Why would someone write book reviews that very few people would see? Why not put them on the big mega-bookseller sites?

This question struck me when I decided to put a few book reviews here and I thought about it for a couple of days.

Part of the answer has to do with the exploitation of people for the purpose of company profits. It seems to me that these companies are getting thousands of hours of work and gigabytes of content, some of it very good quality, from unsuspecting people.

Consider, for example, the top reviewers. There are people who have done over a thousand reviews. If each review of these top people takes about an hour-give or take- that’s a thousand hours of work. Suppose they were being paid $10 per hour-and copywriters make more than that-then they’ve just given away 10,000 dollars worth of work. For what? Well there are bragging rights and the little badge they get by their name on a site. But that’s it.

No doubt for some people book reviewing has become a hobby and they like to see the product of their labors shown to as many as possible. That of course is their choice. And maybe they can even list it as an accomplishment on their resumes.

But for others it would seem that the only time they review is when they have some disagreement with previous reviews or if they want to amplify some point that they think was not particularly well made.

This is where the marketing comes in. My question is who posted the first reviews? Authors? Publishers? Booksellers? And what books were they about? Bestsellers? Possibly were they by some people hired by the companies to get things started? To generate some hype about particular items?

And once the ball was rolling then genuine reviews from individuals with no connection to the products started to appear. And incentives, such as badges and rankings, were offered to keep those people coming back and working. It’s an ego massage and a marketing ploy. And with the possibility of these reviews being seeded by the companies there is always some question as to their veracity, just like anything else on the Internet.

The point for me is that I don’t really care if I’m in the top 50 reviewers or have the prize for the longest review or if I’ve contributed 1,000 pages of content to some corporation. I just talk about books here in my own way and not for the purpose of helping someone else get their product sold.

It’s about the content that writers produce. It’s about the writing and the ideas not about the score either on a seller’s website or to score points against some other reviewer. Maybe that appears self-indulgent of me but art is the ultimate self-indulgence if it is to be kept as art and not simply as a way to make money. For me that’s a real definite line. The right intention.

Thanks for listening.