Reviewing

Good Grief! Miss Austen!!!

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Over at the Aqueduct Press blog Timmi Duchamp has posted her collection of favorite reads from 2009. A book that particularly caught my eye was Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson. Timmi notes:

Heydt-Stevenson’s revelations of the multitude of sexual double-entendres and smutty allusions in Jane Austen’s novels (intelligible to her contemporaries but not so much to us) are stunning. That’s not all she does in her book by any means, but it pretty much makes the point that very few of Austen’s twenty-first-century fans have any notion of how Austen’s contemporaries read and understood her novels. For about a decade now — ever since I read Eve Sedgwick’s essay on Sense and Sensibility — I’ve suspected that significant aspects of Austen’s work was sailing clear over most of our heads. Given the socially contingent nature of language, it really doesn’t take long for certain (often important) aspects of texts to become either invisible or unintelligible.

Ah, if only I’d had this book years ago I might have been more willing to read Austen in school.

Also it is a very good point that Timmi makes. The way we read books depends very heavily on the cultural context in which we read them. Reviewers please take note.

GGK on Reviewing

~ Cheryl

Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest blog post (the Dec 14 one if you are late clicking through, as his web site doesn’t allow deep linking to individual posts) has some interesting thoughts on the changing way in which publishers use reviews. When I was doing Emerald City I tried not to publish reviews too far before the issue date of a book because, as Guy says is the philosophy for print magazines, there’s no point in reviewing a book that people can’t buy. Bloggers, however, appear to compete with each other to see who can be the first to publish a review of a particular book, leading them to publish months before the book is in the shops. I’m pleased to hear that publishers are able to find something useful in this – Guy says that these days they are nimble enough to adjust initial print runs to take account of the level of buzz a book is getting online.

I’m also pleased to hear that at least some publishers are getting better at targeting bloggers with the sort of books they want. (In my day, Guy, it was less a case of “At least read what I blog about before you send me something!” and more a case of “Please do not send me books I specifically said I didn’t want and then follow up with rude emails demanding to know why I haven’t published a review”.)

FTC: Some Sense At Last

~ Cheryl

GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan has finally managed to talk some sense about the new FTC regulations, rather than the ridiculous scaremongering of the past few days. Some of the latest post bears quoting:

“If people think that the FTC is going to issue them a citation for $11,000 because they failed to disclose that they got a free box of Pampers,” Cleland says, “that’s not true.”

“We have never brought a case against a consumer endorser and we’ve never brought a case against somebody simply for failure to disclose a material connection,” he explains. “Where we have brought cases, there are other issues involved, not only failing to disclose a material connection but also making other misrepresentations about a product, a serious product like a health product or something like that. We have brought those cases but not against the consumer endorser, we have brought those cases against the advertiser that was behind it.”

So, as I expected, no book reviewer is likely to be subject to massive fines. You can all stop hyperventilating now. (Or alternatively start talking about how the FTC is “obviously lying”, if you prefer.)

The GalleyCat post then goes on to talk about what this will mean for publishers, who are going to have to try to ensure that people they send freebies to do make unreasonable claims for those products.

You should note that all of the examples of possible unreasonable claims come from non-fiction books. Hogan admits that even silly hyperbole about a work of fiction is unlikely to attract the attention of the FTC. Even if you claimed that reading the latest Neal Stephenson caused you to lose weight because of all the effort needed to carry it around you’d probably be OK.

But there is still an outstanding question as to what is a legitimate review publication and what is a “celebrity endorsement”. The FTC clearly views bloggers as minor celebrities. But does that apply to everything published online? I would argue that Emerald City very clearly presented itself as a book review publication, whereas this blog is equally clearly my personal opinion. I ask that question because many of the people I have seen hyperventilating about the FTC ruling online have been people who run blogs or web sites that are very clearly dedicated primarily to book reviewing.

The people who I think may be covered by this sort of thing are folks like John Scalzi who very clearly are minor celebrities and whose blogs, like mine, are not mostly given over to reviews. But even then, as John mostly talks about fiction, he’s probably OK.

FTC Regulation Causes Blogger Panic

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

The US Federal Trade Commission has finally issued the results of its investigation into advertising through blogging, and perhaps predictably a certain amount of panic has been caused in the blogosphere. People are starting to worry that they may be fined $11,000 if they fail to disclose that a book they reviewed was provided free by the publisher.

The problem with such legislation is that it has enormously broad scope. What the FTC is mainly after is the professional advertising blogger, and the celebrity endorser. There are plenty of companies out there who will pay people for writing blog “reviews” of products. Mostly these products are much more expensive than books. Equally celebrities are showered with free stuff from companies who hope they will like it and say so in public. A private individual writing about a book she got for free is very small fry in comparison.

Furthermore, the FTC is well aware that trying to control blogging is a pointless exercise. Richard Cleland, an FTC staff attorney quoted by Reuters, said:

Principally the requirements are about disclosure. Our concern is less with the individual bloggers (than) with the advertisers who are using the bloggers. [..] On the Internet, everything is whack-a-mole, and that’s why our focus is not going to be on these individual bloggers.

So technically, yes, book reviews are included in these regulations. Practically the FTC is unlikely to come after you. And even if they did, simply stating that you got the book for free is sufficient to cover you.

So why the panic? Well, a lot of web sites run by established media companies, especially those who publish a lot of product reviews, are busy pushing articles about how bloggers could face massive fines. Anyone would think that they wanted to discourage bloggers from writing reviews. I wonder why that might be?

In Catchup Mode

~ Cheryl

Because I was away for a day and half and have been busy on World Fantasy business today, here are some quick links.

The first one is probably unnecessary because I believe that Neil tweeted about it, but Jenny Turner has an excellent article about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the Guardian Book Blog.

Also in The Guardian, Alison Flood reviews The Worm Ouroboros and asks for recommendations for further fantasy reading. Go and encourage her to read Gene Wolfe, please.

And finally, Timmi Duchamp quotes from Brian Attebery’s acceptance speech for the 2009 Pilgrim Award – some questions all critics should ask themselves.

Save WaPo Book World

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There are rumors around that the Washington Post is planning to axe it’s popular Book World supplement. As you probably know, this publishes many good people, including Michael Dirda and Elizabeth Hand. Henry Farrell suggests that we should let the Post know how much we value intelligent discussion of books. Details here.

Another Reviewer List

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This sort of thing appears popular at the moment. So if you do reviews (and you have submission guidelines on your site, which you should), check out this site and email Ann to let her know about what you do.

Publisher marketing people please take note as well.

Dirda Online

~ Cheryl

Via Neil I discover that Michael Dirda has his own forum at the Washington Post. I don’t know how much time he’ll spend there himself, or how much SF-related discussions will go on, but as Neil noted if nothing else it gives you a very quick way to find all of Dirda’s reviews easily.

Reviewer Database

~ Cheryl

Over at Grasping for the Wind there is an interesting idea being floated about creating a database of SF/F/H reviewers. I have no plans to get registered, but I wish something like that had been available when I was running Emerald City, because if publishers take notice of it it should greatly reduce the hideous mis-match between what people get sent and what they want to review.

Of course marketing people will always send out the books they want to push regardless of whether people want them, but it might make things better.

Today’s Assignment

~ Cheryl

Jonathan McCalmont’s review of Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft : Against the World, Against Life begins as follows:

At a time when the Anglo-American SF scene is falling over itself to lay claim to any and all works of literature that use SFnal ideas

I am intrigued, and your homework for today is to answer the following questions:

1. Is it true? (Please cite examples.)

2. What does it mean? (For example, are Anglo-American writers trying to claim that Jules Verne was really British?)

3. What evidence can you find to support the suggestion that such behavior is particularly prevalent at this time (as opposed to, say, 50 years ago)?

The rest of the review is interesting as McCalmont has actually read some of Houellebecq’s fiction.

Edelman on Reviewing

~ Cheryl

I’ve mostly been ignoring the various “rules for reviewing” posts that have appeared over the past year, but David Louis Edelman has managed to come up with a set that makes a lot of sense without being unduly prescriptive. The only one I think doesn’t belong on that list is the “no spoilers” because that’s so difficult to define. I’ve seen people who claim that mentioning what the jacket blurb says counts as a spoiler, and equally there are some books that you really can’t write anything sensible about without including spoilers. The other 9 rules, however, are pretty much spot on, especially #6.

The Effectiveness of Reviews

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There is a Journal of Marketing Research. Who knew? I didn’t until today. But it does sound like an interesting publication. And the reason I have found out about it is that it has just published a paper on the effectiveness of online reviews. The question that the researchers asked was: given a bunch of recommendations from strangers, which ones are people more likely to believe? The results they got suggested that online recommenders are judged on:

  • their speed of response to queries;
  • the length of their opinions;
  • back-and-forth dialogue; and
  • a reputation for successfully answering others’ queries

This was more to do with asking questions such as “which software package should I buy” than book reviewing, but I suspect that it may be applicable.

Sadly the researchers didn’t study the effects of reviewers having a penchant for extended rants and inciting flame wars.

Sam Does Heinlein

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

At The Guardian’s book blog Sam Jordison’s exploration of part Hugo winners has reached Starship Troopers. As with most non-Americans, Sam was rather non-plused by the book:

Worse still, great chunks of the book are given over to terrifically dull lectures about the need to limit the franchise to veterans and joys of combat. These come courtesy of a handful of other characters equally as one-dimensional as the narrator, who seem to exist only to spout philosophy.

But his view of the book is by no means entirely negative. Read on.

Bloggasm on Publishing Email

~ Cheryl

Simon Owens of Bloggasm has an excellent post that draws together the recent William Saunders flap and the rather more high profile one going on at Pharyngula. I’m sure I have said this before, but if you are a high profile blogger you have to be very careful what you post, because if you post something negative about someone then some of your readers will go after that person, and they will behave in ways you find deplorable (and for this reason I think that publishing links to negative reviews of your books is a bad thing, even if you think you are just acknowledging the reviewer’s opinion.). Most of the hate mail I got while I was publishing Emerald City did not come from authors, it came from fans who were offended on behalf of the favorite authors (often by rather mild reviews).

But actually the thing that struck me most about Owens article (and like him I’m going to be careful about how much is actually proven) is that if the stories about the 1-800 Flowers hate mail are true, what kind of stupid and cowardly idiot uses his wife’s work email to hide behind when sending out hate mail?