What prompted me to start thinking about ethics for authors
is the intense attention paid to writers who write their own reviews
anonymously, pay a firm to review them and even write negative reviews of those
writers they perceive as competitors. Cliché alert: Necessity is the mother of invention. Once such companies as Amazon and Barnes
& Noble become the central pipeline for the sale of books — and especially
now with the swarms of e-books — how does one get noticed? Standard reviews
from The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist can’t
possibly provide the nearly complete guidance they once did. They simply don’t have the resources to read,
measure and report on every book that comes out. And if what I understand is
true about on-line booksellers — that is that the number of reader reviews and
the number of stars books are given are the major arbiters of the amount of
attention a book receives — there is the tempting motive for hanky panky.
We writers are desperate to get noticed, most of us, anyway. The temptation to do whatever is necessary
has to be great. If my mother were alive, she would be the first to say my
latest book was a sensation and if she were also computer literate, she would
do so on all the Internet book sites as well as fill in every star
available. She might even ask her
friends to do the same. This is what
people do. How unethical is that? The truth is:
I don’t know. But all the
discussion has me thinking about it.
At election time, I have similar questions. What I’m about to say is related to the
subject at hand. Obama, when he ran in
2008, said that marriage should be between a man and a woman. After the election, he said that his position
was “evolving.” As time moved on and the polls began to show support for gay
rights, he repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and took some other positive steps
for equal rights for LGBT people. More
time passed and the needle showing support for gay marriage went above 50 percent. The President said he now supported gay marriage. I do believe in evolution, but this one? Because he is a sensible politician he waited
until the time was right. To be fair, the policy weathervane that Romney
has embarked upon in his career should have caused him terminal whiplash. But the point I’m making is that the
discussion of ethics is, like most things, a matter of degree. If Obama said
what he thought in 2008, would he have won? Are we okay with that? That’s
really the question. In the end,
marketing is selling. What do we want
and what will we settle for?
Another, perhaps slightly oblique example: I was reading
every book a certain writer wrote. Great
stuff. Really. He took me to places I could not go
myself. His work was colorful,
insightful, and he created a main character about whom I cared and with whom I
wanted to identify. However, the character became more and more a vigilante. He seemed to have lost his
ethical center. This is fiction, so this
isn’t wrong in a universal sense, of course.
The writer might have been after a greater truth and used the
development of the character to do so.
But he lost me. Others have avoided
the moral dilemma by creating a strictly principled main character who happens
to have a psychopath as a good buddy. The psychopath can do all the bad stuff
that needs to be done, keeping the main character as high-minded as I might
want him or her to be. Some
sleight-of-hand ethics here. Does that
make it better? For some.
The reason I bring this up is that writing, like most
professions, does have ethical issues to consider. Plagiarism for example. That's an easy one. But writers
steal plots and characters. Some abscond with another writer’s style.
Shakespeare was a notorious thief. I use a P.I.
Would I have even known to create a P.I. character if there weren’t all
those writers before me? Is that theft? The truth is we tolerate a certain level of
questionable behavior. How far does that
extend? And now that the marketing
burden falls more heavily on writers, how do we handle that?
Writers have had to engage in self-promotion for decades,
perhaps centuries. The demand to do so may be quite a bit greater now. With
book promotion in the hands of the authors more than ever, the ethical issues
can be treacherous. We have the ability
to stuff the Amazon or B&N ballot box with fake reviews. Based on what I understand to be the
algorithms of Internet booksellers, the number of reviews and average numbers
of stars may put a certain book in a special, highly promoted category. If that boosts sales, then it hits the
bestseller lists, which in turn boosts sales still further. If the stats are actually based on falsified
data, then it’s all wrong. It is not only inaccurate, but has also misled
readers while increasing the writers’ royalty checks. It is fraud.
But only a few short years ago, when nearly all people
picked up books from store shelves or display tables, we looked at the book
jacket to guide us. There was almost always the publisher’s blurb that extolled
the virtues of the writer and the book.
There were also blurbs from established writers, some of which seem
suspect. “John Doe is the greatest
mystery writer since Poe,” says Bill Smith.
On Bill Smith’s next book, “John Doe says, “Move over Hammett and
Chandler, Bill Smith just moved to the top of the list.” And what about the
quotes we extract from Publisher’s Weekly
or The New York Times?”
The Times said of
my debut mystery, “The pragmatic investigator makes a good first
impression.” The Times said a few other things as well; however we focused on the
positive. We didn’t lie. The quote is exact, if not complete. Careful
extraction of quotes can turn a mildly positive review into a rave. Dishonest? Possibly. Where do we draw the line? Whose judgment do we accept?
Certainly there is something wrong with buying reviews and
pawning them off as genuine. Or stuffing
the ballot box with self-praise under various alias. It’s even worse when we start demeaning the
work of other writers, thinking it might boost our own status. It’s kind of
sleazy. I can’t imagine that this is
effective, even in the short run. But I think we had to expect — though we
don’t have to accept — this kind of
opportunism in the current wild-west publishing environment. It is a result of the disarray we experience
as readers, writers, publishers and reviewers while we try to adjust to the
monumental changes we are experiencing.
Meanwhile, everyone, not just Amazon or B&N, needs to find
a way that some sense can be made of how books are marketed to potential
readers, how we can fairly guide the reader through the overwhelming volume of
books available to them. How can we help
get the right books to the readers who would enjoy them?
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