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Aug. 30th, 2012 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupI tried. I tried so hard to read about this whole John Locke situation. And so much of it is just so incredibly boring.
Allow me to share with you The Interesting Parts Version:
John Locke was a 17th century intellectual during the Enlightenment. This is not that John Locke. That John Locke was also boring, but not NEARLY as boring as this John Locke, oh my god.
The story is that this guy named Todd Rutherford ran a review-mill where authors pay the mill and the mill churns out five-star reviews of the author's work to be posted on book review sites and Amazon.com. Reviewers are not required to give five-star reviews but are only paid in full for all five stars. His initial rank of reviewers apparently came from Craigslist, merely reinforcing my instinct to avoid Craigstlist at all costs.
Todd Rutherford also claims to have made $20 selling Playboy centerfolds as a seven-year-old, which comes off much creepier than he intended, I think.
Todd Rutherford is watching you. Choose your books wisely.
Now, it's illegal to be paid to endorse something online unless you make it clear you've been paid, but it's not like this has ever stopped anyone, or even gotten very many people in trouble.
Enter the not-Enlightenment John Locke, an insurance salesman and real estate investor who was apparently looking for a scam hat-trick. He wrote and self-published some fiction thrillers that really took off, leading him to write and self-publish a book entitled "How I Sold One Million E-Books". Not mentioned in this helpful tome is that he paid Todd Rutherford's company to generate five-star reviews for him. Locke claims it's just business; that reviews aren't really that vital but it's easier to buy them than cultivate them.
I kind of agree that Amazon reviews aren't that vital, because they're all in one place and that place is only visible if you have already found the book. But he got the reviews in October and his books started selling shit-hot in December, so what do I know.
Okay, back to Todd Rutherford, who is way more interesting than John Locke, though mostly in a train-wreck kind of way. Rutherford's "artificially embellished reviews" operation got outed, as it were, when a writer paid him $99 for reviews of what the New York Times called "An exceedingly bleak book, Sex, Drugs, & Being An Escort." She didn't get fast enough service, apparently, and went after him ALL OVER THE INTERNET. [My summaries here and in the paragraph below are partially inaccurate, entirely my fault for skimming; you can read Ashly's rebuttal and my response in comments.]
I kind of feel like John Locke had more hubris writing a how-to book about selling a million books when he conned his way into the sales, but I don't think Ashly Lorenzana is exactly guiltless given she went EVERYWHERE complaining that the con she was trying to pull didn't happen fast enough.
There is a lot of discussion to be had about the ethics and efficacy of paying for reviews. Outside of the economic sphere there's a lot of discussion to be had about the relationship between critics and writers, and whether critics should keep themselves at arm's length, or whether they should be involved in the literary life so that they have context for what they read. In addition, there's a debate to be had about whether this is that much different from big publishers who can afford to splash out on the kind of PR it generally takes to get a book to bestseller status. (I will never forget being fifteen and having a friend of mine's father, who worked in publishing, explain to me that books are mostly sold through expensive PR, which is why small presses have it so hard.) And that requires an examination of the tension between big publishers and small/self publishers, and the philosophy that any edge you can get is a good edge.
So there's a lot to chew over, which would be fantastic, except that it appears that everyone commenting on it is attempting to be as uninteresting as possible. MY GOD, PEOPLE, this is brickspace book wank. It should at least involve a few lols along the way. I keep trying to sort out who thinks what about which issue but then I start nodding off, or I stop reading because the person blogging about it has said something so incredibly irrational or stupid that I can no longer pay attention to their opinions.
And it's hard to form one of my own without hearing the arguments. It's easy to say "paying for reviews is wrong", but it's not that simple, especially when some publishers have the clout and cash to get their books seen in a way that startups and selfpubs can't.
So the basic opinion I have formed about all of this, which is no doubt informed by the article I recently read about the 1962 Edinburgh World Writer's Conference, is that WRITERS BE CRAZY.
Allow me to share with you The Interesting Parts Version:
John Locke was a 17th century intellectual during the Enlightenment. This is not that John Locke. That John Locke was also boring, but not NEARLY as boring as this John Locke, oh my god.
The story is that this guy named Todd Rutherford ran a review-mill where authors pay the mill and the mill churns out five-star reviews of the author's work to be posted on book review sites and Amazon.com. Reviewers are not required to give five-star reviews but are only paid in full for all five stars. His initial rank of reviewers apparently came from Craigslist, merely reinforcing my instinct to avoid Craigstlist at all costs.
Todd Rutherford also claims to have made $20 selling Playboy centerfolds as a seven-year-old, which comes off much creepier than he intended, I think.
Todd Rutherford is watching you. Choose your books wisely.
Now, it's illegal to be paid to endorse something online unless you make it clear you've been paid, but it's not like this has ever stopped anyone, or even gotten very many people in trouble.
Enter the not-Enlightenment John Locke, an insurance salesman and real estate investor who was apparently looking for a scam hat-trick. He wrote and self-published some fiction thrillers that really took off, leading him to write and self-publish a book entitled "How I Sold One Million E-Books". Not mentioned in this helpful tome is that he paid Todd Rutherford's company to generate five-star reviews for him. Locke claims it's just business; that reviews aren't really that vital but it's easier to buy them than cultivate them.
I kind of agree that Amazon reviews aren't that vital, because they're all in one place and that place is only visible if you have already found the book. But he got the reviews in October and his books started selling shit-hot in December, so what do I know.
Okay, back to Todd Rutherford, who is way more interesting than John Locke, though mostly in a train-wreck kind of way. Rutherford's "artificially embellished reviews" operation got outed, as it were, when a writer paid him $99 for reviews of what the New York Times called "An exceedingly bleak book, Sex, Drugs, & Being An Escort." She didn't get fast enough service, apparently, and went after him ALL OVER THE INTERNET. [My summaries here and in the paragraph below are partially inaccurate, entirely my fault for skimming; you can read Ashly's rebuttal and my response in comments.]
I kind of feel like John Locke had more hubris writing a how-to book about selling a million books when he conned his way into the sales, but I don't think Ashly Lorenzana is exactly guiltless given she went EVERYWHERE complaining that the con she was trying to pull didn't happen fast enough.
There is a lot of discussion to be had about the ethics and efficacy of paying for reviews. Outside of the economic sphere there's a lot of discussion to be had about the relationship between critics and writers, and whether critics should keep themselves at arm's length, or whether they should be involved in the literary life so that they have context for what they read. In addition, there's a debate to be had about whether this is that much different from big publishers who can afford to splash out on the kind of PR it generally takes to get a book to bestseller status. (I will never forget being fifteen and having a friend of mine's father, who worked in publishing, explain to me that books are mostly sold through expensive PR, which is why small presses have it so hard.) And that requires an examination of the tension between big publishers and small/self publishers, and the philosophy that any edge you can get is a good edge.
So there's a lot to chew over, which would be fantastic, except that it appears that everyone commenting on it is attempting to be as uninteresting as possible. MY GOD, PEOPLE, this is brickspace book wank. It should at least involve a few lols along the way. I keep trying to sort out who thinks what about which issue but then I start nodding off, or I stop reading because the person blogging about it has said something so incredibly irrational or stupid that I can no longer pay attention to their opinions.
And it's hard to form one of my own without hearing the arguments. It's easy to say "paying for reviews is wrong", but it's not that simple, especially when some publishers have the clout and cash to get their books seen in a way that startups and selfpubs can't.
So the basic opinion I have formed about all of this, which is no doubt informed by the article I recently read about the 1962 Edinburgh World Writer's Conference, is that WRITERS BE CRAZY.
