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Part of the Package
February 25, 2008

I am sitting at my desk, drinking tea.

Is it becoming standard practice to send promotional items that have nothing to do with the books they're promoting? I can understand Baen including a CD-ROM with the latest John Ringo novel; I tossed it out without looking at it, as I do with most promotional material, but I assume that whatever was on it was related to the book, perhaps illustrations or a short story set in the same universe or a biography of the author. This tea, not so much. A publisher sent it out to promote a reprinted novel by a well-known 1930s pulp author. Is the implication that the author drank tea? Does the muscle-bound protagonist like to settle down with a nice cuppa after a hard day of demon-battling? The book's cover image, which appears on the front of the package of tea, offers no clues. Perhaps the wounded demon is bleeding tea, or the buxom love interest dyes her scanty clothes with tea. Perhaps the idea of the promotion is to drive you mad with curiosity until you buy the book and page impatiently through it looking for any mention of tea.

It's only been a year and a half since the science fiction and fantasy end of the bookblogosphere erupted in a ferocious debate over whether sending out high-quality ARCs and fancy collateral material is tantamount to bribery of reviewers. Cheryl Morgan summarized many of the arguments on both sides on her Emerald City reviews blog (sadly now defunct) and concluded that there really wasn't much to worry about, as most publishers couldn't afford to send out gifts and she didn't feel that the few gifts she'd received affected her reviews of the books they were promoting. I'm sure every reviewer would say the same. But is the sending of gifts itself unethical? Or is it neutral, with the ethical burden on the reviewer? I'm honestly not sure how to answer that, though I think I come down slightly in favor of the latter. I realized while writing this post that I didn't feel comfortable mentioning any identifying details about the book that the tea is promoting. I'm blogging about the tea because it's hilarious, but hilarity is still publicity. I don't think the publisher was wrong to send it, but I also don't think it feels quite right to obligingly respond by discussing the book in detail in an official venue, especially since PW didn't review it. So that's where I, personally, draw the line. (As the tea was a gift, with the hope but not the requirement of reciprocity, I feel no ethical qualms in drinking it.)

For that matter, is ARC-sending an ethical practice at all? In another end of the reviewing world, respected computer blogger Joel Spolsky has flatly declared that providing bloggers with free hardware or software in hopes of getting a review is unethical. "Even if no quid-pro-quo is formally required," he writes, "the gift creates a social obligation of reciprocity. ...Who are the most trusted reviewers out there? Consumer Reports, probably. They don't take anything from vendors. They even buy everything they review at retail, which is what I'm going to do." Spolsky doesn't mention the possibility that investing money in something might encourage the reviewer to say positive things about it, simply to avoid feeling like the money was wasted; he also doesn't mention the items that will never be reviewed because they aren't sold at the store where the reviewer shops, or the ones that happen to be out of stock when the reviewer stops by, or the ones the reviewer can't afford. If PW bought books instead of getting them for free, I suspect that would skew our attention heavily toward the books that are at the front of the big chain stores--much as the NBCC Best Recommended list looks an awful lot like the bestseller lists that it's intended to supplant--and we would miss out on a lot of the work being put out by independent presses. Australian SF author Ben Peek recently mentioned on his blog that his novel Black Sheep has sold under 200 copies. If his publisher hadn't sent us an ARC, I seriously doubt we would have seen it, or reviewed it, or interviewed Peek about it. The loss would have been ours, and our readers'. So as a devoted fan of independent presses, I'm glad and grateful that the books come to me, and I think it helps us to review a genuine cross-section of what's being published. Again, that's about the reviewer making ethical use of what the publisher sends.

In the end, I pay very little attention to most promotional material. I read publisher letters and jacket copy only to be sure that reviewers aren't cribbing from them (we have marvelous ethical reviewers who would never do such a thing intentionally, but sometimes a phrase "feels right" and you don't realize until later that that's because you read it in the promo copy) and to note any glaring discrepancies (e.g. the protagonist's name being spelled differently on the cover and inside the book). I even try to ignore cover images. Shiny POD galleys aren't a bribe; they're a distraction, another way for the publisher to tell me what to think. I wouldn't be in the reviewing business if I wanted to be influenced by other people's opinions. So go ahead, publishers, send your CD-ROMs and shiny ARCs and ridiculous tea. We'll go right on reviewing the books, the whole books, and nothing but the books, just as we always have.  

Posted by Rose Fox on February 25, 2008 | Comments (1)