What an eye-opener!

As I googled for information about the difficulties facing fiction writers today, I found an interesting Article in Poets & Writers:

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Nat Sobel by Jofie Ferrari-Adler

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The article offers some very interesting and useful insights, not least this:

Quote :

Do you think book reviews are as important as they used to be?
I don't think so. I don't think anybody will tell you they are. A front-page New York Times Book Review can either sell a book or not sell a book. Sometimes it's because you finish reading the review and you can't tell whether or not the reviewer liked the book. There was a time when book sales fell off dramatically when the New York Times was on strike and there was no Times Book Review. I don't think that happens anymore, unfortunately. You can see the newspapers are cutting back on their book sections. They're not making any money. The publishers aren't spending the money they used to on advertising in the book review section. Look at today's Times Book Review—the number of ads is very small. Once a book review section doesn't make money, and starts losing money, it's going to be cut back. So between the number of reviews now available, and the effectiveness of the reviews, and where they're placed in the paper, I think we're seeing the real value disappear.

I didn't need to read between the lines, it hit me like a train! The good reviews were bought and paid for by publishers advertising on the review page. If a reviewer gave a bad review, the newspaper lost the revenue for ads placed by the publisher of the book with a poor review. So, the reviews were no different from reviews of POD books writen by fellow authors, friends and family. In fact, they were slightly worse -- they were paid for.
I don't know why I was so surprised!

Shelagh,
good information to remind us of how the industry has worked.
Greasing the wheels has and continues to occur. Another word would be "bribe" but that doesn't sound as nice.
A good portion of marketing/sales involves doing favors - a more acceptable expression.
The end users are the ones who are duped. Getting them to believe in the schemes designed by the marketeers is what they get paid to do. Because the industry is changing means that the marketeers will be devising new gimmicks. Our economy is based on buying and selling. Product turnover. That's what the publisher wants and everyone else involved in the chain of distribution. Sadly, very little is done in favor of the Author.

Pretty much everything today is marketing. People don't want to take the time to find out for themselves, so they will rely on a third party to tell them what to buy, what to read, what movie to see, and more importantly, what to think.

Reviews are just as good as the amount of money the publisher wants to spend to get them. Some reviewers will always pan anything that seems to be from a certain segment of the celebrities in the world, and will love everything by the rest. It's the pecking order, and the fact is that publishers don't really care how much money the authors make, just so long as the publishers make several times that much.

Pretty much nothing favors the person who is the doer, and everything favors the person(s) who put up the money.

A good example is J.K. Rowling. She has become a billionaire, but we all know that someone behind her has made a lot more off young Harry than she has.

Isn't it a shame that everyone can't just put their work on the table and let it sell on its own merit? No promotion, no reviews, no razzle dazzle, just every book and movie and everything else lying there and the consumer can just choose the one he or she really thinks they want.

Just goes to show 'there ain't no free lunch', even if it is deserved!

Thanks for the link, Shelagh.
The more I read from people in the business end of writing, the more discouraged I feel.

Ah well...

The whole marketing thing makes me nuts, anyway. The tendency lately to label everything as "green" is a good example. No matter if the product actually has a minimal impact on the ecology, they label it green to help it sell.

I'm thinking of seeking endorsements from The Incredible Hulk and the Jolly Giant.

lol @Lin

Psst Lin...seeing as how their both dead, and knowing how things can come together much better for us dead than alive, you just might be on to something. Me, I want the Pillsbury dough boy... because he's fluffy and giggles a lot.

But he's not GREEN!

madhatter wrote:

The whole marketing thing makes me nuts, anyway. The tendency lately to label everything as "green" is a good example. No matter if the product actually has a minimal impact on the ecology, they label it green to help it sell.

The Hulk lives. Edward Norton will star in the new film. Not as the Hulk itself, of course (but if Norton wanted to, he could probably pull it off..he's pretty great)

Shelagh wrote:

The good reviews were bought and paid for by publishers advertising on the review page. If a reviewer gave a bad review, the newspaper lost the revenue for ads placed by the publisher of the book with a poor review. So, the reviews were no different from reviews of POD books writen by fellow authors, friends and family. In fact, they were slightly worse -- they were paid for.
I don't know why I was so surprised!

Shelagh,

That's not what Nat was saying. Yes, the publishers sponsored the existence of book review sections, in newspapers all across the country (and probably the world)--almost no one else would advertise in those sections, because they were only read by people looking for book information.

But there has never been, to my knowledge (and I know several of the top book review editors in the business) any quid pro quo between publishers and reviewers. The book review editors are adamant that their reviews judge the books on their own merits. The publishers buy the ads (often for books that won't get reviewed anyway) because it's a place to target readers and book buyers. Publishers have been cutting their ad budgets, and that's been hurting book review sections--but not because of bad reviews. Look at any book review section over a period of time, and you'll see plenty of bad reviews, and plenty of ads from the publishers of the books that got those bad reviews.

Jeff

I wish they DID charge for reviews, actually. Maybe there'd be less book review sections biting the dust across the country.

The stores and publishers apparently no longer shell out for print ads like restaurants and movies do.

Jeffrey J. Mariotte wrote:

Shelagh wrote:

The good reviews were bought and paid for by publishers advertising on the review page. If a reviewer gave a bad review, the newspaper lost the revenue for ads placed by the publisher of the book with a poor review. So, the reviews were no different from reviews of POD books writen by fellow authors, friends and family. In fact, they were slightly worse -- they were paid for.
I don't know why I was so surprised!

Shelagh,

That's not what Nat was saying....

Jeff

I know it wasn't what Nat was saying Jeff. He said that when publishers paid for advertising on review pages, it was easy to tell if a reviewer liked a book or not but since publishers stopped buying advertising space, the reviews have become non-commital. I added my own explanation for why that happened.

Shelagh wrote:

I know it wasn't what Nat was saying Jeff. He said that when publishers paid for advertising on review pages, it was easy to tell if a reviewer liked a book or not but since publishers stopped buying advertising space, the reviews have become non-commital. I added my own explanation for why that happened.

Sorry, Shelagh, I still don't see how you get that interpretation. He doesn't say that the reviews became non-committal after ad dollars disappeared. Obviously, he could be a little more clear in his phrasing, but he is saying there were aways non-committal reviews, and they didn't necessarily sell (or not sell) books. Then he goes on to bemoan the loss of book review sections in general, because of the drop-off of ad revenue. But he isn't claiming any connection between advertising dollars and the favorable, unfavorable, or non-committal reviews--because there is no connection.

Jeff

Well, Jeff, there may be no connection between the reviewers and advertising dollars, but reviewers don't decide which reviews make it onto the review page and they don't have a say in the date of publication.

Conversely, the newspaper editors have to make these kinds of decisions and, at the same time attract advertising to the review pages. If publishers are no longer paying for ads to be placed on review pages, it suggests that the ads are not generating enough sales. Something isn't working. Maybe, in the past, editors were willing to coordinate the good reviews with appropriate ad placement and some bright spark decided that this was unethical. So, when the ads didn't increase sales, the publishers stopped placing ads.

Shelagh wrote:

Well, Jeff, there may be no connection between the reviewers and advertising dollars, but reviewers don't decide which reviews make it onto the review page and they don't have a say in the date of publication.

Conversely, the newspaper editors have to make these kinds of decisions and, at the same time attract advertising to the review pages. If publishers are no longer paying for ads to be placed on review pages, it suggests that the ads are not generating enough sales. Something isn't working. Maybe, in the past, editors were willing to coordinate the good reviews with appropriate ad placement and some bright spark decided that this was unethical. So, when the ads didn't increase sales, the publishers stopped placing ads.

No, ad sales people sell the ads, not editors. And the people who buy ads for publishers are not book editors or the publicity people who send books out for review. Some of the book review editors I know are acquainted with booksellers, authors, and publishers--but they aren't the people shaking them down to buy ads, and if they had to do that they'd have left their jobs long ago. In any major, reputable newspaper (which is usually the only kind with an actual book review section anyway, smaller papers having long since gone to an occasional column, if that) there is NO connection between favorable or unfavorable reviews and the sales of ad space. It's just not done. If word got out that it was, not only would the ad salesperson lose his/her job, but so would the editor and so would the person in the publisher's marketing department who placed the ad.

Jeff

I used to sell ad space for a daily newspaper but I had no say at all about when or how the ads appeared in the paper. I couldn't say how the decisions were made about the ads that appeared on newspaper pages from day to day or week to week, but I don't see why the review section should carry fewer reviews because publishers have stopped buying ads -- ad space could be sold to any business; it doesn't have to be publishers.

I thought this was interesting:

Quote :

THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern. Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues.

"79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues."

I wonder if the same percentage of readers feel the same way about newspapers?

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The decline of book reviews may seem to disadvantage authors but not entirely. I found this:

Goodbye to All That

The decline of the coverage of books isn’t new, benign, or necessary

By Steve Wasserman

It would seem that word of mouth still rules when it comes to book sales:

Quote :

The argument that it is book sections’ lack of advertising revenue from publishers that constrains book coverage is bogus. Such coverage has rarely made a dime for newspapers. Nor will it. Book publishers have scant resources; their own profits are too slim and, besides, newspapers charge too much for them to afford significant print advertising. Just to pay for the real estate in the chain stores consumes a huge chunk of a publisher’s advertising budget. Moreover, their own marketing surveys consistently show that most people who buy books do so not on the basis of any review they read, nor ad they’ve seen, but upon word of mouth. What’s worse is that most people who buy books, like most people who watch movies, don’t read reviews at all. For those who do, however, reviews are an invaluable way of eavesdropping, as it were, on an ongoing cultural conversation of critical importance.

As for ad space, it would appear that few newspapers can attract any kind of advertising to the book review section:

Quote :

If newspapers properly understood such readers and the lifestyle they pursue, they would, in theory, be able to attract advertising from a diverse array of companies, including movie companies, coffee manufacturers, distillers of premium whisky, among others. Diversification of ad revenue is a key component of a winning strategy of growth. But apart from The New York Times, no newspaper has dedicated sales reps whose sole job is to sell space for book ads. And even The New York Times, with three such reps, finds it hard to drum up significant business.

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I found this today while searching for something else:

Quote :

July 19/07: Michiko Klausner
The much-anticipated (by some) final volume of the Harry Potter series is reviewed today in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani and the Baltimore Sun by Mary Carole McCauley, breaking a "review embargo."
I am as "staggered" as author J. K. Rowling is reported to be. Not because the Times and the Sun broke the embargo - embargoes are silly anyway - but at the speed of the reviews.
I have, at various times over the years, had occasion to complain about the brutal deadlines involved in newspaper reviewing. And I've poked fun at the farce of "speed reviewing" as practiced, for example, by the Globe and Mail's John Allemang (a book a day for a year), and Amazon.com superstar Harriet Klausner (who writes some 20 "reviews" a week). The system is a joke. Usually, however, timely reviews can be honestly written because reviewers are given galleys or advance reading copies that allow them some time to write an opinion.
Not so with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This book was apparently unavailable in any form to reviewers (as with most of the previous installments). However, the Baltimore Sun, in their own words, "obtained the book from a reader who is a relative of a Sun reporter. The relative pre-ordered the book from an online retailer and received it before the publication date." Ms. Kakutani was able to get her hands on a copy sold (by mistake?) in a New York City store yesterday.
Yesterday.
And the review was posted last night.
And the book is 759 pages long.
Is this supposed to be a joke? Is it a fraud? Note that the other examples of "instant reviews" mentioned in stories appearing on Slate.com and the Guardian web-site refer to reviews done by teams of reviewers, of non-fiction books. Now I've said before that I don't think Kakutani is much of a reviewer. I don't think she writes reviews so much as book reports. But I thought she, and the New York Times, were a (little) bit above this kind of stunt. Meanwhile, her review doesn't give anything away and is worthless as criticism or consumer report. The absence of any reference to the text makes it clear that Kakutani only skimmed. Why bother with such a superficial "review"?
Because it's news.
Which is fine. But if we're really interested in saving or defending book review sections it might be a good idea for them to demonstrate what it is that sets them apart from the user reviews on Amazon instead of trying to beat the instant-media at their own game. The only race here is a race to the bottom, and that's one nobody wins.

http://www.goodreports.net/news.htm

Interesting, Shelagh, to say the least. No wonder reviews are hard to come by.

Wait a minute.... there was a "REVIEW EMBARGO"?????

Ah ... the things we don't know.

When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution fired it's long-time book review editor last year, there was a lot of griping around the country from NBCC and other groups about the status of these newspaper sections.

The consensus was that failure of the sections was partly due to the fact that publishers AND book stores advertise very few books and partly due to the reality that very few people were reading book review sections compared to other sections.

I never saw any of this controversy indicating that there was a relationship between publisher ads, book store ads and the kinds of reviews being printed. Most editorial staffs are very independent of most marketing staffs. I really don't think it can be said that the reviewers are being influenced by ad sales.

Malcolm