The Writers Vineyard: Book Review Bloggers Beware

Have you heard the recent buzz lately about the FTC and blogs that review books? If you perform and publish book reviews you need to know that recent regulations have changed. Anyone who receives a book from a publisher for review is considered to endorse that product and any relationship between the two entities must be clearly disclosed. If you keep the book, this is considered compensation. In other words, book reviews are now considered paid endorsements.

Obviously this does not take into account that reputable sites will not automatically give a good review to an undeserving book. And compensation? Really, is the cost of a book considered adequate compensation for all the work that goes into reading, writing the review, and maintaining a blog?

In an interview with Richard Cleland of the FTC, Edward Champion asks the question of whether or not returning the book after the review would alleviate part of the problem. He replied affirmatively but also stated that anyone who reviews similar products from a single source (like a review site that covers books published by Champagne) would be under scrutiny. What is likely to raise eyebrows is whether or not the review site is an affiliate marketer for the publisher or sales site and whether the blog contains an advertisement for the same product.

To me this whole policy raises a whole lot more questions than it answers. For one, would a publisher like Champagne be affected since the company is located in Canada and this is a United States federal ruling? Would the blog owner be penalized for reviewing several books from a single publisher? Richard Cleland states that at this point, there are no particular fines that would be levied on someone not conforming to the regulation and that the FTC would be focusing more on the publisher than the reviewer. But – could the FTC ultimately shut down your blog if you are non-compliant?

Another question is why bloggers are being targeted, as opposed to other forms of media, such as newspapers or magazines that publish book reviews. Cleland’s answer to this concern was that the reader of a newspaper expects the reviewer is compensated. Sounds like a pretty fine line to me.

While I have to disagree overall with the intent of this FTC regulation, part of me thinks there may be some actual merit to it. Anyone who knows me knows my stance on book reviews and that is that far too many of them are simply endorsements and not true, honest representations of the reviewer’s opinion. I may be ruffling some feathers here, but I have run across an instance where I was asked to write a review for a book I felt was completely “unreadable”. After expressing my concerns – which mirrored those of another reviewer who refused to write it up for the same reason – the review site owner contacted the author to let her know we couldn’t review it because we couldn’t give it anything more than a really bad review (we don’t use a rating system). I did a bit of investigation on my own and lo and behold, this book had received a rave review elsewhere. I can’t even begin to tell you how bad it was, from the over-the-top characters, to a completely implausible story line, to the very creative (i.e. totally outside the industry standard) POV switches.

I know many sites are like this. They may have a review rating system of say, one to five stars, but very, very few will ever post a one or two star review – anything less than three is just not listed. Obviously this is not exactly fair. As an author or publisher, you could send the book to several sites until you found one that would give it at least their minimum publishable rating. Is this really honest?

I’d love to hear the opinion of others regarding this new regulation – which goes into effect December 1st of this year, BTW – and your thoughts regarding the current online book review system.