I need to admit something. I’m obsessed with how well my books are selling. After I release a new book, I check daily on how well it’s doing. That entails, among other things, heading out to Amazon and checking my sales rank. I’ve realized something disturbing. Apparently, there are some folks out there who have learned how to game the system.

My latest book has been the #1 Microsoft certification guide on Amazon for a long time. I’m not saying that to boast. In fact, that’s largely because the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam is the most popular Microsoft certification by a wide margin. Even so, it’s a stat that is of interest to me, so when I noticed my rank dropping a few months ago, it concerned me. As I looked into it, what I found concerned me even more.

I looked at Amazon’s list of best-selling books in the Microsoft Certification Guide category, and what I found was that I was bumped out of my position by a book called Excel 2023: The Complete Illustrative Guide. Needless to say, I was interested in how a book on Excel was classified as a Microsoft certification guide, so I started looking into this book.

The first thing I noticed is the large number of 5-star editorial reviews from people identified as financial analyst, entrepreneur (medium company), and so on. I found that odd since editorial reviews are typically from the media, not vaguely-identified individuals.

Next, I checked out the author, Nigel Tillery. Amazon identifies him as “an American analyst at a well-known credit union.” Well, good for Nigel! I admire the entrepreneurial spirit. I decided to buy his book and see what was so great about it.

The first thing I noticed is that the title page identified the book as “Excel 2021: The Complete Illustrative Guide.” Wait a minute! I purchased a book on Excel 2023, not 2021. This looks like the old “bait and switch” scam. Even though there isn’t any such thing as Excel 2021 or Excel 2023, I decided to let that go and I started reading. The introduction was filled with grammatical errors. The organization of the book was chaotic. The screenshots were inconsistent in quality and formatting. Something was definitely fishy.

Upon further examination, I found more Excel books that had made their way high up on the rankings of Microsoft certification guides. I purchased several of them, and I found them all to be extremely similar in content, formatting, and layout. I also found that they contained many of the same screenshots from the same sample spreadsheets. I became even more intrigued suspicious.

That led me down the path of trying to figure out who these authors were. The two I’ll pick on are Nigel Tillery (pictured at the top of this post) and Jerome Lindsey, but there are many others. (We’ll ignore the author named “Joe Webinar” – not even kidding – for now.) I found their biographies to be bizarre, so I decided to do some looking into their photos from Amazon’s website.

I pasted the photo URLs into TinEye, a reverse image search. What I found only slightly surprised me. Both were stock images. Nigel was identified as, “Middle-aged guy with trendy eyeglasses”, and Jerome as, “Bearded pensive man works from home.” That’s right. Both of these authors are completely fake. (I did legally purchase the photo of “Nigel” for use in this blog post.)

I didn’t stop there. I did more digging into the screenshots that appear in these books, and what I found was that these “authors” used screenshots and text (slightly modified) from many different websites that offer completely free Excel tutorials.

There are dozens of these books on Amazon right now. The numbers continue to climb, and they all appear to garnish high praise from reviewers. However, these reviews are highly suspect. I performed an analysis using Fakespot, and the review grade was an F. You do the math on that.

The bottom line here is that you can’t trust everything on the Internet. I realize this revelation comes as a shock to some, but it’s true. I notified Amazon of this scam-like behavior, but they don’t appear to be interested in addressing it. I’ll wait and see if that changes, but in the meantime, if anyone I know asks about learning Excel, I’ll be sure to carefully select where I point them. I recommend you do the same.

By the way, I’ve reclaimed my #1 position thanks to all the people who have put their trust in me to help them prepare for the AZ-900 exam. If you’re in that group, I thank you. Nigel and Jerome might be mad at you, but I don’t think I’d sweat it.