First, Simon & Schuster has bought the U.S. print rights to Wool, the bestselling self-published science fiction title by Hugh Howey. Howey retains the digital rights, but Simon & Schuster will release hardcover and print editions. “This is a modern twist on the old paperback license, but in this case Simon & Schuster will be publishing the hardcover and paperback editions simultaneously,” Julia Prosser, assistant director of publicity at S&S, told Digital Book World. “We’re thrilled to be able to help Wool achieve greater distribution at retail and bring this talented writer to a larger audience.”

Publishers Lunch notes that Howey “had already made a traditional publishing deal in the U.K. (with Century) and agent Kristin Nelson and her sub-agents have already licensed the book in over 18 territories” and also lists some other print-only deals publishers have made in recent months — including Simon & Schuster’s print-only deal last year with bestselling self-published author John Locke. And Fox and Ridley Scott bought the Wool film rights in May.

Separately, the San Francisco e-singles publisher Byliner signed a deal with distributor Ingram to distribute its titles in print. In the statement, Byliner publisher John Tayman said “we increasingly hear from our readers and writers that they would like our stories available in print as well as digital form,” and he believes the partnership with Ingram will provide “the expertise and unmatched distribution channel to deliver our writers’ stories to all of the great neighborhood brick-and-mortar bookstores.”

Debate has been brewing in the UK since July, when crime and thriller authors from around the world gathered at the popular annual Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. A panel on ebooks featured two British thriller authors, Steve Mosby and Stephen Leather. During the panel, Leather revealed that he uses “sock puppet” accounts. Fellow panelist Mosby transcribed the exchange on his blog (and the recording is available here):

SL: I’ll go onto several forums, from the well-known forums, and post there, under my own name and under various other names and various other characters. You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself. And then I’ve got enough fans.

[Mosby]: So you use sock puppet accounts, basically?

SL: I think everyone does. Everyone does. Or I have friends who are sock puppets, who might be real, but they might pick a fight with me.

[Mosby]: Are your readers aware of this, or…?

SL:  Well, I think that everyone … well, are the readers aware of it? No … But they’re not buying it because of the sock puppet. What you’re trying to do is create a buzz. And it’s very hard, one person, surrounded by a hundred thousand other writers, to create a buzz. I mean, that’s one of the things that publishers do. They create a buzz. One person on their own, difficult to create a buzz. If you’ve got 10 friends, and they’ve got friends, and you can get them all as one creating a buzz, then hopefully you’ll be all right.

Jeremy Duns, a British author of spy novels and a journalist who now lives in Sweden, began investigating Leather and turned up two of his “sock puppet” accounts, one of which belonged to a real self-published author named Steve Roach. “Roach had been very annoyed at what Leather was doing in the Amazon forums,” Duns told me. “He called him out quite aggressively. Leather reacted very furiously and waged a campaign against Roach for about a year online.”

Roach told Duns that Leather posted one-star reviews of his books to Goodreads and wrote a short story featuring “a sleazy villain” after Roach. Leather also created a Twitter account, @WriterRoach, in Steve Roach’s name. He used it to promote his own books and to make digs at Roach.

‘You’ve outsmarted me’

“Steve Roach sent an email to Stephen Leather saying, can you please stop? You’ve outsmarted me,” Duns says. “Leather was very gracious in his acceptance that he had beaten this guy. He said, I actually have two Twitter accounts in your name. I’m going to delete one of them and give the other one to you.”

Duns taped his phone conversation with Roach, but Roach now says he was tricked and wasn’t told he was being taped.

When I got in touch with Leather, he called Duns a “troll” and sent me a PDF of a letter written by Roach which begins, “With regard to the confrontations that I had with Stephen Leather while we were promoting our books on the Amazon forums, I do not look back on it as cyberbullying, more a straightforward confrontation in which I eventually conceded defeat (because Leather was better at it than I was).”

Leather also confirmed to me that he had created fake accounts to review his own books. “Yes, I said that. It was recorded so I can’t really deny it,” he wrote to me in an email. “But I never really got a chance to explain what I meant and there was an element of mis-speaking, but yes I said it. I didn’t do it much, and only over a couple of months. The reason was that writers were coming in for a lot of flak when they posted under their own names and I was being trolled unmercifully. So it was easier to talk to other posters using a pen name, which is something that the majority of forum users do.

‘I should have just kept my mouth shut’

“I didn’t attack people, generally it was just a way of talking to readers.  I haven’t done it for well over a year.  I also tweeted under different names, and again most people on Twitter use pen names. I don’t do that any more, either. Basically at Harrogate I was asked how a new writer could get themselves known and I was trying to explain how to get a word-of-mouth buzz going. . . . Obviously with hindsight I should have just kept my mouth shut.”

Leather’s print publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, had no comment.

More recently, the New York Times reported that thriller author John Locke — the first self-published author to sell over a million books on Kindle — paid several thousand dollars for 300 reviews through a now-defunct site called GettingBookReviews.com. Locke had attributed his success to low prices (all his books are $0.99) and fan outreach.  ”Reviews are the smallest part of being successful,” Locke told the NYT’s David Streitfeld. “But it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.”

Over the weekend, Jeremy Duns exposed British thriller author RJ Ellory for promoting his own books under fake accounts and slamming books by rivals (Ellory has since apologized), while crime writer Stuart Neville has begun “naming sock puppet names” on his blog.

The retailer response

In response to my query on how it has handled “sock puppet” reviews, Amazon sent me a link to its review guidelines with no other comment.

Barnes & Noble did not respond to my request for comment.

Kobo did not directly answer my question about reader reviews. “We’re in the process of formalizing our online/social media guidelines,” Rene d’Entremont, the company’s media relations manager, told me. But those guidelines apply to Kobo employees, not to users. “For online book reviews, we collaborate with Goodreads.com, a company that shares the same core values of transparency and using social to encourage conversations among readers,” d’Entremont said.

Social reading site Goodreads also has review guidelines that prohibit “commercial reviews.” Members can also flag suspect reviews. “Our approach to reviews is very different from other sites,” CEO Otis Chandler told me. When users click on a book, the first reviews they see are by their friends, then from people they’ve chosen to follow, and finally from the broader community. The Goodreads algorithm prioritizes community reviews by number of ‘likes,’ the popularity of the reviewer and how recent the review is. “One of the most consistent pieces of feedback I hear from members is that they find reviews on Goodreads more real and trustworthy — ‘you can tell they are by real readers’ — than reviews on other sites,” Chandler says.

A code of ethics for writers

So far, 56 authors — including Laura Lippman, Michael Connelly and Lee Child — have signed this statement vowing they’ll never create “sock puppet” reviews. ”But the only lasting solution is for readers to take possession of the process,” they write. “The Internet belongs to us all. Your honest and heartfelt reviews, good or bad, enthusiastic or disapproving,­ can drown out the phoney voices, and the underhanded tactics will be marginalized to the point of irrelevance.”

The UK-based Crime Writers’ Association posted a statement on “sock puppets” on its website and says it’s “keen to find a course that helps preserve the integrity of crime writing, and the traditional supportiveness of the genre.”

So far, the “sock puppets” controversy has centered around crime and thriller authors, and the issue has received the most attention in that community. But these practices aren’t limited to one genre of books, and fake reviews remain a widespread problem not just for books but for other products online, with University of Illinois professor Bing Liu estimating that a third of online reviews are fake.

As he has shown with books like “Here Comes Everybody” and his ideas about how the “cognitive surplus” has created a crowdsourcing explosion, Clay Shirky has a way of putting his finger on trends in media — disruptions that we are all experiencing, but sometimes fail to properly appreciate. In a recent interview, he described one of those trends when it comes to publishing: namely, the fact that publishing itself is no longer a job, “it’s a button.” By that he means that the sheer act of publishing something is so simple now that it doesn’t even qualify as a job or a task that requires an entire industry. So what are publishers supposed to do now?

Shirky’s interview was with Findings — a website and service that aims to make reading more social by allowing users to share passages they have highlighted in books — as part of a series called “How We Will Read,” which has also featured authors like Clive Thompson and Steven Johnson. When Shirky is asked how publishing is changing, he says that it isn’t changing at all, it is “going away”:

[T]he word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done… We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.

Obviously, Shirky is being a bit disingenuous. Publishing things — especially something like a book, or a magazine, or even a newspaper — takes a little bit more than just a blog platform. But his point is the same as the one Om made in a post about what he called the “democratization of distribution” that social media and other web tools have created: namely, that publishing is now something anyone can do. You no longer have to be part of a priesthood or guild of professionals, whether it’s the book-publishing industry or the traditional newspaper business, in order to create content that can (theoretically at least) reach tens of thousands or even millions of people.

How do traditional publishers add value?

We’ve seen this with self-published authors like Amanda Hocking, who used Amazon’s Kindle platform to make more than $2-million in revenue for her books without the help of the traditional publishing industry, or John Locke, who has sold over a million copies of his self-published books. We’ve seen it in the news-publishing business as well, where web-only entities like The Huffington Post and Politico have created substantial media properties without the help of the traditional news industry — and in video, where videographers like Tim Pool and others have become one-man TV news stations.

And what are publishers to do amidst this kind of disruption? As Shirky points out in his interview, they need to think about what other kinds of value they can add, apart from the simple act of owning a platform (like a newspaper) or the distribution system for a specific kind of content (like the traditional book-publishing industry). That control — and the ability to manufacture demand or create information scarcity that came along with it — is effectively gone forever. Says Shirky:

The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet.

So an author might not need a publisher in order to reach his or her readers, since the Kindle and other methods provide all the access they could want, but they might see the value in having a personal relationship with an editor who can help them shape their content: when Hocking shocked some observers by signing a $2-million deal with a traditional publishing house, for example, she mentioned professional editing and support as one of the reasons for her decision. And Andy Carvin of NPR has shown how valuable fact-checking can be when applied to social media as a journalistic source.

In the end, Shirky is making the same point we have made before when it comes to publishing: if traditional publishers — of all kinds, not just the book industry — want to maintain some of the value they have had in the past, they will have to stop thinking about controlling the process of distribution or the delivery platform, and think more about the services they can add for authors and readers. If you’re interested in the future of media and publishing, be sure to join us at paidContent 2012 on May 23 in New York City.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Willi Heidelbach and Jeremy Mates

Simon & Schuster will handle the sales and distribution of the print editions of Locke’s Donovan Creed novels into stores (including online retailers like Amazon). Locke retains the print and digital rights and will continue to handle e-book sales himself. His agent, Jane Dystel of Dystel & Goderich, represented him in the agreement with S&S.

In a statement, Locke said, “There are many paths from author to reader,” John Locke said, “and any path that puts the reader first will be successful. This agreement represents an exciting departure from the norm, and I applaud Simon & Schuster’s incredible vision, and their willingness to provide a vehicle that allows all readers traditional access to my books.”

Locke is not the first successful self-published author to enter into an agreement with a traditional publishing house, and his distribution agreement with Simon & Schuster is more limited than the deals that some other self-published authors have made. In the most well-known instance, 26-year-old Amanda Hocking signed a $2 million deal for four new books with St. Martin’s in March. St. Martin’s is also re-publishing her Trylle Trilogy in both print and digital editions.

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) said that as of yesterday, Locke had sold 1,010,370 Kindle books. The 60-year-old Locke, who lives in Louisville, Ky, has written nine novels, mostly thrillers, including Saving Rachel, which hit the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) e-book bestseller list.

Locke prices all of his novels at $0.99 and does not plan to raise prices. His latest book is How I Sold 1 Million E-Books in 5 Months, a marketing guide for self-published authors, which sells for $4.99 on Kindle.

Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old who’s probably closest thing in the self-published world to being a household name (especially after the profile that ran in the NYT Magazine this past weekend), has said she’s sold over a million copies of her e-books, but apparently hasn’t hit a million on Kindle yet.