Social Media & Review Crews Q&A With Meoskop

*Over at SBTB Sarah is running a Q&A with Susan Mallery about her newest reader initiative. If you haven't yet read it, I would.

With the rapid changes in publishing authors have been pushed into being their own publicity department. With so many voices willing to tell authors what to do (and what not to do) it seemed like a great opportunity for us to connect with an expert on author behavior. Meoskop has been a blogger and reviewer under various names since the mid 1980's, when net access was primarily through phone numbers found in the classified ads. Back in the day we'd phone a stranger's basement to talk books.

Q: So Meoskop. (Can I call you Meoskop? Going 3rd person seems like something I should ask permission for.) You get a number of books for free. What's wrong with Susan Mallery offering books to her readers?

A: I suppose I can call myself anything I like, so yes, feel free. If it's good enough for Michael Douglas... Wait, books. Let's get back to that.  Nothing is wrong with Susan Mallery giving away any number of books she chooses. The free book is a long standing promotion. In fact, the free book is one of the best tools an author has to self promote.

Q: Then what's the issue? If authors have been giving books away since books began and many reviewers frequently receive promotional copies, why is Mallery's Review Crew controversial? Is this about gatekeeping reviews?

A: Not at all. In fact, a novice reviewer can be a consumer's best friend. The conflict lies in the author's natural (and necessary) desire to promote being at war with the consumer's natural (and necessary) desire to find reviews they can trust. The issue here is the winnowing of the review pool. Mallery says that she has thousands of readers wanting a chance at reviewing her books in advance. Where I believe she's raising the eyebrows is the consolidation of her reviewers...

Q: I have to interrupt you. If I'm not mistaken you didn't pay for a Courtney Milan book in all of 2012. In point of fact, you proclaimed yourself her number one fan girl in 2011. How can you hope to have any credibility at all on this issue?

A: Excuse me. I was assured there would be no Courtney Milan questions.

Q: You're evading the point.

A: Obviously, I am untrustworthy. This question proves that. It is that fact upon which my credibility hinges. An author or publisher who provides a free book to me has no assurance of a positive review. In fact, when it became clear to both of us that I would likely be hate reading her new release, Avon declined to provide me with an advance copy of Lorraine Heath's upcoming work. I have a track record of refusing to review authors who expect favorable reviews of their work. Or any review. I frequently decline to review ARCs that have been sent to me. Sometimes they're boring.

Q: Mallery obviously realizes not all reviews will be favorable. While she demands a review within two weeks to remain in her program, she acknowledges that not all reviews will be five star!

A: It's the tiered aspect. If Mallery ran a lottery for each release that did not have the tiered aspect this wouldn't have warranted a second look. By offering bars for her reader reviewers to hit, she introduces the elements of bias. She wants something for her time and money that is in conflict with general consumer interest. If you want the next book, review it in two weeks and you're golden. Look at all the thousands of people that want to be you. You're in the Review Crew. You're an insider. I love 5 stars (who doesn't?) but you say what you really think. On the one hand, she's saying (mostly) all the right things. On the other she is justifiably building a network of reliable superfans who can commit to deadline. It's like walking up to the people camped out for a new Chik-Fil-A in a Chik-Fil-A uniform while carrying a video camera and asking them if the food is any good. They're going to say yes. They wouldn't be there if pickle brine made their nose hairs curl.

Q: Aren't all review and promotion schemes in conflict with consumer interest?

A: Pretty much. The tightrope for the author is to conduct their promotion in a way that enhances their brand. Libby Bray puts on a cow suit, I pre-order her book. Maybe I hate it (ok, I did) but I bought it. I hit a review site I know is flawed (that would be any of them) and I see 200 happy reviews all posted in a two week window? That one star review complaining that the author never calls her mother just became the ONLY review I read. Mallery is gambling (probably correctly) that more readers will see a stack of glowing reviews and slam the preorder button than will call shenanigans. Shenanigans rarely answers the phone, anyway. It's probably going to work. But undermining already flawed review systems undermines all authors. A reader who doesn't trust anything she reads has reduced discoverability.

Q: Discvoerabi - whatever you said. That's like, making my head hurt. You're not industry, are you? That industry stuff is a snooze. I just want to find a good book and buy it. How does Susan Mallery stop me from doing that? I don't see the issue.

A: Maybe she doesn't. Maybe the future is one where buyers expect hundreds of largely positive reviews to quickly appear on her books. What does that buyer do next? If the buyer disagrees with those reviews or knows about the Review Crew does the buyer stop trusting all positive reviews? Are you going to trust positive reviews on other authors? Will the three star review become the new rave review? Look! This book doesn't have 5 star reviews - it must be good! Will the one star review be the only one given credibility? In a sea of solicited 5 star reviews how do you apply comparative meaning?

Q: Was that a shot at Klausner? That got old in the 90's.

A: Not at all. I do me and I let other reviewers do them. My point is that an author who plans on having the same name (or hundreds of names) attached to her book reviews needs to carefully consider issues of credibility. Consumers already suspect reviews and review sites.

Q: Are we back to Courtney Milan?

A: You really need to get over this Courtney Milan thing. You're starting to embarrass me.

Review: The Cross In The Closet by Timothy Kurek

I have to give it up to Kurek's marketing team.  They 50'd me into The Cross In The Closet. It seemed like everyone was talking about it so I decided to buy it. (Not my best idea.) How do you review the book and not the author when the book is about nothing but the author? Under the guise of advocating for the gay community, Kurek has written a book about himself. He is an exhausting companion. In desperate need of an editor, The Cross In The Closet takes a meandering path through Kurek's psyche. (I think part of what attracted me to The Cross In The Closet is that I used to know this guy. And a few like him, if less ambitious.)

Kurek doesn't set his bigotry aside through education, he reinvents himself as something he isn't - a gay man. Telling his friends and family of his new sexual identity, Kurek begins living what he thinks is an authentically gay life. This leads to Kurek writhing in self loathing while everyone else gives him cookies. You'd expect that finding out someone put you through the emotional wringer for their own gratification would lead to serious recriminations but (with the exception of Kurek's sister in law) the people in the author's life think it's just awesome.  While the denizens of the book are compelled to stroke Kurek's ego the reader is not. Whether is it Kurek feeling all super smug for letting someone who sexually repulses him feel him up or Kurek comparing teenagers drinking lattes to dropping a six pack at an AA meeting (the teens all avoid the coffee?) The Cross In The Closet is all Kurek, all the time.

An editor might have shaped this into a more cohesive (and less self serving) tale of a misguided mission, but Kurek appears to be going it alone. The book wanders. Basic errors of word choice (most often involving homophones) further distance the reader from the text. Most of this memoir comes in the form of quoted text, yet the speakers share very similar speech patterns. Without distinctive idioms or pacing to indicate natural conversation paths the quotes appear to be fictionalized or paraphrased. This leads the reader to doubt the veracity of the whole. The overall impression is not of a man so moved by discovering his own shortcomings that he radically changed his life. It is of a man at loose ends who saw others writing stunt books (he mentions Kevin Roose in passing) and decided to write a My Year As piece. While he calls it The Experiment, the reader is hard pressed not to cynically view his actions as being content motivated. Without much context (hey, you all know who they are, right?) Kurek decides to cold call Westboro Baptist under the guise of reaching out. He tries to manipulate his way into their world through the same methods he used successfully in the gay community - lying. When faced with hostile suspicion he goes for mentioning their recently born baby. Because that is not creepy at all. If I lived in an us against them mentality and a stranger showed up at my door talking like he knew me and referencing my newborn I would totally embrace him. After that fails Kurek again pretends to be gay. He might not have been able to infiltrate Westboro, but he can certainly show how much he loves them and all his fellow men by... I just can't. (Proverbs 14:5 dude)

I grew up around the gay community. I grew up around fundamentalists. I should have been a sympathetic audience for this book. It's a feel good moment for those who want to believe that the differences between the two can be easily overcome but The Cross In The Closet is little else. Kurek is not Tim Wise for gay people. I was repulsed by a section where Kurek, who has asked a good friend to play the role of his partner, lets things get physical. He lovingly details his revulsion then gives himself another cookie for allowing his friend that moment of joy. I lost all sympathy for the author. Using another person for your own ends, letting that person develop a hopeless emotional attachment to you and then praising yourself for giving up a kiss? Take the male / male dynamic out of it (and thus the martyr aspect) and you've got an old as time dynamic as distasteful as it is transparent. While those in the book are moved to tears by Kurek's Lady Bountiful turn, I was not. Given context and shaped by an uninvested eye The Cross In The Closet might have made an excellent book. We'll never know. Worth reading for a look at how privilege operates through the underlying assumptions Kurek makes and his framing choices, but not a read I can recommend.

*Note - I put my short review up first as I wanted to consider the tone of this long review. As I say above it is difficult not to review the author in this context. While engaged in an exchange with a commenter who felt The Cross In The Closet deserved bonus points for Kurek's intent (and his not being a racist hate monger) Kurek chose to obliquely weigh in. Thus relieved of any considerations of tone, I didn't take another editing pass at this longer opinion. Kurek may choose to consider today's timely DA piece - his PR team is doing excellent work on his behalf, work he can easily undo.

Apples To Apples: Why You Care About DRM

This is an easy one. I've assumed through this that you already understand DRM, or Digital Rights Management. In case you don't, we're going to break that down. See that candy? (Right now, I could totally go for one of those fat frogs in the lower corner.) Imagine you've bought a big old bag of it. Maybe you've been opening the bag and eating a piece here and there. Maybe you've been saving it up. Whatever, it's your candy and you want to eat it. Now imagine that you take a piece of candy out of the bag, put it on a plate, and someone hits your hand. "That's not your candy." Of course it's your candy. You bought it. You saved it. It's yours. "No, it's not." That is the DRM experience, right there.

When you purchase a book (or the right to read a book, actually) it is encoded with security software designed to keep you from giving the file to 100's of your closest friends. Because of that, you cannot change the format of the book. If you buy EPUB (for Sony) or AZW / MOBI (for Kindle) you are locked into that choice forever. Deciding to change readers means buying all of your books over again. Because of DRM, you may find yourself unable to read your books even with that reader attached. Forget a password, have a computer clock error, there are literally dozens of ways your candy will be taken from you. It's absurd. DRM is a far greater impediment to legal book purchasers than it is to book thieves. As long as people make money off DRM, then DRM will be suggested as a helpful tool to publishing, data be damned. Removing DRM is either Not Cool, Illegal, or A No Brainer depending on who you're speaking with. (This issue is going to fall under personal choice.) Adding insult to DRM injury is a little thing called Agency Pricing. We used to call it Price Fixing and it used to be illegal, but now it just means that publishers can charge you the exact same price for a book at every outlet. If a retailer wants to offer you a discount or incentive? Too bad. They can't. Want to buy the book at Target? They can sell it to you for a penny if they want. In e-book format? Full MSRP with no ability to resell or give the book away and no promise that DRM won't (at some point) keep you from reading it. Attractive, huh? Of course there are publishers who do not practice Agency Pricing, and there are publishers who do not use DRM (Carina Press, that means you!). You could stick to their books (or free books) and live a perfectly happy (if restricted) e-reading life. But we both know you won't.

I'm not going to explain DRM removal to you. That's on you to find out, should you choose to do so, because I don't need the legal hassles. I can give you an example of a situation where you might choose to remove DRM even if you feel you would never want to do so. There's a Kindle owner I know who was reading a multi book series. All but one of the books was for sale as MOBI. One volume was inexplicably unavailable. She could buy it elsewhere in EPUB, or she could download it from a pirate site. She chose to buy it in EPUB, strip the DRM, convert it to MOBI with Calibre and load it to her Kindle. She jumped through 5 hoops to make sure the author was paid and she paid a price far above a used or new paper copy. I promise you that was no deterrent to piracy. (Her kid said they would have just picked up the pirated copy since it was less hassle.) So let's assume that you have decided not to lock you (and your books) to one device. Keeping track of your books is light years easier with a program called Calibre.

Calibre is a means to store your books. Think of it as your virtual bookshelf. You can (on DRM free files, files with DRM cannot be changed) modify a cover, assign tags for easy organizing, rate the books or arrange them by series. Calibre will convert whatever format the book is in to whatever format you need it to be in. Step on your Kindle and break it in half? Calibre will convert the AZW file to EPUB for your iPhone to use until you replace your reader. Here is another place your choice of reader is important. Files from iBooks are locked into Apple's DRM tighter than tight. Hope you don't run into any technical problems (On a computer? When does that occur??) because those books are not currently strippable. If you order from Amazon, you shouldn't update your software. When Amazon improves their software they tend to also improve their DRM restrictions. New hoops for the paying consumer. (I just want to eat that frog, I don't want to play Frogger.) When it comes to freeing your file, the big A's are not your friends. However, if all of this gave you a headache, my advice is to go with a Kindle and don't buy more candy than you can eat in one sitting. Make a wish list of stuff you might want to read and buy one book at a go. (It will minimize your losses, even if it doesn't maximize publisher profits.)

Did we cover everything? If we didn't it's going to have to wait. I feel downright fragile from all this thinking. My Courtney Milan Fan Girl card and I are going to spend some quality time with Unclaimed. I'll let you know how that turns out.