As Nicholas Mason tells it, authors were publishing rave reviews of their own works nearly three centuries before Amazon and Goodreads:
The first widespread reports of puffery came in 1730s England, where a number of journalists and wits remarked on the recent shift from straightforward, unembellished announcements of goods for sale to elaborate schemes to trick consumers into buying shoddy merchandise. Two trades in particular were seen as the foremost practitioners of puffery: quack medicines and books. In fact, the first known commercial usage of the term “puff” (the May 27, 1732 issue of London’s Weekly Register) pinned the practice squarely on booksellers: “Puff is become a cant Word to signify the Applause that Writers or Booksellers give to what they write or publish, in Order to increase its Reputation and Sale.”
In fact, the book review from the beginning was “a compromised form”:
Nearly every British writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries either participated in or benefitted from ginned-up book reviews.
Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed her own translation of a French book in the Analytical Review. … In an 1817 issue of the Quarterly Review, Walter Scott anonymously reviewed his own Tales of My Landlord, slyly noting “none have been more ready than ourselves to offer our applause.” Other famous Romantic-era puffers included William Hazlitt, who lauded his own Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in the Edinburgh Review; Percy Shelley, who wrote a glowing (but ultimately unpublished) review of his wife’s Frankenstein for the Examiner; and Mary Shelley, who attempted to revive the reputation of her father, William Godwin, by puffing his novel Cloudesley in Blackwood’s Magazine.
Mason adds that “in many respects, the age of Fielding and Richardson is a remarkable analog to our own”:
Just as we grapple with the information overload resulting from the explosion of new media, these writers and their contemporaries were frequently bewildered by the new mores, codes, and ethics of the first great age of print. And just as many now are quick to blame the Internet for the rise of “astroturfing,” several eighteenth-century commentators saw puffery as the direct outgrowth of print culture.
The Dish 