The Advanced Amazon Sockpuppet Strategy

Amazon ‘Sockpuppet’ accounts are virtual puppets created by Amazon authors to give their own ratings a boost. Using these accounts, authors employ tactics such as:

• Giving their own books a 5 star rating and a glowing review
• Giving other authors in their genre a 1 star rating and a damning review, regardless of actual quality
• Creating message board threads and other discussion topics praising their own magnificent literary skills, under the guise of an ‘impartial judge’
• Sending death threats to reviewers and bloggers who were less than fully pleased with their book

This is the Novice Amazon Sockpuppet Strategy. It requires little more than a second email address, 2 minutes to register the fake account and a vigilant eye to watch for any negative comments about their book.

The Advanced Amazon Sockpuppet Strategy is a way for authors to shake this model up and see better results. The process is much more time-consuming and expensive, but we all knew what we were in for when we signed up for this lifestyle:

1. Start with a newly released book of yours that has not received any reviews yet.

2. Create 965 fake Amazon Sockpuppet Accounts. These must seem to originate from 965 different locations (IP addresses). Better get to work reading up on how to use untraceable Proxy Servers to disguise the location of each account! Do this gradually over a period of 3 months.

3. Also create 965 fake Paypal Accounts. Load each one with the value of your book (told you this would be more expensive, but you’ll recoup a bit in the next step and the final result will make it all worthwhile). Connect each Paypal account to its own Amazon Sockpuppet Account.

4. Over the period of a month, start using your Sockpuppet Accounts to leave 1 star negative reviews about your own book. Make sure to buy a copy of the book first in order to make it a ‘Verified Purchase’ review (and give you back either 35% or 70% of the book value, depending on your royalty rate). The tone of the review must attack the book itself in odd ways and remain free from abusive language.

5. Once the month is up and your book has seemingly racked up 965 solely negative reviews, start your pity campaign. Email the story of how ‘hated’ your book has become to reviewers, bloggers and book journalists.

Now sit back and watch the sales flow in as people flock to buy a copy of ‘the worst book on Amazon ever’ and see what the fuss is about. Hey if you’re lucky, they’ll decide that it’s not actually that bad and win you extra salvation points!

Good luck.

The Marketing Guru-izer

I think it’s time to sleaze up the proceedings and run my book campaign through the ‘Marketing Guru-izer’. Countless people turn to the advice of these glorious self-proclaimed maharishis of the marketing world, and it’s about time I used their techniques on my own promotion efforts.

Here’s the result. If this doesn’t persuade you to buy the book, then we truly live in a sad world - one where people refuse to be taken in by shady marketing techniques.

***

LEARN IT. EARN IT. CONQUER IT.

…with Supervillain: The Concise Guide, the bestselling literary property from the hottest new British author Ras Ashcroft!

Testimonials:

"Within hours of reading the book, I started up my first new company and got in touch with a Swiss bank. THANK YOU RAS."

"I’m not seeing great results from Glenn Beck and his Goldline scheme, but I am POSITIVE that this fresh new life paradigm from Ras Ashcroft will suit my needs."

"Couldn’t put it down. Mostly because my son made me flip through it at gunpoint after reading it himself, but that shows initiative and I’m proud of him AND Ras!"

"There was a great deal of synergy between my eyes and this book."

Hi there! I’m Ras Ashcroft.

I’m an ordinary person just like you. I have a wife who bakes apple pie and a son who plays baseball. I used to be stuck in a boring, dead-end job, where the highlight of my day was delivering fresh coffee to a bunch of fat cats in a stuffy boardroom. My life was going nowhere.

But that was all destined to change.

The world has not been the same since the Arab Spring. It has highlighted the power of ordinary people, who can go on to achieve great things. I thought to myself - why couldn’t I be one of those people? Why couldn’t I learn, earn and conquer? LEARN IT, EARN IT, CONQUER IT! That’s the origin of my message.

By shifting the business paradigm, thinking outside the box, reaching for that pie in the sky, synergizing my efficiencies, using Web 2.0 and striking while the iron was hot, I could eat that elephant one bite at a time.

With Ras' book, I earned billions in mere hours!

Order my book now and you will receive $290,000 dollars worth of information in one neat little 99 cent package including:

• How to use synergy
• Becoming rich - some may possibly hit $10,000 in hours!
• Using Web 2.0 to interface with your minions
• Learning that superheroes are superZEROES - and how not to fall into that trap
• How to wear a Bluetooth headset and walk around like a WINNER
• Learning from failure while failing to fail in future failures
• Synergizing your synergy

You will also receive PREMIER PLATINUM STAR LEVEL 8 ACCESS to my special webinars. After briefly talking about my books, I will unlock further secrets in the supervillain ‘rainbow’.

Hurry this offer won’tlast!

Author Confessions - The Darker Side of Writing

Over the last few months, I have been gathering information on the ins and outs of the writing industry. Few stones have been left unturned in areas ranging from general writing trends to more hardboiled and controversial subjects such as ‘whether pricing your book at $1.99 is better than $1.98’.

However, very few authors have been willing to talk about their ventures into the darker side of the business. I’m referring to the various shady methods used to promote books (ebook or print, online or offline). Authors are afraid to divulge information about their personal attempts at these schemes, and perhaps rightly so, because this could put a serious dent in their sales once the wider community condemns their actions.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting subject, and I decided that the best way to explore it was with the help of Internet anonymity.

A while back, I set up an email account and put out a message asking authors to send in their confessions anonymously using puppet email accounts, under the agreement that I would publicly post the most interesting ones.

Please note: This isn’t an invitation to act upon these schemes.

Here are some of these confessions:

Anonymous1 emailed:

forgive me authors for I have sinned - I use my sister’s account to post 1 star reviews on the pages of other authors in my genre

Anonymous2 emailed:

I’ve hacked into the pages of book reviewers and added glowing reviews for my own book. One time I lowered the star rating of one of my rival’s books by 1, teehee

Anonymous3 emailed:

I mailed 1000 bogus letters to people in my neighbourhood, branded with the logo of respected travel companies, telling them that they had won a holiday and could come to the airport to claim it. 5 people actually showed up! At this point I told them that the prize was actually a copy of my latest book, ‘The Wild Holiday’.

Anonymous4 emailed:

yeah this isn’t so much a confession as a plea for you to buy my goddamn book, look just publish this link on your site ok: [link removed]

Anonymous5 emailed:

12 23 24 45 67

I broadcast these numbers on shortwave radio frequency. The sleeper agents know what to do. That’s all you need to know.

Anonymous6 emailed:

One of the perks of working in a nuclear power plant is…nah you know what, trust me people are going to know about my book very soon. :)

Overall, an interesting round of confessions. If you want yours published, please send an email to author.underworld@gmail.com

[Satire-Free Zone] $4.99 for Professional eBook Formatting (ePub and Kindle)

Independent authors can use all the low-cost help they can get, including a basic professional formatting service to get their books ready for uploading to many major outlets. I thought I’d lend a helping hand.

If you need simple, professional formatting for your book (anything up to 25,000 words), I’ve started offering my services for $4.99. I aim to deliver your book as quickly as possible. Depending on my workload, you can even expect to receive your book back within 24 hours.

For this, you receive:

1. Two files:

• Mobi (for the Kindle)

• ePub (for the Barnes & Noble NOOK, Kobo eReader, iPad, Sony Reader, Bookeen Cybook Opus, iRiver Touch, Adobe Digital Editions)

2. An Interactive Table of Contents

3. An embedded cover (if provided), well-formatted headings, text, paragraphs, symbols etc

Sample images of the type of formatting applied to your book (Click on the links): 

Table of Contents 

Title Page 

Chapter Heading and Text 

Contact Page 

To use the service, please visit: http://rasformat.moonfruit.com

The Disciples of Ink - We control literary destiny

The Disciples of Ink was founded in 1546 as a secret society to advance the art of writing. Many of history’s greatest writers covertly worked in our organisation and references can be seen in their works.

The three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth represent three harlots who turned down the bard’s advances during one of our infamous Masquerade Balls. Mark Twain was notoriously bad with financial matters, and based Tom Sawyer’s entrepreneurial trickery on one occasion where we gave him the ‘privilege’ of painting our headquarters in return for an increased share of his book royalties.

Even authors who were denied membership based novels on us - Herman Melville’s Moby Dick drew upon his anger at being left out and his unwise decision to spend the rest of his life battling us. Others choose not to think of us as the giant white sperm whale of the literary world, but as the real handle that turns the gears. Ernest Hemingway once put it best at one of our speakeasy book gatherings:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and shed blood for The Disciples of Ink.”

Of course for obvious reasons, our agents changed the accepted version of this quote to “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

What we do

This can be summed up quite simply: 

We guarantee the success of any book that is published by our members.

We pick our potential authors based on their previous works and welcome them to our organisation. In return for a 50% share of future royalties, our extended agent network guarantees its success.

How? Now that would be telling…Stephen King once asked too many questions about our organisation and…well the less said the better.

Why reveal our existence now?

At our most recent convention, one of our elders interrupted J.K Rowling’s reading of the last meeting’s minutes to bring up an interesting point. With the latest advances in independent publishing, the advanced state of social networking and increasingly lax governance on private institutes, it would be foolish to spend more money on maintaining a cloak of invisibility. Incidentally, the cloak of invisibility in the Harry Potter books was inspired by technology that our agents use on a daily basis.

That’s why we have privately purchased Amazon and are discretely announcing our presence to the world through this blog. We review every independently published book that is published on the Amazon website, and are midway through plans to purchase the remaining major outlets.

Congratulations.

Independent Authors: Be on the lookout for a black envelope with our wax seal. That represents initiation into our ranks and a better life for you and your books.

We shall leave you with a parting quote from one of our most successful member authors so far this century, Stephanie Meyer:

“I wish they would remove Bram Stoker from the Ink Hall of Fame. Vampires are kinda meant to be my deal, you know?”

The MedicAd Corporation - Free Private Healthcare!

The citizens of the United States have been calling out for cheap healthcare, without having to worry about the evils of ‘universal government programs’ and ‘helping fellow citizens with tax money’.

The MedicAd Corporation has proudly decided to step up and fill this gap left by the government and insurance companies. No longer will you be turned away at the hospital gates for medical insurance purposes. You can rest assured that the only patients we throw out onto the street are the ones who hate freedom and compassionate capitalism.

Recently, we have acquired a network of private clinics and hospitals around the country, where we treat all known ailments and conditions. Everything from sprained ankles and cosmetic issues to complicated neurosurgery procedures are treated by our medical staff. We also offer a helpful ear to our patients with interactive artificial intelligence chat functions.

Read on to discover what it costs (or rather doesn’t cost) you.

Advertising Your Good Health

In our experience, advertisements make the world go round. Apple could never have become the pioneer of technology and Chinese workers' rights that it is today, without a little help from Ridley Scott and his famous 1984 advertisement. You would not be able to pry into the lives of people you don’t know on Facebook, if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t let various corporations pry into yours. The advertising business model works wonders, and it is now poised to gift the United States its greatest innovation yet.

Free Healthcare!

Using simple technology and with the help of some of the largest marketing firms in the country, we can wean you off your high medical bills & insurance premiums, and put you on a healthy diet of targeted advertisements. 

Here’s how the process works:

Take aim at your bills

1. Visit one of our centres. We verify your details, take care of the legal mumbo jumbo (such as a full liability waver) with an easy-to-understand contract and welcome you as a member for free!

The MedicAd Screen Bracelet^TM

2. We attach one of our MedicAd Screen Bracelets^TM to your wrist. These light and comfortable screens are worn for the entire duration of your contract with us, and deliver targeted advertisements directly to you.

More money for non-medical drugs!

3. Your future medical and pharmaceutical bills at our hospitals and centres are completely free.

                                                                                        

Simple!

The MedicAd Screen Bracelet^TM

Our patented bracelets are no larger than an iPhone and easily fit on your wrist. When you join us, our sales team will note your preferred interests and appropriately beam exciting new advertisements for useful products and services straight to you on a regular basis! In order to best serve your interests, we ask you to adhere to these conditions:

1. Depending on the amount of medical bills you have incurred, you must 'acknowledge' a set number of advertisements per day.

Example code highlighted in red

This is done by viewing the advertisement, noting the random 4 digit code generated and entering it on the number keypad. Example advertisement acknowledgement numbers that we expect for treatments (please note that these figures vary for each person):

No outstanding visits: No extra acknowledgements necessary

Regular checkup: 3 adverts per day for a week

Cold Treatment: 10 adverts per day for a week

Breast Implants: 50 adverts per day for 6 months

Heart Surgery: 100 adverts per day for a year

Note: Patients who fail to meet these targets once will be fitted with our ‘second chance’ bracelet. These occasionally emit a harmless electronic shock when a new advert appears, to remind the patient to view and acknowledge it, until the day’s target is met.

Please refer to the end of these conditions to understand what happens if this bracelet is refused or a patient fails to meet ad-acknowledgement targets for a second time.

2. You must not attempt to remove or deactivate the bracelet at any point. Any issue with it must be attended to by a certified MedicAd representative (for maintenance / repair / any other purpose). The bracelet is tamper-proof and comes equipped with sensors that alert MedicAd to these actions.

3. The bracelet also tracks your daily movement. We only use this information to further tailor the advertisements to your preferences. Therefore, please go about your daily business as normal, without worrying that we will use any incriminating information against you in the future.

Breaking any of these conditions will result in the immediate cancellation of your medical plan, and immediate court proceedings for the sum of all medical costs incurred by the member to date.

Advertisers

We are always looking for new advertisers to promote their businesses on our bracelets. Please contact us to request a full brochure of advertising costs for types including:

• Regularly Scheduled Adverts
• Electronic Shock Adverts
• Adverts with Sound

Enquire now!

Dark-O-Late Ltd - Mind-Bendingly Great Chocolate!

Dark-O-Late Ltd was started in 2012 by a retired British government worker who wanted to fulfil his dream - share his grandmother’s delicious dark chocolate recipe with the world!

The heavenly dessert with a trademark bitter aftertaste and numerous health benefits, dark chocolate has found its way into the palates and hearts of millions. But at Dark-O-Late, we go that extra mile by infusing our chocolate bars with more than just sugar, butter and affordable labour.

The Base Ingredients

Our cocoa workers aim to please

We start with pure dark chocolate, made from the finest Ghanaian cocoa beans. Many other companies these days opt for ‘fair-trade’ chocolate made by workers who are paid a higher wage. We set ourselves apart by not participating in this scheme, since we believe in quality and trust that the free market will adequately reward these workers if their chocolate is delicious!

Our bees aim to please

Then we add our healthy sweetener - honey. While pesticides are being publically blamed for the recent 'mass extinction event’ of honeybees, you will be pleased to hear that this decrease in their population is actually due to our collection efforts. We have captured and nurtured honeybees in our loving Level 3 industrial treatment facilities for years, all to serve you, the ardent chocolate-lover.

Our mercenaries have perfect aim

Finally, this rich base is seasoned with a bounty of mixed nuts - cashews, macadamia, almonds, brazil nuts and walnuts all make the cut! These ingredients are sourced using the same standards as our cocoa, with workers lovingly watched over by our ‘fun-mercenary’ (funcenary) teams.

Once these ingredients are mixed together in just the right quantities (our secret!) and hardened, our trademark chocolate bars are made!

Oh but hang on…

Where are our manners? We’ve left out the most exciting part of our recipe! One more special ingredient is added before the hardening process, giving our bars an irresistible edge.

SF-8999

Our version of 'Green Energy'!

 

Our founder wanted to add even more to the experience of tasting his secret family recipe. He managed to synthesize a wonderful and safe new additive that gives our bars that extra zing! By adding a mere 100ml of SF-8999 (nicknamed SUPER FUN 8999 by our lovely cooks) to each large batch, our chocolate bars possess the following qualities:

• A caffeine-like boost without the addictiveness
• Positive mood-altering effects

Some media sources have also affectionately nicknamed this chemical the ‘mind-control drug’. Hilariously, one newspaper even stated that the actions of those who consume the chemical can be controlled by an outside source with specific radio signal frequencies. How funny is that?

By coincidence, some people who have eaten our chocolate bars have gone on to attack the offices of our competitors, left-leaning politicians and ex-employees who have attempted to slander our good name. We assure you that the only ‘control’ we could possibly exert over you comes from brand loyalty!

In fact, we argue that those unfortunate events were carried out by normal customers who weren't brainwashed, but loved our chocolate bars SO MUCH that they simply had to attack our opponents. We do not condone such behaviour, but we do encourage you to buy our bars!

Special Offer: For every chocolate bar that is purchased, 10 pence will be donated to the Chamber of Commerce in a country of your choosing.

Order our chocolate now!