Toodaloo Goodreads
I’ll be honest: As a publicist, I didn’t like Goodreads. A good publicist is a control freak and I couldn’t control Goodreads. Over the years, authors would call me when a negative comment about their book was posted by a reader and ask “What can we DO about this?!” And there was, in most cases, nothing we could do. It’s the bane of being published: Other people will have opinions about your book and you might not agree with them. Goodreads collected those opinions. Sure some of those reviews were posted by author’s friends, or even by authors themselves, but mostly those reviews were neutral and posted by involved readers who were moved enough by a book that they took the time to comment.
When I remembered to check it, Goodreads let me know if readers were marking books I was working on as “to be read.” And I liked, certainly, seeing thoughtful readers weighing-in early with positive comments. But as a publicist, as well as a reader, I count on independent booksellers and professional critics to steer opinion. People might take issue with that, but it is what it is. I took Goodreads reviews with a grain of salt.
And with this week’s news that Amazon has bought Goodreads, I deleted my account. There are a ton of articles out there about the pros and cons of the Goodreads deal, but I agree with every word of this blog post, by John Eklund a University Press sales rep (who I don’t know). It’s well worth reading, especially when he says, “I can’t think of anything nastier right now in the book world than the prospect of this behemoth acquiring even more intimate knowledge of my buying habits than it already has. Enough is enough.”
Pretty soon, this publishing industry news will be topped by something else and we’ll turn our attention to that. But for now, and if for nothing else, the Goodreads acquisition is another reminder that one of the best, most reliable sources for figuring out what to read is available by heading over to your local independent bookstore and talking with real, live people.
