I'm not one to complain about authors/books I've never read. Nor am I one to swear off books by an author because of the author's behavior. However, I'm going to make an exception.

As you all probably know I've been getting back into fantasy literature. Thorough my search for good fantasy literature I've come across a self-published author named Robert Stanek. All of his books have hundreds of overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon. But, digging a little deeper reveals the truth: Robert Stanek is a fraud. The sheer number of distasteful things this sad, sad little man has done in the name of self-promotion makes it hard to figure out where to even start, but I'll try.

First, I'll start with one of the most distasteful things: He makes up praise for his books and attributes it to famous, GOOD authors in the genre that are very well known and loved. On one of his websites (Yes, ONE of his websites, he has multiple ones used to promote himself including fake fansites made entirely of accounts he and his friends and family made) he claims that he is very good friends with beloved young adult fantasy author Brian Jacques (The Redwall series) and posts fake quotes attributed to Jacques praising Stanek's work. He even goes one further. He posted a picture of Jacques at a book signing and photoshopped himself sitting next to him at the table...but forgot to photoshop his legs into the picture. If you are going to photoshop pictures, make sure you have all your body parts in the picture!

Needless to say, Jacques eventually heard about this and demanded he take the photo and fake quotes attributed to himself and other famous authors down. So now Stanek is forced to get by with unattributed fake quotes praising his work, or fake quotes attributed to random reviewers on Amazon. Poor guy.

The next major campaign of distaste he launched is just as bad. He has thoroughly exploited Amazon's review system by creating TONS of fake accounts and getting family and friends to do the same. He uses all these fake accounts to post dozens and dozens of fake 5 star reviews and to get Amazon to remove genuine low score reviews by using all his accounts to complain and report the bad reviews for trolling. He also starts threads in the Amazon discussion boards and carries on gushing fan discussions with himself using the dozens of fake accounts he made.

It gets worse. Not too long ago many fantasy literature fans noticed a very suspicious flood of 1 star reviews directed at many moderately well known fantasy authors that have highly rated novels, such as Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind) and Steve Erikson (The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy epic series) The reviews often directed people towards other authors, such as George R. R. Martin (Song of Fire and Ice series), Tolkien, Rowling, and ROBERT STANEK. Closer inspection reveals that the people writing the flood of 1 star reviews are the same people who wrote all the praising reviews for Stanek's own work. Yep, you guessed it right. Stanek and his family/friends began using all those dozens of fake accounts to promote Stanek by BRINGING DOWN THE RATING SCORES OF OTHER AUTHORS and recommending other "quality" authors while slipping in a plug for Stanek's novels! Amazon eventually caught on and deleted many of the reviews, but a few are still around. Even still, Stanek keeps using these fake accounts to troll those same authors by making (And responding to via other fake accounts) negative threads in the discussion boards bashing the authors.

To add insult to injury Stanek also actively searches for blogs, websites, and reviews around the Internet that are critical of his work and unsavory marketing tactics and tries to get them removed, often with the threat of legal action, but other times by spamming the sites in question.

Never let this sad, sad little hack of a man get your money. Never buy his books. Don't do ANYTHING that could result in him getting your money. Look him up and you'll find tons of websites showing proof of the very things I just talked about. Heck, many fantasy literature fansites have taken down the Robert Stanek page and replaced it with a message saying that they have removed him due to his overzealous and dishonest self-promotion marketing campaigns.

Besides, you aren't missing much. The way I understand it all his books are crappy, generic Tolkien-esque rip-offs with terrible writing anyway.