It’s not your grandmother’s bookselling world anymore. Two separate issues roiled the online book blogging community over the last five minutes. Or at least it seems like it was five minutes.
The first to roil Twitter was an irreverent
letter from Quirk Press that accompanied review copies of their new book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that were sent to bloggers. The letter admonished bloggers not to write reviews prior to April 1st, and to refrain from excerpting the book as well. Frankly, the whole seemed like a tempest in a teapot to me. Sure, embargoes (the industry term) are a pain in the ass, and you can legally pretty much ignore them. And no excerpts on a book that is at least half excerpting itself seems to be in the pot meets kettle variety. Legally, excerpting is just fine. The sanction is that Quirk will no longer work with you.
To which my response is a giant don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass
. Rat’s Reading has never depended on publicists. While I will accept review copies, I don’t agonize over my relationship with publicists, publishers, or authors. So a pox on all your houses! Bloggers, stop sucking at the teat of the industry! If you expect to, as a group, take the place of quickly disappearing book review sections in newspapers, then you need to change your attitude. It’s your effin’ blog!
Bloggers got up in arms over it. I don’t think they are wrong for the irritation, even if I don’t share it. Book bloggers got treated like they were sitting at the kids table at Thanksgiving dinner. You can work with other channels, but you can’t really treat book bloggers contemptuously, intentionally or not.
Publishers need bloggers just as much. More. Quirk got off easy! If it were the old days, the New York Times would round-file the letter and review a different book. That would be the end of that. The book would die an ignominious death without the attention of major newspaper reviews. Quirk probably got a sales boost from the controversy! If bloggers ever start simply ignoring books because of obnoxious P.R. efforts, small presses could take it on the chin.
The second issue is arguably bigger. Over the last few minutes #AmazonFail has taken over the world of Twitter. Amazon doesn’t want objectionable content showing up to users who aren’t open to it. Right now they don’t really have a way to selectively hide stuff with sex in it like Google and Flickr’s SafeSearch functions. Their solution, remove it from their sales rank and indices. In other words, you have to search for the book by author or title to get a sexy book to show up.
Where the big fail comes into place is that Amazon appears to be discriminately applying this method to books with any homosexual content in it. Which is very very ugly.
At first it was just book bloggers on my Twitter list who were bitching, some at a rate of several items per minute. Now reporters have jumped on the story, as have bestselling authors who don’t write lots of gay fiction. I’m willing to be someone at Amazon has a shitstorm of PR work on their desk when they get in tomorrow. Cause if no one noticed, today is Sunday. Easter Sunday in fact. Much as I am not into religious holidays, I’m betting the appropriate people who will need to cave on this are not in the office today.
So before book bloggers spend a few hours removing all their Amazon affiliate links, I suggest taking a walk and dealing with it in a few days. I’m betting Amazon caves as soon as there’s someone in to office to surrender. Oh sure, I totally understand not wanting to support a business that would do something like this. If you are gonna do it no matter Amazon’s response, then by all means go ahead. But if you give a rip what their response is, give em a chance to do the right thing. Me, I’m leaving my Amazon links up. Maybe I’ll write another post someday on Amazon vs. every other online bookstore, but not today.
All this highlights a very different world out there. It’s the first couple of cases where book bloggers have really driven the industry, where publishers as pugilists are caught by punches balancing on the wrong foot. There’s one big lesson from all this: get to know the book blogging community (as much as it is one). Know them well. Much as they annoy me, the publicists putting together blog tours
are in touch with a major publicity channel for them. Those that treat bloggers like weekly community newspaper reviewers, perhaps to be occasionally indulged but ultimately disregarded, do so at their own peril.
Although my blog has the reach of a weekly newspaper in Troy Idaho (2,000 to 4,000 people per month), some blogs are much bigger. But there’s something very different about my blog. It’s the power of aggregation. Memes can sweep through a group of bloggers faster than a spark through a methane extraction tank at a landfill. There’s a power of the crowd in lots of individual blogs put together that newspapers wouldn’t exercise. Whether it be righteous or groupthink or whatever, it’s a whole different world.
The blog tour people are way ahead of the game compared to most publishers and authors. While no blogger needs to be catered to (none are big enough individually to care), if you care about a book making it, it behooves you to know how this channel works. With blogs, especially the addition ot Twitter, the pitchforks and torches can be sharpened and lit faster than you can order a Starbucks latté. They won’t call for comment first like a newspaper would. It doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday. It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday. Problems will spread like wildfire. You have a permanent mob on your hands.
Having a few young people on your staff who use Facebook won’t suffice. Your army of laid off reps are probably going to be needed to minister to this new group. Perhaps not as many of them, and mostly likely a different set of people. Blogs can’t be treated with a one size fits all attitude. And most definitely not with a we’re bigger than them
or a they need us, we don’t need them
attitude. If you don’t you are screwed in the post-newspaper world.
