Professor David Wilson is a criminologist from Scotland, who decided to track down a 'troll', that had been criticising his books for months.
The 65-year-old's most recent book, Murder at Home, which has a solid 4.5/5 rating on Amazon with over 9,000 reviews, was subject to a 'cancerous' one-star review from anonymous account, 'Junius'.
"'Junius' clearly hated my books," Wilson wrote for The Times.
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"Over the years, I’d become used to his scathing one-star reviews appearing on Amazon every time I had a new one published.
"The anonymous account had become my online nemesis."
The 'troll' described the Professor's work as 'low quality' with 'poor research', and something which 'would disgrace an undergraduate dissertation'.
Wilson thought the attacks were personal.
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"Junius seemed to take things too far. His attacks were ad hominem — they seemed aimed at my credibility as much as any factual errors I might have made," he admitted.
"His one-star review of my new book immediately made an impact on the average scores, influencing the measures used by Amazon to rank new books and threatening to reduce sales.
"It was also crushing. No matter how many books you’ve written, you tend to remember the bad reviews, not the favourable ones."
Instead of feeling down about the situation, the 'UK’s leading criminologist' decided to do what he was good at and 'solve the mystery'.
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"I surmised that he was a historian or at least had a degree in history. Handily, he signed off his reviews with the hint of an address — 'London, Middlesex' — although there was no trace of his name," he explained.
I typed 'author', 'Dick Turpin' and 'Jacobite rebellion' into the bar of a search engine.
"Up popped several authors who had dabbled in these different areas. One caught my eye because he worked in Middlesex — the historic county that now forms part of west London: Jonathan Oates."
After managing to get a hold of Oates on the phone, the fellow author immediately apologised and, according to Wilson, said: "I’m so sorry. I apologise — I know. I’m so, so sorry."
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Revealing what went down, Wilson wrote: "This time, on the phone, Oates and I discussed how, if I had made factual errors, he could have emailed me at my university: I would gladly have corrected them and acknowledged his help.
"We talked about how it was clearly unethical to review the work of another author on the same topic using a pseudonym; I suggested that his attacks seemed personal rather than professional and that, as a trained historian — he has a PhD from Reading University — he should know better."
Jonathan Oates told the publication that he was too 'harsh' and apologised.
“I am Junius,” Oates said. “I suppose I am now unmasked.”
LADbible couldn't find Jonathan Oates' contact information online.
Topics: UK News
Anish Vij