Sunday, May 13, 2007

Public pieties

From NYT: The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller:

"“Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” [Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director] said."

They really want to know, huh? Well, now they know what Harriet Klausner & Co. thinks — or, rather, what they pretend to think — or, rather, what they are probably paid to pretend to think (which is that all new books are great, five stars). Kinda disingenuous, don't you think? I mean, if you want to know what your customers think, unleashing hordes of shills into the marketplace wouldn't be the first thing to do, right?

Do you find out what people think by purposely flooding comminications channels with noise of your own manufacture?
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1 comment:

Barbara Delaney said...

Oh please, their own sales figures did not give them this information? So we are to believe that before the advent of Amazon.com publishing houses were stumbling about with no way to gauge reader interest in their offerings.

What about the best seller lists? How about the feedback from retailers? What an absurd comment.

May 16, 2007 at 11:43 PM

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