Can book reviewers at big dailies ever master crowd-sourcing? Why small publishers should care
“With large publishers flooding ever smaller # of book review pages w big-name authors this fall, will small pubs be completely closed out?”
So tweets Ron Charles, an editor with the Washington Post book section.
Excellent question. It’s the very kind of challenge I’m up against with The Solomon Scandals despite the nice send-off I got from the Washington City Paper (“same dark zeal Hammett held for Frisco or Chandler had for Los Angeles”).
With a tiny publisher, even an award-winning one like Twilight Times Books, a first novel might as well not exist in the minds of book editors at most big-city newspapers.
Opportunity for crowd-sourcing
But look, this is actually an opportunity for a refined version of Amazon’s crowd sourcing (in the form of reader-written reviews, aka comments on for sake on Amazon). Book review editors could still cover The Big Books while letting readers discover small-press titles. Readers could debates the merits of books from tiny publishers—which the editors could bless in some cases when they agreed.
Will such a scenario actually unfold, though? Papers such as the Post can be a little too control-minded and worry excessively about the barbaric hordes, thus putting themselves at a disadvantage in an interactive era.
On the related topic of local fiction…
Speaking with obvious bias, I’d also suggest that big city dailies in many cases are negligent in reviewing and otherwise writing about local fiction. Talk about ways to drum up readers for both book sections and the novelists themselves!
In an e-book and POD age, local fiction will be easier to produce, and crowd-sourced reviewing could cut through the clutter. Arrangements at local libraries and local bookstores could help connect writers with appropriate local editors. Furthermore, with “space” so cheap, the Post could even publish excerpts from local books and maybe even some in full. Dickens-style serialization, anyone? Ad-supported books within newspapers? Didn’t many and perhaps even most of Dickens’ novels appear first as installments (image from PBS)?
Some positive news about the Post Book World: With book reviews showing up in the Outlook and Style sections, the paper’s book side is supposedly drawing more reader attention than when Book World was a separate section in the print edition. Even before the change, reviews did appear in Style. But now they are receiving better play there.
The current solution isn’t my favorite, but was far, far better than totally killing off Book World.
June 8th, 2009 at 11:20 am
MUST you mention your book in every single post? I come here to read about ebook news and issues, not for the constant shilling. There’s at least one ad on every page, multiple posts about it, etc.,etc., etc.
You’re about to lose an avid reader here if you don’t give it a break.
June 8th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Many thanks for your thoughts, Kate. First an idea. Then I’ll explain why I’m doing what I’m doing.
In the main part of the blog, I’ll post an invitation to all regular TeleRead readers with books to promote. They can send me 200-word summaries and point to cover images at Amazon, etc.; I’ll publish the first ten or so that I receive. The readers won’t get the same space I use, obviously, but I’d like to do that anyway. It would be fun to see what other members of the TeleRead community are up to. Some of our most loyal regulars write romances, but as long as they’re the kind of titles that could be displayed at a typical U.S. public library, I’ll go with ‘em. Wait. I’ll actually make that 11 readers if you yourself have a book to mention and ten people get in line ahead of you. Send info to drNOSPAMteleread.org.
Now about the Scandals mentions. I do them in context to make my points on various topics and also to let readers know where I’m coming from on industry issues. Remember the New York Times guy who was writing on the credit crisis without mentioning his own extraordinary situation? Disclosure would have helped.
Sorry if the above approach rubs you the wrong way, though. I’ll try to give it a rest for a few days, except for the two ads and mention in the post proposed above—unless someone objects to the lack of disclosure. I also regularly disclose my little investment in Google made for retirement purposes, by the way.
A few more thoughts. The book industry is broken, badly, and it’s only natural to use the situations most familiar to me. Would you believe, my book isn’t even listed properly at Amazon. Unless you type “The,” you won’t even see the title of the paperback. The Pentagon is a model of efficiency compared to the book industry or at least the American part of it.
Now as for the ads—clearly noticeable as such—we use a standard WordPress arrangement; what appears in the home page appears almost everywhere. And here’s something else to consider. We have a high percentage of repeat visitors, but many of our readers are seeing the blog for the first time. We’re getting 50K-60K unique visitors a month, so someone must want to come back, ads or not.
The other factor is that my publisher is small and cash-strapped—a description that may soon fit the large houses, too!—so this is my way of making up for the lack of a budget and for the tendency of big-city dailies to diss books from small presses.
If you want TeleRead without ads for Scandals at least, I invite you to pay a subscription fee. Otherwise a little empathy will help.
Thanks,
David
Addendum: My kind of book, set in D.C. in the 1970s, will not appeal to the typical TeleRead reader. It’s the minority I’m after. I’m also trying targeted approaches at Facebook and elsewhere. I’d write further today about my Facebook efforts except that I might end up mentioning — ——- ——–.
June 8th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Hi David,
I wonder if crowd-sourcing really can work for small publishers. If you’re talking about Amazon, people have to go to the book page before they find out what other readers are saying. So, how do you get them there in the first place. I have friends who are working on tags… but talk about a lot of work for small payoff.
Then again, Amazon may not be the best way to reach eBook readers–at least those readers who don’t own Kindles.
Rob Preece
June 8th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Hi, Rob. I meant Amazon’s existing crowd sourcing of reviews for paper and E. I’ll tweak that in the next ten minutes to be clearer. Thanks for the feedback! And don’t forget to take advantage of the opp to mention your latest book (see next post). David
Addendum: I can appreciate your comments re discovery. But Amazon itself has discovery mechanisms such as messages pushed out through e-mail. In that sense it is already doing some book-reviewish things (though it’s no book review substitute).