Here’s one of those not-so-secret secrets of the book business: we authors are encouraged to put together “street teams” of readers who get advanced reader’s copies (ARCs) ahead of the official publication date and can thereby choose to leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon or whatever platform they feel like. You, loyal reader, by now be indignant: “Josie, why haven’t you asked me to be on your street team?” Dear reader, I’m flattered, but the Josephine Skylar Street Team does not yet exist. After spending much of last month working on redoing this website and publishing The Way Through Disaster, I then succumbed to inertia. If you want to get this baby going, email me.

While being lazy*, I happened across a piece on BookTok by Chels Upton, BookTok denizen (which I am not) whose Substack is full of interesting insights about romance novels, reading, and consumption, if you like thinking about the books you read you should definitely take a look at it. Upton is partly making the point that a lot of recent writing about BookTok is lazy and as shaped by TikTok’s algorithms as its authors accuse BookTokers themselves of being. (Upton’s essay came out the same day as Leigh Stein’s piece for LitHub, so it’s not included in Upton’s critical roundup.) But Upton also discusses the rewards of BookTokery, in a way that reminded me of a trend I’ve seen, and been uncomfortable with, in a completely separate sphere of social media.

Writes Upton:

While I don’t care about how much BookTokers are paid for ads (whatever it is, it probably isn’t enough) this dances around a salient point. The Big Five publishing houses don’t even like paying their in-house staff, and paid ads notoriously perform poorly on BookTok, so why pay for an ad with a BookToker when they can mass distribute ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies, provided in exchange for a review) and achieve a better result for a fraction of the cost?…

There’s no downside to distributing ARCs to BookTokers. Even a negative or mixed review contributes to the hashtag and boosts engagement. Then the next frontlist title rolls around: rinse, repeat. Not all BookTokers are reviewers either, (It’s not necessary for them to be! This is their hobby) so some ARC videos end up essentially being a recitation of the book jacket (the BookTok equivalent of “great gowns, beautiful gowns”) which… does feel a little bit like an ad, right?

In other words, rather than pay directly for marketing, publishers outsource the marketing work to ARC readers, who may or may not be reviewers, who may or may not be fans, who may or may not be thinking of themselves as working. But they are, in fact, working on the publisher’s behalf.

The comparison I thought of was to pop fandom. Let me give you another Substack link: Monia Ali was a Directioner whose experience caused her to think long and hard about what current social-media-based, quasi-commericialized fandoms require of their participants. One of her ongoing points is how fans become a resource for the entities looking to profit off them:

Fans have inadvertently become a resource, both for creative content itself, but also as a free marketing tool. In fact, fans are considered better marketers because fans are internally motivated. Jackie Huba coined the term ‘customer evangelists’ to describe these ideal fans. According to her, the fans that are the most devoted, productive and influential make up only one percent of any given fandom…. These are the people that need to be hyper-targeted, who will bring the most value and who will be self-motivated to promote your products because of how much they believe in it.

If you know anything about K-pop fandoms, you’re bored now, because those fandoms have relied on fans as unpaid labor for ages. Fans are the ones explaining to the newly arrived how to join official fan clubs or fancafes (which, in the pre-Weverse era, meant answering a bunch of questions in Korean, and making payments via Korean credit-card systems; it’s a long story); who distribute photos of the group performing (the photo-takers are known as “fansite masters“); who translate and upload subtitles. BTS-Trans has a staff of two dozen people, and BTS’s parent company, HYBE, which had revenues of about $9 billion in 2021, isn’t paying a cent to any of them.

Now, admittedly, it is a long way from that to an independent author distributing ARCs. It may be just my ego that makes the comparison and makes me uncomfortable. But it does seem to me that there’s a difference between hoping for fan involvement and banking on it, as it were. Making money off of fans is inevitable: how exactly do I get this whole publishing career to work if I can’t get people to like my books enough to go buy the next one? But the expectation ought to end with the exchange. If you buy my book and pay your money, you should have no further obligations to me: not to tell your friends, not to leave a review, certainly not to leave a flattering review. Throwing an ARC into the mix might change the equation, but it shouldn’t change it by that much! My ebooks retail for $4.99. If you spend a half hour writing a review you might not otherwise have written, that values your time at less than the $15-per-hour standard. Fandom shouldn’t come with an obligation! It shouldn’t be work! And it especially shouldn’t be underpaid work.

I am leaving one bit out of the equation here, as Upton highlights at the end of their piece. Up until now I’ve been talking as if the only relationship is between the producer (me) and the fan (you). But that’s actually not how it works. The relationship between you and me really isn’t there once you’ve bought the book. The relationship is between you, the book, and whoever else you want to include. If you like or even love the book, you might want to share that with an audience. If you hate the book, that might make you even more inclined to share that with an audience. (There are Goodreads reviewers out there I’ve been tempted to contact, even knowing the risk that they might not like my books, on the grounds that their pans are so good it would be an honor to receive one.) In that case then you move from consumer to producer, and your relationship with the people who enjoy your work is a different issue; but you’re not obligated to me, and I’m not using you.

So, yes, at some point I will start offering my readers the chance to download ARCs and post early reviews. In the meantime, feel free to review my books wherever you like posting reviews: Amazon, Goodreads, TikTok, Tumblr, one of those places trying to replace Twitter (can you tell I’m not much of a social-media user?). I will appreciate it; but I don’t want to get myself (or you!) into the position of expecting it.

* “Not completely lazy,” I say, a little defensively, as I point to the work-in-progress.