There’s been some discussion recently about the fact that Publishers Weekly is now offering paid reviews to self-published authors – for $399 a pop.
No, I haven’t mislaid a decimal place. Four hundred – as near as damn it – American dollars.
As I remarked on Twitter, for that sort of money I’d expect wing walkers, and a solo extolling the merits of my book at the Last Night of the Proms.
Now, there are various schools of thought around paid-for reviews. I don’t buy reviews myself (except that one time when it was a friend trying to get a service off the ground), and, from the other side of the counter, I’ve recently resolved only to review books that I’ve bought with my own money. (Because a refusal often offends, but not nearly so much as the bad review that you would otherwise be posting.)
Actually, I do believe that most book bloggers are basically honest, and tend to say nothing at all if they can’t say anything nice. I’d recommend this pair of posts from Jo Linsdell and Lovely Audiobooks which debunks the myth that book bloggers are all rolling in free money. Which is hardly surprising, when most of them don’t charge.
And that’s the thing: whichever way you slice it, $399 is a lot of money. Do I believe that I’d get an honest review for $399? Perhaps. Do I believe that anyone else would believe it was an honest review? Perhaps not. To be blunt, the more an author spends on a review, the more flattering everyone else (and perhaps the author too) expects it to be.
But I think that what’s going on here is slightly more than paying for a book review (you can get them a lot cheaper on Reedsy or Fiverr or all sorts of other places, or so I understand) or even plain old advertising.
They’re selling credibility – or trying to. They’re offering you the chance to say, ‘This is my book, and a review of it has appeared in a Publishers’ Weekly supplement, therefore it must be good, right?’
The thing about credibility is that you can’t just rock up and buy it. Sooner or later the reader is going to catch on to the fact that a Publishers’ Weekly review can be bought. Even if your book actually is as good as all that, the reader will look at some of the others (which, to be frank, are already looking a bit amateurish) and start to wonder… The lowest grade on offer is a C: that means that some truly terrible stuff is going to come out marked ‘average’.
You have to earn your credibility. And the way you earn it is by making your book good. As good as it possibly can be. Oh, it does appear that the review may include suggestions for things you could do better in the future. But you could spend your money on making your book good now, before you put it out into the world.
(The other thing about credibility is that it doesn’t, in itself, make any money. It takes credibility plus hard work. Actually, it’s mostly hard work.)
Here are some other things that a self-published author might – note, I don’t say should – do with $399:
- get a really good cover… for the next few books
- get a really good editor… for the next few books
- get a really good typesetter, proofreader, publicist… oh, you get the idea
- get really nice gin for the people who do those things for you but refuse actual payment
- buy Facebook ads from here to kingdom come
- buy a couple of dozen copies of the book from Amazon to push it up the sales rankings
- buy a couple of dozen copies of the book and leave them on honesty bookshelves and railway station bookswaps (I have long wanted to do this, just for the hell of it)
- go on a research trip for the next book
- any other ideas?
I mean, don’t take financial advice from me. I’ve just spent a chunk of my most recent writing income on a rainbow skirt, but I think I’ll get a good deal more joy out of that. It cost me $35.00.
And yes, that decimal point is in the right place.
Kathleen Jowitt 