One more reason not to trust reader reviews

We’re not sure how long the website readerspoils.com has been around, but we thought we should bring it to your attention. It’s a site from out of the U.S. that allows authors to pay cold, hard cash for reader reviews on Amazon. Yes, that’s right, for just $15 U.S. you can get a completely “honest” review of your book posted to Amazon in mere days!

According to the site’s author guidelines:

Up until now the publishing industry kept a tight lock on their book reviewers, paying them large sums of money and giving them many freebies to urge them to review books for well known authors. The time has finally come where you, the self published author, can get quality, real life book reviews for the price of a couple of tickets to the movies.

But the owner of the site, PR professional Clark Covington, is apparently selling reviews only in bulk quantities: 100 reviews for $1,400 and 500 reviews for a mere $6,500. The book reviewers, incidentally, are everyday folk, people apparently so bored they’ll read (or at least skim) your self-published dreck in exchange for nothing more than a digital copy of the book and a Starbucks gift card.

Who knows what Amazon thinks of all this, but it sure doesn’t speak well of the integrity of its (already frequently dubious) reader reviews…