Fake accounts
I'm an indie author who writes cozy sci-fi. It's a little niche, but indie in general is hard to find a lot of traction, so I went looking for bookstagrammers who might be able to help with reach and visibility.
What I've found is that there are a lot of bookstagrammers who are paying for comments and followers, and that looks impressive but it only takes 2 clicks to realize you wouldn't get any reach from it.
As an example, it's highly unlikely you'll have 42k followers with only 9 posts. Additionally you probably aren't going to organically have 1500 likes to a post and zero comments. Some people seem to also buy comments, and they all seem to pick one thing about the book and everyone talks about the same thing (which is usually interpreted incorrectly), and then you click into one commenter's profile and they're a Vietnamese fisherman with 4 posts, all of fish.
The question is simply, why? Why bother faking accounts like this? I've had them reach out to me and offer $20-30 packages for 'promotion', but surely it's costing you that much to buy the likes and comments.
I just don't understand, and it makes it really difficult to find the authentic creators.