Publicists Slipping Bloggers Money? More Thoughts
Book designer Stephen Tiano, whose blog I just discovered over the weekend, has an interesting response to yesterday’s post about authors promoting themselves on blogs, specifically the passing reference in a NY Times article to “blog tour” promoters who said they’d paid bloggers to review their clients’ books, something I’d never seen verified and which I thought deserved further discussion.
“I was thinking the same thing about bloggers being paid for reviews when I read that,” Stephen emails. “For all the baseless whining by print writers about blogs that review books—and blogger journalism, in general—here’s a genuine issue that bears some discussion … at the very least. I mean, it does seem to strike right at the heart of the integrity of people doing such reviews. Or,
considering how many writers who are employees of newspapers and magazines, and also have signed contracts with book publishers, does it?”
Individual reviewers probably have their own solutions for that, if they even view it as a dilemma: One obvious solution would be to avoid reviewing books from the publisher with whom you have a contract. Any others come to mind?
3 September 2007 | uncategorized |
Cleary I Need a Better Publicist
I’ve had authors making guest star appearances on Beatrice since the fall of 2004, beginning with short book recommendations and building up to longer essays. And yet there’s no mention of this blog in Kara Jesella’s article for the NY Times style section about authors promoting their books on blogs. Oh well.
Most of it will be pretty familiar stuff if you’ve been online for any amount of time, but there was one detail that leapt out at me: “Some blog tour producers,” Jesella writes, “say they have, from time to time, paid bloggers to review an author’s book as part of a tour.” Gotta admit, that’s the first I’ve heard of it, but maybe that’s because “bloggers may or may not reveal this detail” and I’m just not reading the right blogs. Too bad the article didn’t identify any bloggers who took that cash—it’s an interesting ethical issue that deserves exposure and debate, particularly since it’s one of the few legitimate issues the self-appointed protectorate of book reviewing could use to smear its electronic competition.
(You know what was kinda fun, though? Pagan Kennedy’s back-page essay for the NYT Book Review on authors hanging out on MySpace. Again, not so new to those of us who’ve been online for a while, but fun nonetheless.)
2 September 2007 | uncategorized |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
