Anyone in Australia listen to the radio this morning?

Edward W. Robertson said:

Specifically, to ABC RN, with John Doyle? The bit about Amazon book reviews? Well, the babbling American you heard was me.

It was a pretty general conversation about the importance of reviews for book sales and the various ways authors and publishers manipulate them. Coming from this self-publishing community where it's common knowledge that reviews are often massaged, manipulated, or outright faked, I'm getting the feeling the general reading public isn't all that aware of all the skulduggery in the publishing industry. Like, it makes much more sense to me now that John Locke is still selling books. People just don't know.

And they shouldn't be expected to, really. They're just looking for a good read.

Anyway, just wanted to share, because I am somewhat skeptical that I will ever again be on national radio to discuss stuff that could easily have come up in a KB thread.

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Edward W. Robertson said:

Oh, thanks for posting that. Yeah, it came together really fast. I hardly had much warning myself.

JB Bouman--somebody from the station called me up the day before to ask some questions (probably to ensure I wasn't a crazy person), so I knew the general topics we were going to talk about in advance. Didn't do any special preparation. I'll tell you this, though--live radio is dangerous! It moves so fast. It is very easy to forget to say important things.

Like, the host asked about The Four Hour Chef, the author of which has been criticized for sending bunches of his fans to review the book. Some of them left (positive) reviews without even having read it. I made the point authors and publishing houses send out advance review copies all the time to have reviews ready to go as soon as the book goes live, but I didn't explicitly say "Normal ARCs are totally cool ethically, although readers should be aware they're a little different from 'normal' reviews. But this guy and/or his fans went too far." So I think it's possible to read what I said as thinking that all ARCs are sleazy. Which isn't what I think at all, and would be insulting to a lot of self-published authors I really respect, haha. Embarrassing.

Janne--I didn't get the impression this was about review outrage. It felt positioned from the reader's perspective, one of curiosity and of learning to be a bit more canny shopping at Amazon. I don't know, maybe if more shoppers know to take reviews with a grain of salt, less emphasis will be placed on them, resulting in less incentive to manipulate or fake them. But probably not.

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