On a related matter

[james_davis_nicoll]

When I did reviews for PW, I told myself that wasn't the same as doing reviews for PW Select but on reflection, that was the wrong call: having anything to do with one arm of a company is supporting the whole edifice.

Although Romantic Times and RT Review Source are not the same organization, they are connected. The review I will be sending RT this month will be my final review for them, at least as long as their upper echelons embrace the idea of RT Review Source.

I have absolutely no ill will towards Regina Small of RT, who had no role in the creation of RT Review Source.

Comments

[elf]

I have a question for you (or anyone else who happens to see it): What's wrong with paying for reviews?

No, I know the answer, or at least, the common answers. I know that implying a paid-for review has the same value as one on a topic (book) chosen by the reviewer is a form of fraud. I know that the desire to keep the income-source happy can skew the review. (Can do so drastically.) I know it violates Yog's Law, and all the ancillary problems with that.

I know that, while Free Book For Review has been a standard practice since approximately the beginning of publishing, and payment to submit a book for consideration for an award is also common, paying reviewers outright (in anything other than more books by the same publisher) is often part of a scam to bilk authors and readers both.

But other than those... If you start with the premises that:
1) The book in question is at least moderately good (up to trad-published standards);
2) Reviewer agrees that, while they might not criticize the book, all their comments will be honest;
3) Reviewer will mention up-front (not buried in an "about" page somewhere) that they were paid to review this book...

What's the problem?

(I will grant those are not always the case, and they'd be very difficult to enforce as standards. But I will also put forward that those are not difficult standards to meet.)

As a reader--I am not an author--I am overwhelmed by choices. Even on a tight reading budget, I have millions of options. ANY review that helps me sort out whether a particular title is in line with my interests is a bonus for me.

There is, I grant, something very fishy about first grabbing money from authors to review their books, and then grabbing money from readers to read those reviews. (I'm not coming up with exactly what the problem is, there, except... yep, fishy. Wrong.) But what about a blogger who takes books and $20-50 and reviews them, highlighting the good parts and not mentioning the bad parts--and lets readers know that's what's going on?

From my perspective, anyone at all who can honestly say "This book reminded me of [author I know] and would probably appeal to readers who like their books"--is a help to me. A review that says "this is a comedy adventure romp with a hint of romance" tells me I'm not likely to enjoy it as much as "a steamy thriller with a few funny moments," which I might not be able to tell from the cover blurb.

Criticism would help me more... but given the thousands of books, especially indie and self-pub books, with no reviews whatsoever, I'd be happy with positive-only reviews rather than more complete ones. I can read between the lines of an all-positive review to see what's not mentioned--and I know other voracious readers can too.

Is the problem mainly that that level of honesty is rare? Is it that the money tempts them into writing for the author's edification instead of to inform the readers? Or am I missing something?

(Honest questions. I know it's considered a sleazy practice; I know some of why; I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing.)

[elf]

Followup thought: It's quite possible the answer is "it shouldn't be so problematic, but working in theory doesn't mean it applies well to real-world humans." The answer could be as simple as "something about the process draws out corruption."

I'm trying to figure out how much of the bias against it relates to the bias against self-publishing, which used to be a valid concern, and now we have a notable difference between self-pub and prey-on-authors vanity press publishers.

[graydon]

Were I to pay James to review one of my books, what would I have contracted James to do?

James is, after all, in that matter and at that time, working for me, not any hypothetical reader.

I can only want one of three things --
1. praise, reliably if not fulsome; paying to be told my book sucks is not a business model that shall prosper James
2. an increase in sales (James' reviews do result in an increase in sales), which is what "a good review" actually means
3. the kind of critical feedback that it is Too Damn Late to apply when the book exists as a book


None of those things can lead to good results; either I don't care about reality, I'm trying to recruit James into a scam, or I've entirely messed up the production process.

For James' opinions about books to be widely valuable, they have to be consistent and they have to be addressing the utility of the book to a reader. The utility of the book to the author can't come into it because the objectives of the author and the objectives of the readers are in conflict.

[elf]

First: None of this pertains to James in particular; he's got his own readerbase already, who base a substantial amount of their trust in him on a certain style of honesty, which would preclude being paid by authors to write reviews of their books.

I'm speaking in abstract--what about a new blogger? Or a site with 3-5 bloggers who've posted reviews at Goodreads and Amazon and decided to start doing their own book review blog? "We'll read stuff and write about it" is about what it takes to get small publishers and self-pub authors to throw books at you--and, as noted, some of them are willing to fork over money to go to the front of the line, without even a promise of a good review.

... However, yes, taking money and posting "this book sucked, and you can believe me 'cos they forked over good cash to hear my thoughts, and those thoughts are, don't waste your money on this book" will not get more money for book reviews.

So: Posit that the paid reviews have to be positive. Posit further that the hypothetical bloggers will refund the money with apologies if they don't believe they can write an honest positive review.

As a reader, I think their service would be valuable to me. Maybe not as valuable as a blog site that posted book reviews without payment. (OTOH, Goodreads, which takes reviews w/o payments, is of limited use to me; many of the reviewers haven't actually read the books at all, and some read well outside of their genre interests just so they can pan the books.)

I read a lot of indie ebooks. (Or rather: I used to. Right now, I read a lot of fanfic, in part because of the difficulty in finding decent indie ebooks.) From the reader's perspective: while a reviewer who's being paid by the author is biased, if the reviewer posts other content, I can get a sense of their overall taste and maybe ethics, and hopefully come to trust that "a biased review" is not the same as "a false review."

Someone who says "This book is an enjoyable mystery with a few clever twists" is giving me useful info. So is "this book was more romance than science fiction; the intimate scenes were a lot more detailed than I expected, and the sci-fi was handwavey space opera a la Star Trek--enjoy it; don't ponder it." So is "This was heavy on exposition and worldbuilding and light on dialogue; good for those times when you want to really think about everything that's going on around the main characters."

Hell, an honest "I read this and enjoyed it" is valuable info--even from a total stranger. (For a paid reviewer who promised readers that, while every review would be positive, they would also be honest--I'd be watching for "I enjoyed this" as opposed to "this was an intense action-adventure story.") A note of "You might enjoy this if you like X" is even more useful info.

I've read self-pub books where I couldn't say, "the time I spent reading this was not wasted." Having book reviews that boiled down to "I didn't find this a waste of reading time" is valuable to me--and that's about as honest as I could expect a paid review to be.

Oh, I'd like reviews prettied up a bit beyond that--a tweet-length "did not suck" is not likely to garner author dollars, and won't push the book high up on my TBR list. But there are many, many promising-looking self-pub/indie press books, that I would love to read reviews beyond the dreck that often hits Goodreads. ("LOVED this story! The main character had the same hair color as my sister, and she acted the same way when her boyfriend dumped her!" or "Hated this story; the author was a bitch to my friend on LJ.")

I am absolutely not recommending anyone who does book reviews, start taking money for them. If the act feels like sleaze, that'll come across in reviews, and there is no point in going out of your way to cater to the "All I want to know is, does it suck?" reading crowd. (By our nature, we read a lot of things that suck, and we're used to that.)

However: a blog full of "this book does not suck" posts, with tags for genre and other details, would be of interest to me, and might drag me out of the fanfic world back into books I have to pay for.

I do see the ethical issues, but I suspect most of them are more relevant to a different kind of reader than I am. I read approximately 30k words/hour; I can read several novels in a weekend, or literally dozens of short stories. While I'm always happy to find those amazing, heart-touching stories that will echo in my mind forever... I'm more interested in having something new to read on my next 2-hour bus trip, and knowing it won't bore me to tears.

Of course, readers like me weren't PW_Select's target demographic, and are not RT Review Source's demographic. Those magazines, if that's the term, are working hard to imply there's no difference between "author paid us to review this" and "we came across this book and it was so good we decided to tell you about it."

[graydon]

It sounds to me like you're asking for more effective advertising of books you'd want to read.

That's really tough; no one's ever found a way to consistently filter books. Someone like James can be consistently interesting, on top of a couple decades of reputation, but it's very hard to tell if someone else will like the book.

Fanfic communities can work for that because they've got large numbers of people feeding into rating systems and filters and there's no possibility of getting paid for legally doubtful content. That no possibility of getting paid is structurally important; you have to get status via gift-culture mechanisms, rather than a larger pile of money. It, literally, keeps people honest. The pre-existing commonality of interests involved in being in the fandom in the first place matters a lot, too; "the fandom" is a better target than "readers, generally" for just about everything to do with both writing and reading. (This is why there's genre. Fanfiction is effectively a non-commercial genre, busily developing its own internal conventions and expectations and terminology.)

There are some examples of co-opting pre-existing communities to, in effect, get paid for fanfic, but those -- like any other major fandom -- more closely resemble ethnogenesis than they do advertising. I think that's ethically unsupportable as a deliberate act.

Indie authors don't have the money to advertise and can't spend it effectively in any case (where would you advertise?); the thing with books is that the major constraint on supply -- the risk capacity of publishers -- has collapsed and the result is going to destroy the commercial utility of fiction, since it's pretty much impossible to compete with free and there's this endless tide of free because people naturally tell stories. (and some of the free's good.)

I mean, sure, Amazon's deliberately working towards that outcome, but it's pretty clear that most habitual readers don't insist on a copyedit. The value-add involved in traditional publishing isn't value-add enough for people to be generally happy about paying for it. Quality filters are pretty much a negative; fanfic prospers in large part because it does things that aren't otherwise available because of the traditional quality filters.

So that's eventually going to push books into a community thing where there isn't much of a mechanism to allow for the possibility of getting paid, much as music acts (and cartoonists) are using the music to get people to buy t-shirts and that supports the musicians. (and is also more ethnogenesis.)

There just can't be that many tribes; people will cheerfully belong to several, but the strength of feeling isn't freely available.

So I figure written fiction is going to turn into a very quiet corner of the artistic landscape; there's too much to read and too much to keep track of so there's no possibility of a canon or a common universe of discourse outside relatively rare fandom ethnogenesis events. More or less what's already happened to poetry.

[elf]

I expect profitable written fiction will stay around for quite a while; while there is plenty of free material, you need training and dedication to find it, and most people aren't going to bother. (I don't bother with genres outside of my favorite; if I want good nonfic, I scrounge up some rec lists and pay for something. I can find free quality fanfic because I've spent years learning how to find it.) (Currently: Search at AO3 and sort by kudos--and then avoid anything tagged "alternate universe" unless you happen to love that particular type of AU.) (Stay the hell away from anything tagged "alpha/beta" or "omegaverse" unless you know what that is and don't mind reading more of it.)

And sure, I'm always looking for better ways to get me the stuff I want to read. But that wasn't the point I was trying to make, or not the question I was trying to ask.

I can see why paying for reviews might not be *profitable* for an author--in the sense that it might not bring in enough extra income, in the long run, to be worth the twist on reputation it also carries. (Worked fine for Locke, though.) I can see that it might not bring the kind of fame or rep an author would like. It won't win awards. It won't bring substantial numbers of real fans, the dedicated kind who put that author's name at the top of their to-buy lists. But it may well bring in a good number of casual readers--"I want a new mystery novel; what's high on the charts this week?"

I know that the history of paying for reviews is full of scams and fraud. I can't tell if that's intrinsic to the practice, or a function of traditional gateway publishing, in the same way that "self-publication" used to be full of scams and frauds (and there's still plenty of vanity presses around to fill that niche). I don't know if pay-for-reviews could reasonably move into the same kind of economic status as pay-for-distribution: the service Amazon and Smashwords provide for independent authors.

Is there an ethical difference between "pay for an ad to appear on some book-focused blogs" and "pay someone to write a blog post singing the praises of my book?" (Presuming, of course, that the book is praiseworthy in the first place. Not talking about upgrading an evaluation--just being willing to evaluate this book, instead of the thousands of others coming out this month.)

FWIW, Amazon absolutely forbids buying reviews, even in the style of "I'll send out free copies to anyone who agrees to review my book with any rating they want." They crack down on it occasionally and inconsistently.

[graydon]

Is there an ethical difference between "pay for an ad to appear on some book-focused blogs" and "pay someone to write a blog post singing the praises of my book?" (Presuming, of course, that the book is praiseworthy in the first place. Not talking about upgrading an evaluation--just being willing to evaluate this book, instead of the thousands of others coming out this month.)

I would think the obvious ethical difference is that the ad is demarcated from the text.

Advertising is about identifying or creating an insecurity and offering to address it in a way that makes a profit for the advertiser. (The route to the profit can be mistaken or long, but that's the category.) Everyone targeted by advertising at least has the opportunity to recognize that it is not undertaken in their best interest.

Were one to pay for reviews to appear on a book-focused blog, the readers of that blog doesn't necessarily know it's an ad; indeed, I'd expect that business model depends on the reader not knowing it's an ad. The reader needs to think it's a review. (An ad wants you to buy the book; the review wants you-as-a-reader to recognize the reviewer as consistent and useful. These really aren't the same objective.) If they think it's a review, they're being misled.

That potential -- nigh-certainty -- of active deception is I think the ethical difference.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

What are the problems with PW Select and RT Review Source?

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Go two posts back.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Writers pay to be reviewed by them. Also Kirkus Indie.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

James, I admire your principles.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

And that he actually acts on them.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Me too.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Do they realize this makes them... useless?

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

Useless from the point of view of readers -- or at least those readers who understand the process. From a strictly financial viewpoint, the question is whether the magazine will gain more revenue from the paying writers than they will lose from readers who henceforth choose not to buy the magazine, and the strictly financial viewpoint is probably all they're considering.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

My local "INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE SUPPORT US SUPPORT US BECAUSE WE KEEP INDEPENDENT LITERATURE ALIVE AND WE ARE SO INDEPENDENT" informed my that they would carry my books (not self-published, but published by a small niche publisher, so I guess still "indie") if I paid an upfront fee of fifty dollars and let them keep forty percent of the cover price, and this would get me space for five books. Since the books sell for an average of five dollars each, the loss is about thirty-five dollars total.

Oh, and also, I could pay extra to have the book face-out with a shelf tag.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I'm okay with you naming names on this practice.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Bookshop Santa Cruz.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[(Anonymous)]

That is enraging. I used to go there for everything when I lived in Santa Cruz. Argh.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

At least when Barnes & Noble does payola, they give the books good placement.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I have friends in the book trade, and I look at how hard they're working, and I can't help but feel that they're dodos in the classical sense: they're working really hard on the long tail of a dying economic model because they love books and the book-trade community amongst their clientele, but eventually, they won't be able to feed themselves.

Which is not at all to say that this stance by BSC is justifiable, but I can understand why independent bookstores (heck, bookstores in general) are moved to do things like this.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

It's an increasingly common mindset in creative and creative-adjacent professions under late capitalism, I find: we might not survive unless we undermine our identity—which means, actually, we won't survive, but everybody's either caught up in panic or hoping for the best. Education's going through something similar.

[(Anonymous)]

Holy shit!!!

That is utter bullshit, and no indie in their right mind would ever institute such a practice. My guess is that they're in deep financial trouble, and might not be around for much longer.

Also, holy shit!!!

xfdryad, posting from work - an Independent Bookstore, as it happens

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

No, actually, they're a big deal, doing very well as far as I can tell.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Oh wait, my outraged memory exaggerated the insult: it's $25, not $50: here are the details.

[julesjones]

Romantic Times has in the past offered reviews in return for buying ads. I am not an unbiased observer in this. From a rant some years ago at Dear Author on a related topic:

"I’ll say right now that I have a bias here — at one point RT was giving authors to understand that taking paid ad space in the magazine would get you a review. During that period, my publisher took out a three page spread in RT to advertise the launch of their new print line. The launch lineup included one m/m romance — mine. It was not reviewed, and will not be reviewed."