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Plaudits for Sale

Chris Flynn September 18

Almost every writer’s festival in the country this year has had a panel on the failure of our critical culture and the issues surrounding book reviews in Australia. Gideon Haigh has spoken extensively on the subject and more recently Emmett Stinson deliciously ruffled a few feathers with an essay on the Wheeler Centre site, in which he called for more, “partisans, contrarians and heretics”. Clearly, there’s something in the air, an underlying and ongoing concern amongst those who ply their trade in the literary world that one of the foundations of a thriving culture (unbiased, unafraid, balanced criticism) is being eroded in favour of bland, empty platitudes that do everyone involved a sad disservice. Thick skins, it seems, went out with last year’s denim cutoffs.

On 25th August the New York Times exposed an even more terrifying practice, in an excellent article by David Streitfeld on gettingbookreviews.com founder Todd Rutherford. Frustrated by the fact he could not get traditional reviews for the clients he represented at a self-publishing service, in 2010 Rutherford came up with what seemed at the time to be a genius idea—he would write the glowing plaudits himself, and bill the authors accordingly for the positive press. Fairly broke at the time, Rutherford charged $499 for twenty positive reviews on sites like Amazon, and $999 for fifty.

If this sounds nuts (not to mention illegal—the Federal Trade Commission in America forbids online endorsements if money has changed hands, but has no real way of enforcing this guideline) then here are some sobering figures. Within a few months of starting the business, Rutherford was making twenty-eight thousand dollars a month. Why? Because customers on Amazon believe in five-star reviews. Witness the success of former insurance salesman John Locke, who sold over a million eBooks between 2009 and 2011—nine thrillers and the bestseller How I Sold One Million E-books in Five Months. Oh, the irony. Two months prior to his sales going through the roof, Locke had purchased fifty positive reviews from Rutherford. Locke stated, “Reviews are the smallest piece of being successful, but it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.”

What Rutherford failed to factor in, or perhaps underestimated, was how quickly enthusiasm can turn to vitriol on the Internet. When a single client was unhappy with the review of her self-published journal Sex, Drugs and Being an Escort, she made it her personal mission to take Rutherford down. Her diatribe appeared on several customer service forums and within weeks his service came to the attention of Google and Amazon, who began to regulate what he was doing. Rutherford tried changing his name so Google would not see his angry client’s complaints and in the end was forced to shut up shop. He now runs a new service, in which he offers to blog and tweet about books for a bargain basement $99.

Rutherford admits that the online reviewing situation is now a quagmire. If readers turn to recommendations from non-professional reviewers because their trust in established critics has been undermined by compromise and fear of making ‘useful enemies’, then the entire superstructure would seem set to topple. In his essay, Stinson claims, “book reviewers face pressures to function as de facto publicists and ‘recommendation machines’ rather than critics.” If services such as those operated by Todd Rutherford are an indication of what’s happening online, his fears have already been realized and the recommendation machine is under a full head of steam.


 

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