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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.

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Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: books, credibility, Fiction, new york times, novel, reviews

Ditchwalk at Year Two

September 3, 2011 By Mark 7 Comments

Another year has come and gone here at Ditchwalk. For the second straight year any personal predictions I might have made last August have been completely voided by the intervening 365 days. Takeaway: don’t think too far ahead.

The most interesting thing about the past year, from my own myopic point of view as well as the point of view of the greater storytelling universe, is that self-publishing is no longer seen as even a lifestyle choice. Established/commercial pipelines will always exist, but the indy storytelling spirit is now fully legitimized across all mediums.

I can’t think of a better turn of events. Anything that liberates and validates writing is a good thing. We can worry about the ocean of work that’s being produced after we empower everyone who wants to write.

Speaking of which, I think the biggest problem facing publishing at all levels today is the problem of sifting, curating and reviewing content. I’ve looked far and wide for an appropriate place to submit my collection of short stories for objective review, but have essentially come up empty. Yet I’m not surprised. If the value of most stories — as determined by demand — is zero, then making a living as an independent reviewer is going to be economically impossible.

Unless you’re a part of the traditional New York publishing pipeline there’s little money in writing reviews no matter how you approach the task. Which of course leads to ugly practices like ‘paid reviews’ and ‘promoted reviews’ and every other form of marketing fraud you can imagine.

I don’t have a solution here. Reviewing demands credibility — along with considerable craft knowledge — and there just doesn’t seem to be any money in being credible these days. Better to whore yourself out as a celebrity and cry all the way to the bank.

How all this affects future plans is a bit schitzy. On one hand I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing a month from now, let alone six months or a year. On the other hand I no longer concern myself with trying to fit my ideas into a market or medium. Provided I can eke out a minimal level of subsistence I feel completely free to write what I want to write.

As to output, I hope to be considerably more productive. A Neil Rorke novel, a non-fiction book, and maybe a screenplay or two, along with blogging here and at NeilRorke.com.

I’d also like to end up some place where I can plug my electric guitar in for the first time in seven years. I think I write better when I pick at small metal wires that make loud, screechy noises.

Year One post here. Six-month post here. Inaugural post here. Food for thought here.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: credibility, Ditchwalk, reviews, two, year

Feedback and Distortion

September 29, 2009 By Mark 5 Comments

In what has turned out to be a nice bit of convergence, I started this post last night (title included), then woke to find a very nice interview of Richard Nash by Guy Gonzalez that helped focus my thoughts.

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed myself hesitating to write a few comments on sites for fear of A) appearing like a self-marketing weasel, and B) appearing like a know-it-all weasel. It’s not so much that I’m trying to pass along anything even remotely controversial, but that, as a writer, I’m intensely conscious of how my comments or feedback may affect other readers’ or visitors’ perceptions. To the extent that all information in a conversation affects the next part of that conversation, these things are inevitable. Distortion in this sense is neither positive or negative: it’s simply the effect of the weight of one’s words on the subject at hand.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Cursor, Guy Gonzalez, reviews, richard nash