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

[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.