Does Fake Controversy Sell Book Reviews?

A few days ago, I read an article on Slate by my former colleague Emily Gould about blogs using feminist outrage to jack up pageviews, which was prompted by her reflections on the running feud between Jezebel, the feminist-themed wing of Gawker Media, and The Daily Show, a prominent example of what she describes as “[the] tendency to tap into the market force of what I’ve come to think of as ‘outrage world,'” which is to say, “regularly occurring firestorms… ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism.” Stoke that rage, the argument goes, and you get people adding their two cents in the comments, then circling back to see what everybody else is saying…

The idea of provocative statements calculated to stir up controversy reminded me of a suspicion I’d long held towards the New York Times Book Review, in the days before I stopped reading it regularly, which I once described in GalleyCat as “encouraging its contributors to make outrageously provocative assertions… for the sake of the buzz they generate rather than for the sake of advancing a genuine literary sensibility.” (Examples of what I meant include certain contributions from Lee Siegel and Leon Wieseltier… definitely Leon Wieseltier.) And I was reminded of that tendency by two separate blog posts this week—first, by Richard Rushfield’s questioning of the NYTBR review panning his wife Nicole LaPorte’s The Men Who Would Be King, where he flat-out posits that the Review may be “a home of vicious attack pieces;” second, by Katie Rosman’s rebuttal to the NYTBR pan of her memoir, a review that makes her wonder if “whether the reader is served by critics selected for their biases.”

(Disclosure time: The Men Who Would Be King was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt during my brief employment there, and while I’m not intimately familiar with every page, I liked the parts I read. And I haven’t read any of Rosman’s If You Knew Suzy, but I know Dana Jennings, the Times journalist who reviewed her book, because I interviewed him two years ago, after which, on occasion, he recommended books and CDs to me which I consistently found to my liking, so if he says a book isn’t good, it gives me pause.)

It’s been said that you should never respond publicly to a negative review because it never ends well; Rosman’s overlong attempt to prove that getting a bad review in the New York Times doesn’t bother her has, at least to this reader, the complete opposite effect. (Rushfield’s argument about the unacknowledged biases of LaPorte’s detractor is better constructed, and plays the wounded victim card significantly less.) And discussions I’ve had with friends about Emily’s article reinforced the point that not every controversy-generating article is cynically crafted with provocation in mind. It seems more, as I said in my first quote, like a matter of overarching editorial sensibility, a deliberate attempt to cultivate extreme, or extremely stated, opinions, perhaps all the better for being sincerely held, with the ultimate aim of being noticed for publishing extreme opinions. Which may, in the case of the New York Times Book Review, actually be an excellent strategy for warding off the indifference with which most other book review sections seem to be regarded (outside of their local audiences and publicists who would still like to see their books reviewed). But is what’s good for the Book Review (which, keep in mind, I haven’t read regularly in well over a year, so maybe it’s no longer like I remember it, although Rushfield and Rosman don’t give me much reason to believe it’s changed) good for books?

9 July 2010 | uncategorized |

Can You Make a Bestseller with Social Media?

A reader sent me a link to a post at James Frey’s blog earlier today, where Frey talked about how he’d gotten interested in a Facebook group called “I bet we can make these books best sellers,” the goal being pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The project starts off with two novels by Shawn Klomparens, Two Years, No Rain and Jessica Z. (which I haven’t read yet, but I’m willing to check them out at the next opportunity).

Frey raises the example of Facebook fans getting Betty White a guest hosting gig at Saturday Night Live, and raises the question of whether the same principle could be applied to getting a book on the bestseller lists. It’s not quite the same thing, though: With the Betty White project, all anybody had to do was express an interest, until it got to the point where Lorne Michaels or somebody noticed and figured, well, heck, we could that. Here, you’ve actually got to convince people to buy a book (or two), and that takes a greater leap of faith. And then there’s the whole issue of buying those books from the outlets that report to the bestseller lists, unless you’re just trying to get on some online bookstore’s charts… (Full disclosure: Several years ago, I was involved in a loose band of bookblogs that tried to leverage whatever “literary influence” we had at the time to sell deserving books; it never quite worked out as well as I’d hoped, in part because it was organized in such a way as to deliberately eschew marketing sensibilities.)

Still, something being hard doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, and the project that I was involved in didn’t have the advantage of Facebook or Twitter to help mobilize social impulses. So if fans can get behind a book and push it onto the bestseller lists, great! There’s a dark side to that—what fans can do out of enthusiasm, insiders can do out of cynical manipulation…a problem Seth Godin addressed earlier this week. “As these [social media] signposts become more, not less, important,” he observes, “there’s a significant market opportunity for someone who can, as Billboard did, clean up the charts and make the payola worthless or at least more transparent. In the meantime, be skeptical.”

8 July 2010 | uncategorized |