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
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• Learning from failure while failing to fail in future failures
• Synergizing your synergy

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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