novel

Revisiting the Book Review Problem

September 16, 2012 By Mark 12 Comments

A few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece on the inherently dubious business of paid book reviews. If you’re an independent author or are writing a book for any reason other than personal interest the article is a must-read, but not for the reasons you might think.

As anyone knows who’s ever tried to search the internet for the best spatula or best toaster, finding credible reviews on the internet is impossible. No amount of persistence and no set of keywords will ever produce what you’re looking for because keywords are the life blood of both search engines and the soulless, SEO-driven marketing weasels who exploit them. The only chance you have of getting an unbiased opinion about anything is to already know sources you trust, and to hope they’ve reviewed the product you’re interested in. For many products ConsumerReports provides that kind of objective, metric-driven coverage, but when it comes to books there’s little chance a title you’re considering will have been reviewed by someone who doesn’t have a personal axe to grind or who isn’t part of the publisher’s own extended marketing effort. Worse, if you’re an independent author there’s almost no chance that you’ll be able to have your book reviewed by a reviewer who has established their own credibility.

The internet workaround for this problem has been to allow customers to post reviews of products they’ve used. The practical result of this workaround in the book world is that authors and their friends and family salt and sock-puppet their own positive reviews when a book comes out, while competitors and griefers and put-upon students post scathing negative reviews about books they have often never read. The resulting noise can be sifted through endlessly or judged in the aggregate, but even then it tends only to reinforce whatever sense of the work the prospective customer already had.

As the article notes, almost all of the current paid-review options are not in fact reviews at all, but sponsorship and marketing. And consumers of reviews are not confused about this transactional relationship. In fact, whether you pay for a review or not, the default assumption by the public is and must be that your review is corrupt. And since it doesn’t matter how sincere a paid reviewer is, that consumer bias only corrupts the process that much faster, with the lion’s share of the paid-review business going to the most corrupt reviewers. (What authors are paying for when they buy a reviews is a positive review, and paid reviewers know this.) I have no doubt that the best of paid reviews are better than the worst, cleverly avoiding, for example, over-the-top claims of grandeur, but the goal is always the same: to help sell, rather than to independently judge.

Made almost comically explicit in the article is the idea that traditional arms-length reviewers do not have this credibility problem because they do not participate in the review process as adjuncts to marketing and sales. But that assertion is patently false. It’s true that the New York Times Review of Books doesn’t take checks or cash up front, but they certainly take phone calls from publishers, and it’s a fair bet that the people at the highest levels of the traditional publishing industry all know each other and how business is done. If the good friend of an editor writes a book it somehow ends up on the top of that editor’s stack. If a book is written by a despised peer the title somehow gets lost, or savaged by a hostile reviewer chosen for exactly that purpose. If there are humans involved, and money and power hanging in the balance, you can be certain that the process is inherently corrupt no matter how squeaky clean the press releases are.

[ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Plot in Short Story vs. Novel

August 7, 2011 By Mark 4 Comments

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The full title of this section is Plot in a Short Story, as against Plot in a Novel. Having elbowed himself ample room to ignore plot in the previous section, Hills returns to the question of plot and his definition of a story as “something that happens to someone”:

What “happens” in a story, the real meaning, is seldom much concerned with the plot.

By ‘story’ here Hills means a short story. Novels, of course, are rife with plot, even if they aspire to literary goals — as Hills notes in comparing the two forms:

But at any rate it [plot] is of very great interest to even the literary novelist: after all, he’s got to get the reader through four hundred pages somehow.

The point remains, however, that meaning and plot are not the same thing. The vast literary real estate of the novel almost necessarily demands that plot act like a kind of superstructure, bridging and supporting the literary points an author wants to make on the road to meaning. For this reason novels lend themselves to a kind of separateness that is the antithesis of the literary short story. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Short Story vs. Novel and Sketch

April 11, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The first section of Hills’ book is titled The Short Story, as against the Novel and the Sketch. It runs four pages. In those four pages you will find Hills’ overarching thesis, a detailed explanation of what a story is and isn’t, a paradigm by which language can be mapped to every aspect of fiction technique, and an explanation of how short stories achieve a unity of purpose and focus unlike any other written form. It is the densest, most informative four pages ever written about fiction writing, and if you read the section ten times you will learn something new each time.

The single most important sentence in the whole section, however, is the first:

This book implies that some techniques in fiction tend to have absolute effects, and tries to explain what they are.

For all the disdain Hills directed at how-to-write books in the Introduction, here he is letting you know that Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular is a how-to-write book. Note also that he uses the word ‘fiction’ above and not the phrase ‘short fiction’. The techniques that Hills describes in his book are not unique to short stories, they are simply intensified and concentrated in short stories. Everything that he talks about — every technique — is portable to every kind of fiction.

What Hills is saying, here and throughout his book, is that ably doing X will necessarily cause the reader to think/feel Y. He’s not saying this might happen, he’s saying that these relationships are “absolute” in storytelling. The implied obverse of this claim is that your inability to do X — even if driven only by ignorance — will keep the reader from thinking/feeling Y. Bold claims to be sure, but what if he’s right? [ Read more ]