This is brilliant.
There is a strong theory going round that the person responsible is ROBERT STANEK, one of the most legendarily disreputable authors in the business. For those not in the know, Stanek writes very, very bad, self-published novels about elves. We're talking about writing on a par with the average eight-year-old. He has several dozen alt accounts on Amazon and uses them to flood each entry for his books with tons of good reviews. Thanks to Amazon's system, if someone posts a bad review he then has these alt accounts each label a review as 'unhelpful'. If a review gets something like a 20-1 ratio of unhelpful to helpful reviews, the review is auto-deleted. So, Stanek can basically get any negative review deleted at will. He also claims to have served in the military and gotten a medal of honour, but this is disputed by the army (the only Robert Stanek on the army books apparently died in 1996).
The whole thing was exposed about 6 years ago but Amazon has taken no action.
The reason why people think that this person is Stanek using alts is that the title of the thread ("Rothfuss is a fraud,") seems a direct reference to the "Stanek is a fraud," thread on his own page, during the discussions on which someone mentioned Rothfuss as being a very good, major new author to look out for. Furthermore, all the military references seem to suggest a Stanek connection, and the tone of the reviews is very similar to Stanek's trashing of other authors.
At least one blog (down in the comments) seems to have automatically assumed it was him.
Also, and I can't believe this is coincidence, one of my friends who works for a science magazine in New York has reported that Stanek has submitted some articles and press releases to her magazine and others (he has a 'real' job as a technical manual writer), suggesting he is suddenly active again.
It might not be him, but if so it would be utterly hilarious.
Help
Abyss, on Jun 11 2009, 08:02 AM, said:
