Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Are your book reviewers clones?

Given the few books that come out in my chosen field, I tend to check out the new ones as soon as they become available...or at least, I check out their sales page immediately; even through at the moment, I have no money to buy books. Nevertheless, I do find some interesting reading.

Like tonight, I checked out the Amazon page for a book that just came out---no name mentioned---and noticed that it had already gotten four five-star reviews. Actually, there was only four reviews all together. And they were glowing reviews. And all dated December 6th. Get the picture?

Now, as a scholar and a writer, I found myself curious about what other books these people were buying. After all, maybe I can sell them something. Upon looking at the other reviews that they have done, I rapidly realized that I will not be selling these readers any books. I had gotten the picture.

Each of them had brought a baby clothing item, a baseball book, and this new occult book. By the way, the baseball book is the exact same book. And these are the only three reviews that these four people have done. Get the picture?

So this book is selling to a very specific audience, one who has a new baby, only read baseball books written by a fan of the Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy, and who thinks this new occult book is the bees' knees. Get the picture?

I get the picture. If the writer who wrote the book is reading this, I would like to inform you that your audience consists of clones. I am not sure how big that audience is...but good for you for cornering that market. As for your book, not being a clone and having a long list of books that I cannot afford to buy already...well, I think I will take a pass on this one. After all, I am not a cloned baseball loving sheep baby-making machine. I hope that you get the picture.

(And if one of my readers have spotted the book that I am talking about and would like to propose a different theory, please feel free to leave it in the comment section. Please remember that I suspect that this writer will be googling themselves to see what type of press they are getting---bear that in mind before naming the author or the book. I am not sure that we want to give buzz to a book that only clones are reading.)

2 comments:

J.C. said...

Yeah, it's funny how the internet is akin to the land of make belief, so often a false reality perpetuated by digital plastic people. In addition to your findings here, a review of many books will show that certain people, while publicly denouncing flame wars, fan those fires in secret, behind false identities while often times using the same identities to exalt themselves.

M.C. said...

Perhaps the author has multiple personality syndrome and each of the alternate personalities living within him positively LOVE his book? Pretty sad when you need to review your own book once, let alone four times.