Hi, I'm William Stanek. Most who know me know that I've been writing for 40 odd years now and that my work has been published and/or distributed by every major US publisher, including Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, Wiley, and HMH, and over 100 other publishers globally. Of the 20 million words in my professional books, many were written for Microsoft, where they were translated and localized for use in over 150 of the more than 200 countries where Microsoft operates. This combined with world-wide readership of my work, written as Robert Stanek, and millions taught in training courses that used my work made me one of the most widely read and popular authors in the world for several decades, so it is any wonder this blog like several others I attempted to maintain fell by the wayside. :) Find news about my work and life at www.williamrstanek.com and www.robertstanek
Between 1 in 3 and 2 in 3 product reviews on Amazon.com are fake. They are bought and paid for. They are written by friends and family. They are swapped and traded on Facebook. They are incentivized from readers. Talking about this problem as I have for nearly 2 decades now has made me the repeat target of the thousands who make their living writing reviews, the millions of sellers who benefit from the fake praise and the dozens of Amazon employees working the system for personal and/or professional benefit. Having reported problems with reviews to Amazon hundreds of times over decades and received repeated, direct retaliation from Amazon employees for doing so, I learned the hard way about the active involvement of Amazon employees in Amazon’s own marketplace, whether to ensure the success of themselves, family or associates or simply to ensure the failure of particular targets. This occurring repeatedly despite state and federal laws protecting those who report criminal activity, c