10.10.12
Bought and paid for
Amid a chart packed with erotica and romance, novelist Ray Gorham cracked our Self-Published Bestsellers List this week with a $1.99 thriller [77 Days in September] about an electromagnetic pulse attack (EMP) on the United States.
At Amazon, 496 reviews, 306 of which are “five stars.”
From the abstract of 77 Days in September:
On a Friday afternoon before Labor Day, Americans are getting ready for the holiday weekend, completely unaware of a long-planned terrorist plot about to be launched against the country. Kyle Tait is settling in for his flight home to Montana when a single nuclear bomb is detonated 300 miles above the heart of America. The blast, an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP), destroys every electrical device in the country, and results in the crippling of the power grid, the shutting down of modern communications, and bringing to a halt most forms of transportation.
Kyle narrowly escapes when his airplane crashes on take-off, only to find himself stranded 2,000 miles from home in a country that has been forced, from a technological standpoint, back to the 19th Century …
This year, there were only thirty days in it.
By contrast, a real book that was in stores and actually written about in the mainstream media, Matt Taibbi’s “Griftopia” — only 242 reviews, of which 173 were “five stars.”
Or Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” 84 customer reviews, 66 of which were “five stars.”
The business of buying “five star” reviews of Amazon vanity published books — at the New York Times.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon, finally destroying the idea of good books, a few hundred vanity e-titles a day. Thanks heaven! Someone had to do it, right?
Previously, the mind-numbing list of really bad Amazon vanity-published electromagnetic pulse doom books.
Jeff Bezos — the man said to think on a planetary scale — from the archives.