Blogs: An Essential Part of Book Marketing?

In late 2011, I wrote a post about book culture, social media, and monetization, riffing off the public debate over marketing aspects to the popular FridayReads phenomenon. As I said then, “the question isn’t so much should [anybody] be making money off other people’s willingness to talk about their love of books online, but rather will they do so in as non-exploitative a manner as possible?”

Right around this time, I got an email from the marketing department at William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins, to which I didn’t pay attention because the “From:” line didn’t have an actual person’s name on it, and I know from experience that there’s usually nothing in an email like that I need to concern myself with. But then my friend Rebecca Joines Schinsky of The Book Lady’s Blog started talking about it on Twitter, describing its tone as offensively condescending to book bloggers, so I decided to dig it out and have a look. The opening was awfully glib:

First of all, thank you for reviewing books for us! We here at William Morrow value your involvement in the publication and marketing of our books. Your thoughts, opinions, and ability to reach readers across the world make you an essential part of the book publishing industry.

I didn’t much like that “reviewing books for us,” or a subsequent line about how, after letting the marketing department know which books we were interested in, “your job is simply to review the book within a month of receiving it and post your thoughts on your blog or site.” Because, you know, if the publishing company is talking about this like a “job,” and telling me how much they “value your involvement” and consider me “an essential part of the book publishing industry,” my instinctive response is, “Really? What’s the dollar amount you’d put on that, then?” (An apologetic follow-up email the next day managed nevertheless to continue this line of thinking, when the marketing team, apparently writing by committee, declared, “Each of you is vitally important to us and play an integral part in creating and sustaining the all-important ‘buzz’ factor when we publish a new book.” So now I’m integral to your marketing campaigns, eh? That’s got to be worth something…)

I don’t intend to single out individual members of Morrow’s marketing team, some of whom I’ve dealt with over the years (although probably not as often as I’ve been in touch with the publicists); it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some other Big Six imprint’s marketing department could just as easily have sent out a similarly tone-deaf letter at some other point in time—this is just the one that book bloggers actually happened to have at hand at that moment. Carolyn Kellogg wrote a thoughtful if somewhat alarmist analysis of the situation for Jacket Copy—thoughtful in its historical perspective on the evolution of the symbiotic relationship between book blogs and book publishers, somewhat alarmist in seizing upon an implication in Morrow’s original email that bloggers who weren’t reviewing the books they received in a timely manner might not see many more books coming their way. Here’s where Kellogg pins down the critical issue (emphasis mine):

“If that is really bloggers’ role—creating buzz for a publisher’s products—then it seems to me that publishers should be plying them with more goodies, if not paying them. But if the role of bloggers is different, to expand the conversation around books, things are a little more complicated. Does the number of readers a blogger has matter? Can and should there be room for disliking a book? Can and should book bloggers be book buyers, and are they? If some bloggers reject publishers’ freebies in order to establish their own freedom, should those that accept them somehow make that relationship clear? Should publishers make any demands on bloggers at all—and if so, are free books an even trade?”

Those questions touch upon issues I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and I’ve argued that individual bloggers should have the freedom to make their own ethical choices, whether or not those choices fully coincide with those made by “professional” book reviewers. (Over the years, my scorn for the “well, we’re better than bloggers, because we have an ethical code” argument has been fairly apparent, I’m sure.)

Some bloggers have chosen to embrace the “objectivity” of journalistic book reviewing in their writing, while others adopt an overtly subjective approach to giving voice to their passionate authority. Still others, and I think we’ll actually see this group increasing in rank over time, are upfront about their interest in somehow making a livelihood, or at least some extra money, from their efforts. None of these is intrinsically superior to the others, and there’s plenty of room in the digital media landscape for all of them to flourish to the best of their abilities. The mistake Morrow’s marketing team made was in trying to craft a single email that they could use for all bloggers, which inevitably led to a lowest-common-denominator message that came very close to insulting the intelligence of some of those people whose respect they most need to cultivate.

The controversy sparked by Morrow’s fumbled outreach to bloggers is nothing new: The same thing happened in 2008 when Thomas Nelson formalized an trading-advance-copies-for-reviews arrangement. Back then, I had this to say about that: “Every day that publishers are not actively fostering public discussions about their products—we hesitate to even call the desired results “reviews” at this point—is another day they spend allowing their market to slowly disintegrate.” I still believe that’s true, although just about everybody’s gotten better at it over the last three years. And I can see that as the impulse behind the Morrow email. They just didn’t do it right.

One last thought for now: Let’s circle back to that idea that blogs “play an integral part in creating and sustaining the all-important ‘buzz’ factor” around new books, and the contention that if blogs are so “integral” to book marketing, they should be compensated a lot better than they are now. And then you look at Bookish.com, or you would look at Bookish.com if it wasn’t still under wraps months past its originally announced launch window. Anyway, you’d look at how three of the Big Six publishers put money into Bookish expecting to compete with established book-themed social networks like Goodreads in attracting readers eager to, as the capsule description on their Google search result says, “find your next book and recommend books to each other.” Could that money—or, I suspect, significantly less money—have been better spent finding one influential/popular book blogger and turning her into a paid spokesperson for awesome books? (With, of course, the same editorial independence that’s assured for Bookish, should it ever see the light of day.)

The book publishing industry already has a lobbying arm, the Association of American Publishers, that serves to “represent the industry’s priorities on policy, legislative and regulatory issues regionally, nationally and worldwide” and, now that I’m looking at their self-description, I see they also strive to “showcase the value of content and the critical role of the dynamic U.S. book publishing industry around the world.” Maybe that’s the wellspring from which a paid spokesperson for awesome books can emerge, somebody who can devote himself 24/7 to introducing readers to writers they might enjoy reading—somebody with distinctive tastes but who won’t turn his nose up at “commercial fiction,” somebody given free rein to dive into the stacks and come out with one treasure after another. Know anybody like that?

2 January 2012 | theory |