Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/these-4-books-were-published-with-fake-reviews-and-still-took-off/
Online book reviews carry a quiet kind of power. A string of five-star ratings on Amazon or Goodreads can tip a curious browser into a buyer faster than almost any other marketing tool. That trust, it turns out, has been exploited more than most readers realize. Research analyzing Amazon bestsellers found that almost two in five book ratings are fraudulent, making books the most review-manipulated product category on the platform.
What makes the following cases genuinely striking is not just that fake reviews were used. It is that the books took off anyway, for reasons that were complicated, unexpected, and in some cases entirely unintended. Each story reveals something different about how attention, algorithms, and human curiosity actually work.
1. John Locke’s Donovan Creed Series – The Million-Copy Milestone Built on Bought Reviews
By all appearances, John Locke and his Donovan Creed suspense novels were the quintessential self-publishing success story. Locke was a successful businessman from Louisville, Kentucky, who owned an insurance agency and was a real estate investor before he started writing fiction in 2009. In 2011, Locke had four titles on Amazon’s Top 10 Best Sellers list, including the number one and number two spots, and that same year he sold more than a million eBook copies of his nine Donovan Creed novels, becoming the first…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-04-28 08:40:00
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