Bat Boy Found - Self Publishing on KDP and Making Fake Reviews of Books on Goodreads

 Decided to get more creative with my post titles. This is my best one. Only down hill from here.

I love books. Obviously. I'm a self proclaimed writer. I'd better love them. But my taste is pretty narrow. I mostly only like sci fi with a focus on space exploration. Sometimes, I'll branch out into something different (been trying to find some gems in litrpg, but it's hard) but there is always a robot, a wizard, an alien, a something. But at the rate that I consume books, I've been having a harder and harder time finding recommendations for good ones. I basically endlessly scrape good reads and reddit for recommendations. This has been pretty effect in some cases, found some good ones that I otherwise wouldn't have tried. But every so many books there is an absolute shit storm of a novel thrown in.

I won't name the series on the off chance that the no one reading this blog finds it and reports it to the author concerned and then I get thrown into a special kind of jail for people who say rude things on the internet. That exists. But I came on one that constantly gets recommended in the sci fi mecha genre. It is really well reviewed on Good reads, but most of them are accounts that don't have any profile data and just say "This author hits another home run." "Mechs in space, what more could you want?" "Finally, good clean fun in a sci fi adventure package."

But when I get down to the two and three star reviews where the reviewers do actually have profile pictures, they talk a lot about typos, discontinuity, and all around bad writing. But I'm like, the other hundred or so five star reviews didn't notice those things?

Obviously, this book is padded with fake reviews. It's been happening for a while. It's no secret. But my question: how do they do it? Is there a service that they enlist? Do they buy these reviews? I'd certainly never want to do something like this myself because it seems like morally wrong and only slightly different than stealing. But also, if these are paid, how much money do they spend and does it actually translate into sales and revenue for the author? Or is it just a money pit?

There are too many people writing and selling and not enough analytics about it to really know these things, but it seems like some sort of shadowy hidden world that's just beyond the horizon. What do the reviewers get out of it, if anything?