I was writing this one as you were answering the other.

I get your point quite well, and I tend to agree to a large extent. Let's say for one thing I share your reservations about the whole thing, and personally I wouldn't want to be in that position and that's why I prefer to do my reviews (the few I write) on forums. Being treated like a pro, under the watchful eye of the publicists, isn't for me.



Yes, this aspect is really there.

The sad thing, though, is this is how things work and how they've worked for a very long time. I'm sure it's even more accute in the USA that has a long tradition of holding all cultural output as products and to be fairly agressive in their marketing (not that it's much different abroad nowadays, but it owes quite a bit to the post WWII explosion of the US entertainment industry that brought everyone to deal with culture the same way, or risk disappearing. ). American culture has not become so succesful and dominant by its players being whimps, nor only because of the average quality of its exports only. As anyone involved in the cultural domains outside the US could tell you, the businesses that distribute American cultural/entertainment products never play nice, and they have far more money than the competition they face locally. Concrete examples: why can I rarely get a book in the original English at the big French bookstore on the corner of my block? If I want to buy it there, I need to be very patient and get it long after release. They have many customers who read in both languages, and they lose business to English bookstores. It's not before I wanted to be sure to get a WOT book on release day (and didn't want to go downtown) that I learned how it worked. They couldn't get the book before three weeks before release. Why? Because most distributors of American publishers are holding the books from them. If they want the big titles they would like to have on the shelves in English, they need to buy way too many copies for a 90% French bookstore, and not only that but they have to agree to order many titles from the same publishers they don't want, and they get offered to host promo displays and such. They dont, so "magically" their orders for the big US titles in English almost always show up two to three weeks after release day only. So when I inquired about WOT, the bookstore could only tell me they wouldn't have it on release day, and that from Tor it could show up anywhere from a week to a month late, depending on the title (it was a month in the end, for WOT). The English titles that show up on time at the bookstore are either UK editions when there's no restricting distribution deal in place, or the titles from publishers with a Canadian imprint (as of course it's perfectly possible for the distributors to deliver those orders on time to the French chains) It's always the same thinly hidden agenda: you can't pick and choose. You want the titles that will sell, you need to agree to enlarge your offering of books in English and take all the titles WE want you to carry.

This work much the same way for Hollywood movies. To get as many copies of Harry Potter as they want to buy, theaters and chains need to agree to give X screens for a minimum of X weeks for a long list of other titles (and typically, it's not for the good productions the studios will resort to these tactics for, it's for their mediocre ones that theaters would refuse to buy otherwise). That's how even the bad American productions get worldwide distribution instead of only the average or good ones. It's more vicious than for books, because as a result the local productions almost everywhere have problems finding enough screens to make money (and to get your movies distributed worldwide, as foreign distributors too have more and more problems finding enough screens to show these movies to make money, so they don't take as many risks as before, relegating even big foreign productions to the art house network). Result? It becomes near impossible to find private financing for the local movies around the world, and they have to rely on the governments to finance them, with much smaller budgets. And to try to sustain and reinvigorate their cinema, a lot of countries introduce laws forcing the theaters to reserve a percentage of their screens to non-American cinema (in Québec, this is only for Canadian movies, in Europe it sometimes "protect" movies from the whole EU). The American studios lobby and fight teeth and nails to have these laws repelled. And guess what they do? They threaten to stop coming to film movies here to pressure governments. It's not because of lack of talent or ideas that world cinema has seen such a decline since WWII. Hollywood bulldozed it. At first, it was because of the then unique genius of US entertainers, but that's long stopped to be case. They preserve near hegemony through ruthtless business practices, and money.

In this context, do it really surprise you to see publishers approach the phenomenon of bloggers from the angle WM decided to adopt? It's nothing new. You merely get a taste of the same medicine the American entertainment industry has been giving everyone for eons. That's how they do business. They don't want you to have freedom of choice to pick and choose and even overlook them if you feel their stuff doesn't deserve interest from you. They will press your choices on you as much as they can (which has limits of course, put they're working to push back those limits as much as they can).


Reviewers who work for professional publications (or freelance for such) face much the same thing, pressure, nagging or more subtle pushing by publishers, or plain solllicitations for reviews. Newspapers get invites for media junkets (and mostly the American industry has the money to fly journalists from all over the world to meet a writer for an interview. That's not all that often done, though it's widespread for cinema. It's typical to see front page articles for an American film that's free promotion, with not a mite of journalistic opinion involved... only to see the same journalist once "freed" write a scathing review of the same movie the week later... and the only reason they can do this and is that they have the power (or the rules) of their media behind them, and that places interactions with the publicists of all ilk on a different level, where it's much easier to resist pressure or draw lines. It's much safer to play with the sharks when you're on a boat. Bloggers are right there in the water on their own trying to swim among the sharks. Don't show blood or...


So while I think WM's decision makes sense and I tend to support it as a customer, don't take it as a sign that I like it much more than you do. I just have no illusion left when it comes to the US entertainment industry and its methods. That's how sharks deal with small fish. It's new they have to deal so much with American small fish, but they'll use them and corner them just as much as they do with everyone else. If you want to be independant, you have to do things on your own and refuse the game, or to have another power that balances things out behind you, like the mainstream media (which also have a long tradition of strength in the US), or even governments placing laws in their paths.