Speaking of fake things, the proliferation of fakeness makes it next to impossible to read genre fiction. I enjoy the mystery genre, courtroom dramas, and mommy lit. The authors I know and trust to be actual human beings get older and sometimes retire from writing. The roster of authors whose work I follow in genre reading is thinning out. I am not managing to add new names to my list because the mechanisms of finding them are broken.
Amazon reviews are increasingly fake. In the past two days alone I have come across about a dozen books with a solid number of reviews, each of which consists of one or two words only:
– Excellent!
– Fantastic!
– Wonderful!
These are clearly bot-generated. After two decades of building a solid base of reviews, Amazon abandoned that model and started aggressively deleting negative reviews and allowing these fake ultra-positive ones. I now go for weeks without even glancing at the reviews of anything I buy or explore because I know that they are now completely fake.
Previously I could rely on the algorithm to give me suggestions based on my history of readings but the algorithm doesn’t distinguish between real and fake. Two of the five recent suggestions that I received were written by AI and recorded on Audible with a fake AI voice. I’m not out any money because these books were available for free through Audible but I wasted time and feel reluctant to repeat the experiment.
At this point, I have no idea how to discover new authors in genre fiction. My window of possibilities has shrunk dramatically.
Clarissa's Blog 
Recommendations from other people work best, but online discussions of genre fiction tend to be dominated by genres you aren’t into like romance and fantasy (and by annoying people with bad taste tbh.) I’m sure that at the very least, mystery fans have their discussion forums, it’s just not as front and center.
Maybe it’s time to reach back rather than forward. Look at the Publisher’s Weekly fiction bestsellers of the past. I’ve definitely seen some intriguing looking authors here: https://lithub.com/here-are-the-biggest-fiction-bestsellers-of-the-last-100-years/
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I look at the 1 & 2 star reviews, it’s a more honest review. I don’t think they are fake (because why would they be?)
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Many books, especially the more recently published ones, no longer have one- or two-star reviews because they are being deleted.
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I stopped reading Amazon’s book reviews awhile ago. About 10 years ago I would actually write book reviews – putting an insane amount of time and effort into them – but I stopped doing that, too, because when the review was negative Amazon wouldn’t delete it but they would delay posting it, ensuring that my pan would get buried beneath all the raves. (You needed to post your review ASAP for your review to get any attention.) My TBR pile is still huge, though – I don’t care whether the book is new or old, I’m always finding interesting books from blogs, discussion groups, friends, etc.
I do read reviews for other stuff – especially electronic or automotive items. Amazon doesn’t seem to censor them, there are plenty of detailed, negative reviews for hard drives and jumper cables.
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For Mystery try Sarah Hoyt’s Dyce Dare series. She is good at creating a sense of place, and the characters are fun.
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I asked ChatGPT to help with a list of courtroom drama authors. I hope this helps, this is what I got:
Classic Legal Thriller Authors
Writers with Strong Courtroom Procedure / Realism
More Literary / Serious Courtroom Fiction
Contemporary / Popular Crossovers
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Not genre fiction in the slightest, but I’ve just finished reading Tatiana Tibuleac’s “Gradina de sticla” and I think you really should read it too (no English translation yet but there’s a Spanish one – El jardín de vidrio). It’s a female bildungsroman with no self-infantilisation at all, and a secondary theme is mother tongues. Have to warn you it’s a pretty brutal read at times (the author is an Aglaja Veteranyi fan and it shows). I really hope the translation is good, because the original is real art – very flawed at times, but there’s a real talent here.
What a contrast with Andrei Makine’s latest (which I also finished yesterday). The man’s turned into his own parody.
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“no English translation yet but there’s a Spanish one”
I see there’s a Polish translation too (Szklany ogród) and it does look fascinating/horrifying…. I’m not so interested in bildungsromane but I’m interested in things from this part of the world, so I’ll be looking around for it.
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Serious literature is not hard to find. There is an entire scholarly and critical apparatus making sure that it survives. This is yet another area of human life where the life of the chosen few is going to be much better but people who can’t read serious literature are going to be doomed to fake books at an increasing pace.
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Which is why we are all eagerly awaiting further installments in the Great American X series
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Have you tried Goodreads at all? I am pretty sure that Amazon bough Goodreads? But the management seems different to me. The bot commenting seems to be minimal there and they certainly let the negative commentary fly. It also highlight authors in a way that’s pretty to ensure that they are human.
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Goodreads is totally, completely committed to push-marketing.
I quit the site a couple years ago when it would not, no matter what I adjusted, what I told it I didn’t like, what I added or deleted from my “read” history, WOULD NOT stop recommending me gay werewolf romances. Tons of them. Relentlessly. “Based on your reading history…” my arse.
It would be hard to find a genre I am less interested in, but Goodreads was so dogged (pun intended) in its insistence it could barely recommend anything else. I had to wade through heaps of gay werewolf (how are there so many of these??) schlock in order to find one non-gay-werewolf recommendation. And those weren’t great either.
Before that happened, GR was at least semi-functional for “people who liked this book also liked that book” type recommendations.
Haven’t found anything to replace. Storygraph is fun for just tracking purposes (I like graphs!) but lousy for recommendations and reviews. GR sucked for reviews as well.
ethyl
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–FWIW I even contacted their customer service about it. No dice. They claimed recommendations were pinky-promise *completely* based on what books you’ve already marked as read and liked.
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“recommending me gay werewolf romances”
I have not read any of those, but I’ve heard about them. Apparently the gay werewolves get each othe pregnant so… does that help or are you a bigot?
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I had no idea.
But since bigot seems to be code for people with tastes not dictated by marketing fads and politics, mark me down with the bigots.
You can’t make me want to read something retarded just by recommending it to me enough times.
That had to be either undisclosed paid advertising, or activist employees.
ethyl
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Yeah, some of us are known for refusing to buy into nonsense ;-D
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Love your comments
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