Hate campaigns on Amazon and my rather disturbing experience

Anonymous hate mail had its moment in the spotlight this week, with this story: Historian’s wife and her poison pen expose dark side of literary criticism. Historian Orlando Figes, who teaches at Birkbeck, called in the lawyers when he was accused of penning nasty reviews of various colleagues’ work. How embarrassing, then, that the culprit was, at first, thought to be his wife! Heads were scratched over this. You would think that the wife, herself a lawyer, would use a rather more intelligent moniker than ‘orlando-birkbeck’ for her anonymous attacks. I tried to imagine the scene at the Figes breakfast table, but could not quite figure out whether they were laughing or crying.

Update: However, it was subsequently discovered that Figes himself had written them. A simple ‘wtf?!’ suffices here.

For the rest of us, though, redress for Amazon hate campaigns is unlikely to be found in the courts. Let’s go back to two years ago, when Cleaning Up was first published. I got some lovely Amazon reviews, but it wasn’t long before some ugly ones started appearing. Now, when you write a memoir, you’re going to get some flak, and I was convinced that one of the hate pieces was by someone I knew. Actually, in my experience, when you have any book published, you’ll make some new friends, and you’ll lose a few. Each time I’ve had a book out, a few people have simply stopped speaking to me. There are several possible reasons for this. They are disgruntled because:

a) They think they are in the book.
b) They think they are not in the book.
c) You have written a book that has been published.
d) You have written a book about your feelings and experiences, but you weren’t a child prostitute in Vietnam. (Applies especially in UK.)

In the case of alcohol-related literature, there is yet another potential reason:

e) Your book is not about Alcoholics Anonymous, and how great it is.

Like the embittered Weary Willies on Guardian CiF, AA wonks pop up on the web like demented whack-a-moles whenever there is a whiff of non-AA recovery in sight. If you want to see this in its most florid form, read the comments on my Independent piece about the book, syndicated on US site AlterNet. There are a few nice ones there, but not many.

Anyway, back to Amazon. After a few months had passed, I realised that three of the four hate reviews had somehow moved to the top of the page, and were therefore all that a potential reader of the book could see. I was baffled. As I spent 2008 recovering from an interesting illness, I was not fully on the ball, and it was only later that I noticed the large number of clicks the hate pieces had got on the ‘Yes’ option of ‘Was this review helpful to you?’ Someone had also been clicking ‘No’ on the good reviews. Now, although I was annoyed, as this would definitely have lost me sales, I figured it was just a bunch of disgrunts of the type mentioned above. Never in a million years did I think it could be an orchestrated campaign by one person, least of all a fellow author.

The hate pieces stayed up there for about a year, and then more of my readers appeared who, presumably, liked the book, and gradually, last summer, the page was back to normal. And then, a few weeks ago, I got an email from a fellow booze writer telling me he had pretty much nailed the person who had done this, to both our books. During our long conversation, he would not name the culprit, but a process of elimination got me there. My source said he had spoken to Amazon, who said they were changing their rules on how ratings worked. (I really should call them myself). I won’t divulge the identities of either my source or the individual author concerned right now (as of course my suspicious mind wonders if my source was doing some sort of double bluff), but suffice to say, the alleged hate campaigner has a major interest in AA and 12-step recovery. Much more worryingly, their job appears to be, let’s say, of a highly relevant pastoral nature.

To carry out the sort of clicking campaign this person allegedly performed, you would need a team of people, at different computers, as I don’t think you can just keep on clicking the Yes/No buttons on the same machine. And then I think to myself, no, surely not. Could someone really be using AA or NA meetings to conduct hate campaigns against people who question 12-step recovery? Telling them all to go home and click on those mean and nasty writers who question their views, so that they lose sales? No way. That’s nuts, right?

I might remind certain people of the 10th Tradition of AA which is: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” Sorry, guys. Too late.