This is… disheartening

[k_a_webb]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand-for-online-raves.html?smid=pl-share

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

Comments

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

It's not really all that new, because ...

1) People have been paying reviewers to say good things about books all along. It just wasn't as obvious earlier.

2) People pay for advertising all the time, and everybody knows it's mostly lies, and they rarely fuss about all the bullshit ads. This is just authors taking advantage of what cereal makers, car makers, movie makers, etc. already enjoy: the opportunity to pay someone to promote your work.

3) The idea that reviewers should work for free is unfair; they have a right to be paid just like anyone else. The idea that reviewers should never know the author is impractical, because many subgenres are so tight that if you ruled out all connections, you'd rule out everyone who cares enough to write a review.

4) The kind of reviewers people hold up as examples, like those working for big magazines, won't touch a majority of the books that get written. They rarely review books by women, or people of color, or any other underprivileged group, or whole swaths of disrespected genres. So if you want something done, do it yourself, get a friend to do it, or hire someone. Don't wait for a free handout from someone who's already decided not to like you.

5) It mainly works on idiots. Any thoughtful reader can pick up a book and figure out in about a minute whether it's reasonably worth reading. They can also look at a handful of reviews by a given reviewer and compare that person's taste to their own. If they don't bother to do those things -- if they take a single review at face value -- then they deserve the same disappointment as anyone else taken in by ads. A fully functioning bullshit detector is crucial for modern life.