rule, it’s best not to engage. If you engage, you will not come out looking good. I have argued in favour of outlawing shorts. I once swore, in a sleepless blaze, that taramasalata is better than hummus (I GOT MY WORDS AROUND THE WRONG WAY). We all make mistakes. Nobody comes out looking good and screenshots last forever. This rule is also applicable to Amazon. The author-who-thought-the-one-star-review-put-him-down-$23,000 broke this rule. He engaged. He commented on the bad Amazon review, the reviewer wrote back and by the end of it there was a 19-comment thread right there on the Amazon page where anyone thinking about maybe possibly buying the book would see it. I’m speaking for myself here obviously, but I’d consider that kind of a turn-off. Had he left it alone that one-star review would have been an outlier compared to dozens of better ones (35 of them being five-stars) and probably regarded as the anomaly it was. But – like Jerry Seinfeld evening up his chest hair in that werewolf episode – he went too far. Could it be as simple as that thing where you don’t remember compliments, but you do remember the place, the time, and the tone in which you’re pretty sure someone implied you have a fat arse? Internet nemeses are easily gained and rarely forgotten. I should know – I have them as saved searches in my Tweetbot. But of course there is a big difference between bad Amazon reviews and disagreeing on Twitter: here there is money involved. Bad reviews pull the book’s overall rating down – the rating that sits right under the name of the book in yellow stars. The temptation to “game” that kind of system is often irresistible – to fans, to haters, to the authors themselves. Reputable sites make a point of not tampering with customer reviews, or at least being transparent about what's fair comment and what's not. Richard Longhurst, co-owner of Lovehoney, Britain’s biggest online retailer of sex toys, says that while his staff do go in and correct grammatical errors, Lovehoney will never outright remove a bad customer review from their website – the presence of the bad lends validity to the good. What prompted Rice to sign the petition were her experiences in an Amazon forum this past January (although she’s been talking about the Amazon problem for some time). She was answering questions while “predatory career bullies” (screengrabbed here) spat venom and abuse, anonymously. She told the Guardian: “They've worked their way into the Amazon system as parasites, posting largely under pseudonyms, lecturing, bullying, seeking to discipline authors whom they see as their special prey . . . They're all about power. They clearly organise, use multiple identities and brag about their ability to down vote an author's works if the author doesn't 'behave' as they dictate." Rice is right about one thing: there are reviewers out there who pride themselves on only leaving bad reviews. Meet Chris Roberts. Roberts has 50 followers on Twitter, where he describes himself as a “short story writer, Pushcart Prize nominee and Lord High Executioner of the Amazon One-Star review”. I first started following him in June 2013. I found him underneath a listing for a book I was thinking about buying and he was rubbishing, in verse. It was a one-star review, the absolute hammer-to-the-balls of the Amazon world. This month he reached a landmark 350 one-star reviews. Authors range from the relatively unknown, to Paul Auster, to Vladimir “nowhere near as good as Katie Price” Nabokov. Since he started in 2010, Roberts has read and loathed more books than I have stacked guiltily and unread by my bed. By review number five he was signing off as “Chris Roberts, God”. He has reviewed a collected edition of Nora Ephron's work by writing a one-act play in the style of Tennessee Williams. Signing himself “Chris Roberts, lord God of the spooky edge”, he reviewed a Thomas Pynchon book in free verse averring that "YOURS is a cyclical pantomime". He reviewed a book about Bob Dylan by noting, “Insanity is knowing Bob Dylan can't hold a note.../ And calling him a great artist.../ Insanity is his response to the Holocaust...” I wanted to know why he rubbished, on average, two novels per week consistently for the past four years. I asked him but was evidently too slow in answering my emails (I am shit at emails, I will give him that). It went: less than brilliantly. You can still find these daily updates on his Twitter if you ever need reminding: Matthew Taub at OTBKB had better luck than me in interviewing Roberts: here he ponders whether he is an “obstinate troll or literary muckraker”? Roberts has a very clear view on one-star reviews: he likes giving them, and Amazon won't stop him. He told Anne Rice as much: “even if Jesus Christ signed the petition, Amazon will do nothing”. Chris Roberts is probably right. But would removing abuse make Amazon purer? While an Amazon rating might matter little to you, it matters a lot to the author. Nobody checks an Amazon rating more frequently than the book’s author. It’s the sort of thing that keeps a person up at night. I should know, I have slept in the houses of the Amazon-ranked. Here’s what writers do in their dressing gowns: writers write back to people who slate them. We know this because in 2004, for one stomach-flipping week, the anonymous reviewer names on Amazon Canada were replaced with real names. By the time the glitch was rectified we’d already found out that the anonymously named “a reader from New York” was actually Dave Eggers, rebutting bad reviews. Some writers wrote five-star reviews of their own books (and their friends’ books) in order to boost the rankings. Don’t judge those guys, you’d do it too. When ratings equal sales, it’s a means to survival. It’s the online equivalent of going into a bookstore and rearranging the display so that your own book is front and centre (also left, right, above and below if my time as a bookseller taught me anything), or putting in a fake order and then cancelling it so the store is forced to put it on their shelves (where it can be rearranged in a week’s time to front, centre, left, right, etc). In areas of creative work, games are always being played: for good and bad. Remember that self-published author from Milton Keynes? The judge threw the case out, a) because such a small portion of the reviews would actually be considered libellous and pursuing it would be a waste of time and money, and b) the judge thought the author might have trouble convincing the jury that he had been wronged, considering his own online behaviour. He has been pseudonymously rebutting bad reviews and adding favourable ones. (He owes £100,000 in legal bills.) Essentially this Amazon petition is just a part of the wider discussion about people being dicks on the Internet. Even if you take away their anonymity, people will still find a way to be dicks on the internet because it’s the internet. As for Amazon reviews, they have become bottom half of the internet at worst, strategic puff pieces at best, and therefore irrelevant unless you're buying a washing machine or being funny about Penetrating Wagner's Ring. In the same conversation you have with your mum about that man from Nigeria asking her for money, you need to explain how Amazon reviews need to be ignored. Will the petition work? I doubt it. If Amazon’s customer reviews were a stain on your shirt, they’d be a go-home stain. No amount of scrubbing will get this out. › Cloning woolly mammoths may be a step closer with latest find Hayley Campbell writes for a number of publications, but then who doesn't. You should follow her on Twitter: @hayleycampbell. More Related articles Why do white working class people turn to the far right? Salman Rushdie: how Cervantes and Shakespeare wrote the modern literary rule book Understanding the boy who became Islamic State’s chief executioner – and his victims
Show Hide image Books 9 April 2016 Why do white working class people turn to the far right? Hsiao-Hung Pai's Angry White People asks what draws people to organisations such as the English Defence League - and finds a long-felt disaffection. Print HTML In an attempt to identify the roots of the sympathies in the UK for the far-right movement, Hsiao-Hung Pai has gone out and spoken to many “angry white people”. She has visited some of the British towns most badly ravaged economically in recent decades, several of whose populations have changed rapidly as a result of immigration. In the course of her journey, most strikingly in Luton – where the English Defence League (EDL) was founded in 2009 – Hsiao-Hung finds not only anger among residents at their present predicament, but also resentment and fear. This book is a timely one, coming as it does after a few months when Europe has shown itself increasingly intolerant of immigrants. People fleeing the conflict in Syria have been turned away from a cluster of Balkan countries. Meanwhile, in Germany, which has admitted over a million refugees in the past year alone, the movement known as PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) continues to grow in prominence. It is reductive to dismiss every concern about immigration as racist. Many of the worries voiced in Angry White People come from self-employed British workers who find their rates undercut by foreign professionals who can afford to charge far less for their labour. Yet it is also notable that the EDL, the main focus of Hsiao-Hung’s investigation, does have a significant racist element. And as the British National Party is in sharp decline, with only a few hundred members left, the emergence of the EDL is of particular interest. Tommy Robinson (born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) left the EDL in 2013, citing his disappointment that the group he had founded was falling prey to far-right extremism. Given his previous pronouncements, however, this was as disingenuous as setting fire to one’s own curtains and then complaining that the lounge is burning. Robinson tells Hsiao-Hung that the grooming of children for sexual abuse is “specifically Muslim . . . It is a Muslim problem,” glossing over child abuse in the Catholic Church. It is Robinson’s selectiveness that makes his prejudice so dangerous. It is entirely legitimate to be concerned about the violence wreaked by religious supremacists such as those who murdered the British soldier Lee Rigby in a London street. The problem comes when this murderous ideology is ascribed to a whole group of people. Robinson has more recently joined forces with PEGIDA, a movement with a far larger platform than the EDL. It seems that Robinson, rather than retracting his earlier positions, was merely seeking a bigger stage to promote them. Hsiao-Hung skilfully draws out the sense of abandonment by mainstream politicians that has led some people to support the EDL and others to favour the UK Independence Party. Although Ukip’s leader, Nigel Farage, has often made pronouncements that can reasonably be construed as discriminatory, his party still won almost four million votes in the 2015 general election. One reason for this is expressed by Martin, a forklift driver who, since being laid off by Ford in August 2013, has barely been able to find work. “I’ve always been Labour, I’m a working-class man,” he tells Hsiao-Hung. “But since Tony Blair’s New Labour, I became fed up with them . . . It’s not a working-class party any more. The Tories are for the rich, and the Liberals would sleep with anyone, we’ve got no one. Ukip’s offering a solution at the moment. I’m not saying they could run the country. But they’re saying what needs to be said.” Hsiao-Hung’s work could form a useful basis for policy formation. A big issue is the lack of a satisfactory minimum wage in the UK, which allows unscrupulous employers to exploit cheap labour. (Farage, incidentally, has been opposed to this practice.) The author also highlights the scant investment in facilities for young people. On a visit to Luton, she notes that “the lack of venues for social education is the one thing that every parent seems to talk about here”. Some might argue that these observations are not particularly new, and that it is this long-felt disaffection with the political elite that is building much of the momentum behind candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States. Yet the facts are no less powerful for being restated, and Hsiao-Hung does that very well here. If the book has any shortcomings, it is in paying insufficient attention to the role of Anjem Choudary, so often Robinson’s sparring partner in the media. Hsiao-Hung interviews Choudary, whose work with the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun has been described by the anti-racist Hope Not Hate as “a gateway to terrorism”. It would have been helpful if she had taken him more firmly to task on this score, but she seems largely to accept his line that his efforts exist solely in response to the ills of British foreign policy. Choudary’s trial on charges of promoting Islamic State suggests that there is far more to his views than that. The most crucial perspective in the book is arguably that of Darren, who was key to the formation of the EDL but was then horrified to be called a racist when he protested with the league in Birmingham. Darren, who marched against the National Front several years ago, has latterly become far more critical of EDL activities. (Although the league has seemingly been marginalised since Tommy Robinson’s departure, its underlying philosophy remains prominent; one of the men whom Hsiao-Hung interviews – a Ukip voter – observes: “Ukip’s just EDL with briefcases.”) If the advance of the far right is to be reversed, it is Darren’s viewpoint, by turns downcast and optimistic, that must be considered most carefully by politicians, journalists and society at large. “They [white, working-class people] are not overnight racists . . . They’re good, hard-working people,” Darren says. “These splinter groups are capitalising on the one in ten. Working-class communities got it really hard, you know. Most people are still trying to hold on to what is right.” Angry White People: Coming Face-to-Face With the British Far Right by Hsiao-Hung Pai is published by Zed Books (384pp, £12.99) This article first appeared in the 08 April 2016 issue of the New Statesman, The Tories at war More Related articles Salman Rushdie: how Cervantes and Shakespeare wrote the modern literary rule book Understanding the boy who became Islamic State’s chief executioner – and his victims The haunted Albania of Ismail Kadare’s A Girl in Exile
